Although it often goes by other names, the Valley of Lost Things has haunted our collective imagination for centuries. Over five hundred years ago, Ludovico Ariosto, one of the greatest writers of the Italian Renaissance, summoned a version of it in Orlando Furioso, an epic poem that tells the story of the most famous knight to fight under Charlemagne in the Crusades. In it, Orlando loses the woman he loves to a rival and, as a consequence, also loses his mind. To help him, another knight consults with a prophet, who declares that they must travel to the moon: “A place wherein is wonderfully stored / Whatever on our earth below we lose.” Together they go there (via chariot) and discover not lost hats and shoes and handkerchiefs but lost fortunes, lost fame, lost loves, lost reputations, lost kingdoms, and lost minds—these latter each in its own stoppered vial, one of them labeled “ORLANDO’S WIT.”
Plenty of other versions of the Valley of Lost Things have cropped up over the years, in every context from autobiography to science fiction. In Mary Poppins and the House Next Door, P. L. Travers reprised the idea that everything that vanishes from earth winds up on the moon, although this time the lost items are everyday household objects. (The most recent Mary Poppins film gave this idea a wistful, existential edge: the young protagonists, mourning their dead mother, are led to believe that she dwells on the far side of the moon, “the place where lost things go.”) Other iterations feature other settings. Charles Fort, an early-twentieth-century skeptic and investigator of unexplained natural phenomena, once posited the existence of a “Super-Sargasso Sea”—located not in our earthly oceans but somewhere above them or in a parallel dimension—into which all missing things disppear, including dodos, moas, pterodactyls, and every other lost species.
Part of the enduring appeal of this imaginary destination is that it comports with our real-life experience of losing things: when we can’t find something, it is easy to feel that it has gone somewhere unfindable. But there is also something pleasing about the idea that our missing belongings, unable to find their rightful owners, should at least find each other, gathering together like souls in the bardo or distant relatives at a family reunion. The things we lose are distinguished by their lack of any known location; how clever, how obviously gratifying, to grant them one. And how thrilling to imagine walking around in such a place—harrowed by the worst of the losses, humbled by the heaps of almost identical stuff, delighted when we discover something that once belonged to us, awed by the sheer range of what goes missing.
This may be the most alluring aspect of the Valley of Lost Things: it renders the strangeness of the category of loss visible, like emptying the contents of a jumbled box onto the floor. In my mind, it is a dark, pen-and-ink place, comic and mournful as an Edward Gorey drawing: empty clothing drifting dolefully about, umbrellas piled in heaps like dormant bats, a Tasmanian tiger slinking off with Hemingway’s lost novel in its mouth, glaciers shrinking glumly down into their puddles, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra atilt upon the ground, the air around it filled with the ghosts of nighttime ideas not written down and gone by morning. It is this taxonomically outrageous population, shoes to souls to pterodactyls, that makes the idea of such a place so mesmerizing. Its contents have a unity and meaning based only on the single common quality of being lost, a kind of vast nationality, like “American.”
Still, for all its charm, the Valley of Lost Things is, at its core, a melancholy place. The things we love are banished to it, and we ourselves are banished from it: the one feature every version of it has in common is that, under normal circumstances, it is inaccessible to humans. Only a prophet or Mary Poppins can take you to the repository of lost things on the moon, and Tot understands immediately why he and Dot are allowed to venture into the otherwise unpopulated Valley of Lost Things: “?’Cause we’re lost, too.” In that sense, the two of them are less closely related to Dorothy and the Tin Man than to Orpheus and Dante, who, unlike most mere mortals, were temporarily permitted to slip into the netherworld. Likewise, the valley and the netherworld are themselves closely related. As with the lost objects we love, so too with the lost people we love: we grant them an afterlife, in the bittersweet knowledge that, at least in this world, we will never again get to see them.
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My father’s death was not sudden. For nearly a decade beforehand, his health had been poor, almost impressively so. In addition to suffering from many of the usual complaints of contemporary aging (high blood pressure, high cholesterol, kidney disease, congestive heart failure), he had endured illnesses unusual for any age and era: viral meningitis, West Nile encephalitis, an autoimmune disorder whose identity eluded the best doctors at the Cleveland Clinic. From there the list spread outward in all directions of physiology and severity. He had fallen in a hotel lobby and torn a shoulder beyond recovery and had obliterated a patellar tendon by missing a step on a friend’s back patio one Fourth of July. His breathing was often labored despite no evident respiratory problem; an errant nerve in his neck intermittently triggered excruciating pain and sent him into temporary near paralysis. He had terrible dental issues, like the impoverished child he had once been, and terrible gout, like the lordly old man he became.
For all this, my father was largely spared one of the most common of late-in-life losses, that of mental capacity. There was, however, one exception to this—a strange and frightening spell that lasted two or three years but, mercifully for us although unusually for the condition, turned out to be reversible. This occurred toward the beginning of his more infirm years, when his autoimmune disorder had first emerged, provoking a series of terrifying health crises and causing an entire team of doctors—cardiologists, nephrologists, immunologists, oncologists, infectious disease specialists—to set about trying to determine what was wrong with him. In the absence of a diagnosis, they resorted to treating his symptoms, which, as often happens in such circumstances, involved an ever longer list of medications: drugs to manage the immediate problems, drugs to manage the resulting side effects, drugs to manage the side effects of the drugs meant to manage the side effects. That all this might create its own crisis is obvious in retrospect, but it wasn’t at the time, partly because we were too worried about the underlying disease to focus on anything else and partly because that secondary crisis was slow to make itself known. Eight or nine months went by before my mother and sister and I began to worry, at first quietly and then openly, about what was happening to my father’s mind.
The earliest changes were gradual, the earliest lapses infrequent and indistinct. My father began sleeping more hours at night and nodding off during the day, including during family gatherings, which normally amplified his usual exuberance. In conversation he would sometimes strike off in inexplicable directions, leaving the rest of us to try to tether the strange things he said to relevance, to see our way from there to somewhere lucid. Of all my family members, I was the most guilty of this—of maintaining an insistent, petrified optimism even in the face of moments of obvious incoherence.