For the most part, though, pranks like this were incidental, side effects of the thrill of first encountering the world on his own terms. He collected enough cereal-box tops to earn a ticket to a Tigers game, took himself one sunny day to Briggs Stadium, and promptly fell in love with baseball—which, in some way that tracked all the way back to his thirteen-year-old self, really did feel to him forever afterward like freedom. He went to the public library, which, being free in the other sense, was an excellent place to escape his home life; soon he was spending almost every day after school there, relishing the quiet and reading until closing time. He even went, in a manner of speaking, to church. After the local radio station kept airing the same advertisement again and again, urging listeners to come hear the preacher’s daughter singing with the gospel choir any Sunday morning, he and Lee finally heeded the summons and took a bus to New Bethel Baptist Church, one blond kid and one bespectacled Jew at the back of the chapel, getting their first earful of Aretha Franklin.
Throughout all of this, my father had excelled in school; in 1958, five years after arriving in America, he graduated as his class valedictorian. But very few of his fellow students were going to college, his parents knew nothing about American higher education, and by the time someone suggested that he apply to the University of Michigan, the only open spots were in the school of engineering. He matriculated, hated it, and failed out after one semester. The next year he talked himself back in, this time to the college of liberal arts, which went better until he accidentally set his dorm room on fire and got expelled a second time. When he finally did get his bachelor’s degree, it was the long way, via a stint as a soda jerk in Manhattan, another as a used-clothing salesman in Illinois, a summons from his local draft board, and an exceptionally lucky last-minute reroute to Korea instead of Vietnam. Just before he deployed, he met my mother; upon his return, he married her, finally finished college, went to law school, then settled in Cleveland to start a family and a career. In a kinder world—one where my father’s early years had been less desperate, his fear of financial instability less acute, his sense of the options available to him less constrained—I suspect that he would have chosen a very different line of work: as a professor like my sister, maybe, or as a writer, like me. But if he ever felt that loss, he didn’t show it. He loved the law and he loved his family, and he was proud to be able to give his daughters a far safer and happier childhood than he himself had enjoyed.
Most parents would do anything to provide that kind of life for their children. That is why my grandparents traveled through war zones and risked arrest and twice in four years left behind everything they knew to board a ship bound for a foreign country, and it is why my great-grandparents sent their youngest daughter off to a new home a world away, fully knowing that in all likelihood they would never see her again. I am alive today because both generations succeeded. Still, I know that those successes, like all such successes, were fragile and contingent. Experience teaches us nothing if not that all the things parents seek for their children—safety, stability, happiness, opportunity—are neither equitably distributed nor permanent conditions. Even if we are fortunate enough to have them in the first place, they, too, are susceptible to loss, liable to be swept away at any moment by forces far stronger than we are—stronger, sometimes, than whole peoples and nations. War, famine, genocide, pandemic, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, mass shootings, mass starvation, mass financial ruination: devastation in all its many forms routinely sweeps through entire communities, sometimes through entire countries, and—as during my father’s earliest years, and again in our own times—occasionally and terribly throughout most of the world.
These are the kinds of losses that make all others seem insignificant by comparison. Indeed, a heightened sense of what is trivial versus what actually matters is one of the few things that supposedly emerges from a disaster not merely intact but enhanced, as if catastrophe left moral and emotional clarity in its wake. After witnessing so much distressing loss, the theory goes, we will understand what is really important in life and stop worrying about all the rest. This idea inverts the logic of Elizabeth Bishop: our largest losses, it suggests, can help us cope with our smaller ones, by putting them in perspective.
At first glance, this is an appealing notion. Yet on closer consideration, it is no easier to accept than Bishop’s claim that minor losses prepare us to accept major ones. It is true that many people learn to count their blessings after exposure to serious loss, and also learn not to dwell on their minor frustrations; my father, for one, had an enduring sense of what to care about and what to let go, and for the most part he did not, as they say, sweat the small stuff. But who can know how much of that was personality and how much was circumstance? Certainly my grandmother did not emerge from the horrors of World War II with a renewed appreciation for everything that matters most in life: she emerged from it robbed of almost everything that matters most in life, including the person she might have become under better circumstances. By the time I knew her, she was volatile and unhappy, her inner life armored and inscrutable. It is possible, of course, that some of that was personality, too. Still, given the overall effects of trauma, it is peculiar, and borderline cruel, to imagine that it ultimately operates on us for the better.
Nor do we live our own lives as if this were the case. Granted, most of us do what we can to salvage meaning from our most difficult losses, and some people argue, either out of genuine conviction or an attempt at consolation, that suffering builds character. Still, if parents truly believed that loss had improved their lives and made them better people, they would not work so hard to keep their children from experiencing it—and yet, generation after generation, most of them do. The problem is that there is a limit to how much such efforts can ever succeed. Sufficient financial resources may ward off certain kinds of hardship, and sufficient love and support may leave us better equipped to face life’s inevitable difficulties. But to be prepared is not to be spared. Our parents cannot protect us from experiencing loss forever, because, in the end, barring a worse tragedy, we will lose them.
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What becomes of the things we lose and never recover? Nothing consistent, of course. The lost glove rots away unnoticed in a corner of the garden; the handbag languishes for months at a train station before being donated to a secondhand store; the scrap of paper with the phone number on it melts into the slush of a February sidewalk; the wreckage of the missing airplane lies twenty thousand feet below the surface of the ocean, visited from time to time by creatures no human eyes have ever seen.
It is a curious and longstanding habit of the human mind to try to gather all these lost objects together in one place. We don’t just invent fantastical culprits to explain why our possessions have disappeared; we invent fantastical destinations to explain where they can be found. I first came across one of these in childhood, stumbling on it because it was the obscure cousin of a far more famous fictional location. In L. Frank Baum’s Dot and Tot of Merryland, two small children clamber into a boat and are carried by the current to a magical kingdom across a desert from the Land of Oz. That kingdom consists of seven valleys, and although most of them are delightful to explore—full of babies and clowns and candy and kittens—the final one is silent and strange, empty of people and strewn with miscellaneous objects from riverbank to horizon: hats, handkerchiefs, buttons, coats, pocketbooks, shoes, dolls, toys, rings. When Dot looks around in confusion, the Queen of Merryland explains: “It is the Valley of Lost Things.”