What We Lose

by Zinzi Clemmons

While my father was out grabbing us prepared sandwiches for dinner, I crept into her room. I closed the door and shoved a chair against the doorknob so no one could enter. I had many things I wanted to say. Some sleepless nights ago, I’d made a list of all the things I needed to apologize for, all the things I needed to tell her I forgave her for. But as I stood there with those mathematics in hand, the weight of the moment on me, I said nothing. And when I tried to speak, only tears came. The pain was exponential. Because as much as I cried, she could not comfort me, and this fact only multiplied my pain. I realized that this would be life; to figure out how to live without her hand on my back; her soft, accented English telling me Everything will be all right, Thandi. This was the paradox: How would I ever heal from losing the person who healed me? The question was so enormous that I could see only my entire life, everything I know, filling it.

I lingered on that word, “orphan.” An orphan was always a person without parents, without roots. I had one parent, and one was not none. Orphan (noun) 1: a young animal that has lost its mother 2: one deprived of some protection or advantage, such as “orphans of the storm” 3: a child deprived by death of one or usually both parents But the condition isn’t mathematical. The loss is what creates the condition. It’s not the fact of one parent, but that the loss has occurred. It’s the wound, not the parts that are left untouched.

Loss is a straightforward equation: 2 − 1 = 1. A person is there, then she is not. But a loss is beyond numbers, as well as sadness, and depression, and guilt, and ecstasy, and hope, and nostalgia—all those emotions that experts tell us come along with death. Minus one person equals all of these, in unpredictable combinations. It is a sunny day that feels completely gray, and laughter in the midst of sadness. It is utter confusion. It makes no sense.

But why do “African” and “contemporary” have to be incommensurate? Why (and to whom) is it appealing to think you are in another city besides the one, in Africa, that you are in?

In this regard I find myself dubious about the politics of women’s peace groups, for example, which celebrate maternality as the basis for engaging in antimilitarist work. I do not see the mother with her child as either more morally credible or more morally capable than any other woman. A child can be used as a symbolic credential, a sentimental object, a badge of self-righteousness. I question the implicit belief that only “mothers” with “children of their own” have a real stake in the future of humanity.

I realized that that was how heartbreak occurred. Your heart wants something, but reality resists it. Death is inert and heavy, and it has no relation to your heart’s desires.

We are like bricks in a wall, and a new one cannot fit unless another is taken away. It comforts me to peace, and M to sleep, this harmony, the idea that for every suffering there is equal and opposite joy. In practice, it is so simple, yet so mystical and infinite.

She comes to me in snatches—I remember pieces of her laugh, the look she gave when she was upset. Sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn’t come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened. This is what it’s really like to lose. It is complete and irreversible. How pernicious these little things called memories are. They barbed me once, but now that I no longer have many of them, I am devastated.

I’ve amazed myself with how well I’ve learned to live around her absence. This void is my constant companion, no matter what I do. Nothing will fill it, and it will never go away.