Dear Z.,
Your mama and I have been talking a lot lately about what it means to lose things, whether material items or relationships, and how different it can feel to misplace something meaningful versus to have it be taken from you. Or, for someone to leave you. The flavors of grief are distinct, and so often, bitter. Poet and philosopher Ann Carson refers to the Greek glukupikron ‘sweetbitter’ because heart things from which bitterness arise are necessarily, at first, sweet.
Between the moment of your conception and that of your birth, I lost three objects that were, and which remain, precious to me. (One of them, indeed, was a ring—the worst kind of ring to lose) Having collected these items during a particularly intense few years at the beginning of my marriage to your mama, they each bore immense meaning, and letting them go has been hard.
Below, I’ll relay a story of a minor loss, one that helped me feel gratitude for all that I have, and also to practice losing, which I believe to be an important skill in this life.
Here, I’ll include a poem that I wrote recently and a friend helped me to record to audio—for if or when you lose something or someone you really love. I offer it as a potential guidepost, something to lean on when it seems like all is fear and loss.
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The first was one of a pair of earring plugs carved and sanded from a piece of East Indian Rosewood by a man named Moses. I met Moses in the Leo Tattoo studio in Mumbai, seeking refuge from a hot and lonely day in that city. I remember him sitting cross-legged on the floor, beautiful and kind, bald and bearded, piercings and tattoos. Seeing my ears which were studded with some pieces I cannot now recall, he pulled a stick of dark, mysterious wood from his vest pocket, and offered to craft me new plugs. I accepted his offer, partly because I wanted them, and also out of obligation, a sort of admission to the air-con space.
Rosewood’s density and interlocking grain make it difficult to work with; it can easily dull the sharpest blades. Moses worked for hours with small hand tools in his lap.
Hours later, as I inched toward committing to the tattoo that Yogi, the shop owner, soon needled into my forearm, Moses massaged my earlobe and tried to fit the plugs. They were too big. Though he wanted to to sand them down more and was perhaps disappointed that he could not see them in my ears that day, something felt right to me about the sizing. I needed to grow into them.
It was a year or more until I gathered the courage to stretch my ears to suit them. After that, I wore them daily for seven years. I usually took them out for entire fishing seasons, but for some reason I wore them for my last.
The plugs turned black with the natural oils of my body. At night they sat together inside my wedding band on the nightstand, which was surrounded by a serpentine chain form which hung a talisman gifted me by your mama on the second spring equinox of our marriage. She had designed the ammonite and ruby talisman, and a skilled jeweler friend, Una, crafted it. There was a sense of an ancient fractal creature being birthed from a golden trillain egg, its cracks mended yet continuing to break open. Una also made the wedding band, a silver cast of a strip of cuttlefish skeleton—ancient sea creatures holding my body in place for years and years. These were the two other items lost in during your gestation.
A couple of weeks after we found out mama was pregnant with you, I was on land in the middle of an intense commercial fishing season. I took a 2 a.m. shower in the PAF boatyard bathroom in Dillingham—which was exactly as gross as it may sound—and, in a moment of scrubbing my bedraggled face, the plug slipped out and tapped the floor of the shower stall and washed unceremoniously through the drain at my feet.
It was a moment of fierce letting go, in which all the shame and guilt and anger and grief cascaded over and off me like the too-hot-or-too-cold water in that shower stall which I had used too few times over fourteen summers.
There were only a few hours before the tide was high enough to leave harbor, and, to my sadness, I needed sleep more than I needed to find the plumbing tools in order to retrieve my earring, an item so frivolous in that specific context that it became a liability.
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It is not lost on me that the items I lost that year were things with which I adorned my body, things for which I had rituals and superstitions, and things which provided a touchstone for who I wanted to be. They represented archetypes I felt suited to but unpracticed in. Sometimes, the simple act of wearing, or doing, or being with something or someone can change you.
Since becoming a father, adorning myself has been the least of my priorities. Indeed, it’s been a great lesson in paying attention to other, to you, to holding a vision and purpose that extends beyond my own internal world. There’s something both humbling and empowering about that.
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Weeks after beginning this letter and a year and a half after its first draft, I notice that I am not ready to tell the stories of the wedding ring and the talisman. Partly, it hurts and I don’t have a lot of capacity right now to really dive in to those feelings, and also those stories are not ones I want floating around the internet, so we’ll save them for later.
All my love, all my bones,
your papa, Sean