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Such a Loser!

I lost my osteoporosis medicine. Usually, it sits on top of the white cupboard next to my side of the bed. On Saturday nights, I work through the child-proof/adult-proof packaging so it will be easier to take on Sunday mornings. Only this Saturday night, the remaining two pills (from the pack of four) were gone. Disappeared into thin air. I tore the room apart. Nothing.

This is not my first go-round with such things. I lost my wedding ring. That's right — what sounds like the plot to an episode of "I Love Lucy" came true right in my very own kitchen. I took the ring off so I could do some cleaning, forgot about it...and long story short, it got thrown away and set out for the garbage collector.... and taken to the dump where it was thrown into a pit and covered with 600 pounds of dirt. There would be no picking through the dump for me. It was gone, daddy, gone.

I also lost my keys. How, one might argue, does one lose keys? Obviously I must have been inside the house, for if I lost them outside the house, how did I get into the house? But if they're in the house, how have I not found them in four long years?

The crux of this dilemma is: Why does this keep happening to me? Does my home sit on the Bermuda Triangle? Is post-menopausal memory loss to blame? Do we have poltergeists?

Honest to goodness, I wish I knew. Loss frightens me. It challenges what small control I have over my world. If I can't keep a wedding ring, how can I keep the husband associated with it? The house? My sanity? It all seems so tenuous, so eminently lose-able.

It's alarming to realize that the rock you built your life on is really made of papier-mâché. That, as Chandler once joked on "Friends," "This parachute is a backpack!" Then I remember. I can only fall so far. My mutable world can crumble away, but there will still be something under my feet, holding me up. There is one thing I cannot lose. True faith, by its very nature, remains...even when everything else is gone.

Lost and Found

I've done it again.
I'd lose my own head if it wasn't attached.
Please.
It seems like such a little thing.
But I could use:
Your eyes, to see the unseen,
Your attentiveness,
so as not to repeat the fault,
Your forgiveness, for being so careless
with the many gifts you give me.
Help me recover what has been lost.
You, who I can never lose,
no matter how forgetful I become.

-Lori Strawn

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