The art of losing
At 10:25 p.m., I get a text from my brother: “Are you in bed?” I should be, but I text back, “Not yet.” His name flashes across the screen, and I swipe open the phone. “Hey,” I say. “What’s up?” “I need to talk to you,” he says, and my mind jumps to our mother, whose cancer has recently resurfaced after decades in remission. “What’s wrong?” I say. “Something weird is happening to me,” he says, and he begins to talk about our grandma, who died a month ago, about the rash that covered her body during the last weeks of her life—a rash that’s now appearing on him. He takes a breath, then says, “I think I’ve contracted a parasite.”
I should clarify a few things. First, my brother lives in San Diego, and the farthest afield he’s ever traveled is Croatia (a place that, to my knowledge, is not known for its parasites). Second, he is a beacon of rationality and the least prone to fantastical notions as anyone I’ve ever met. Third, when he says these words to me—I think I’ve contracted a parasite—I don’t doubt him, not even for the split second most people’s brains would afford them when presented with absurd information. I don’t doubt him because, in the last few years, our family has suffered one blindsiding blow after another, and there isn’t much that collectively shocks us anymore.
I, too, take a breath, then say, “Okay. What makes you think that?” He describes his symptoms, and those of our grandma, and he says they match the signs of scabies. He pronounces it “scah-bies,” like a scab from a wound. “Scabies,” I correct him, “like rabies,” and how I know this, I can’t say. He goes on to tell me about the pins-and-needles itching that kept him awake the whole night prior, how he didn’t have time to go to the doctor after work today, and so instead, scanned the internet for home remedies and opted for rubbing himself down with cayenne pepper. “That can’t have felt good,” I say. “No,” he says. “I felt like I was on fire.”
The only parallel I can draw to this is the time we had chicken pox, some twenty years ago. Though I’m older, he got the worst of it, a pain so intense he couldn’t fall asleep, and our father stayed up with him late into the night, watching Fantasia on VHS. Something about the music and the hypnotic, vivid colors distracted my brother enough that he was eventually able to drift off. I don’t suggest Fantasia to him now, just as I don’t bring up how odd it was that our dad, and not our mom, sat up with him, which was a switch from the usual dynamic. But then, I have also been told our dad was the one who walked up and down the hallway with me as a baby when I, too, couldn’t sleep.
My brother and I stay on the phone for an hour, as he flings out one irrational fear after another, and for the first time, challenges my belief that wild ideas never spring from him. “I read a story about these prison inmates who had scabies for weeks, and no one did anything about it,” he says. “Some of them went insane.” I say, “Well, you’re not in prison, and I think you have a while to go before you descend into full-blown madness.” It’s another switch from a usual dynamic—me talking him off a ledge—and when he says it’s rare for him to fall prey to a mental whirlwind like this, I remind him, “For me, a downward spiral is just another Thursday.”
True to form (and in the hope of distracting him), I launch into my latest crisis: for months, I’d been getting to know a man I was hoping to date, only to learn—after forcing him to tell me—that he had no romantic feelings for me and had been seeing another woman for some time. “I don’t understand why this keeps happening,” I say. “Why I meet these guys who seem so interested, and right when I think we’re going to start something, they push me off a cliff.” He says, “I wish I could tell you.” “You are literally the only man in my life,” I say, “and that’s the best you can do?” He chuckles, which was, at least partially, my goal.
Elizabeth Bishop has a poem called “One Art,” which I’ve loved since I first encountered it in college. It begins, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Two years ago, when our father was hospitalized for a severe allergic reaction to his medication, it was my brother who stayed with him that first night—sleeping in a chair in the CCU—to see if he’d wake from his coma. When he didn’t, it was my brother who came into my room at 3:00 a.m. to tell me, “He’s gone.” A year later, it was my brother who called me at work, to tell me our mother’s cancer had returned, and a year after that, it was my brother who held our grandma’s hand as she lay dying, which resulted in a parasite crawling onto his body.
Elizabeth Bishop
“I think we took a wrong turn somewhere,” he says, and I can feel it, the way the accumulated rage starts to rise in me. I reply, “I want off this road.” I want off the road where death and sickness have become the norm instead of the exception. I want off the road where, though there’s little I desire more than the love of a good man, I can’t seem to find one, let alone hold onto him. I want off the road where my brother can tell me he thinks he’s contracted a parasite, and I don’t flinch, don’t even blink. I want back onto the road where one trauma does not beget another—where a rash is just a rash.
In Unspoken Sermons, George MacDonald writes, “This losing of things is of the mercy of God: it comes to teach us to let them go.” Ever since I read those words last spring, I’ve been trying to believe them. But instead, I keep returning to Bishop, to “the art of losing” and the instructions she puts forth: “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Our dad, with his hip pack and baseball caps and such a loud, emphatic walk that he couldn’t wear shoes in the house without scaring the cats. The man I hoped to love, with his dog tags dangling from the rearview mirror. My brother, dumping my bucket of roly-polies down a slot in the deck, a sin for which I have yet to forgive him.
Siblings fight—it seems to be a universal truth, but it is not true of us. I can’t recall a time in our adult lives when we’ve fought, aside from a tiff in a Croatia grocery store about what to look for first: bread or bananas. When our father died, several people commented on how adeptly we navigated the disaster, handing tasks back and forth the way we used to pass cards while playing Go Fish. “Your children are incredible,” they told our mother, and I lingered on that word: children. I had never felt like more and less of a child than I did in those days, nor in all the days since. And yet, then and even now, the impulse swells within me: how to put one foot in front of the other and keep on doing that every day.
And let’s not forget—I am the older sibling, and so, at the end of our phone call, I dispense instructions: “Go to the store, and buy some antihistamines, calamine lotion, and that oatmeal bath stuff. Then tomorrow, go to the doctor, and don’t let them send you home without running tests.” My brother agrees, and we say goodnight. The next day, he sends a text to tell me the rash is better. He coated himself in tea tree oil, and it seems to have helped. I tell him I’m glad, but still think he should see someone with a medical degree instead of a blog. He says he will and thanks me for taking his late-night call. “I wasn’t in my right mind,” he says, and I think, Who among us is?
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Bishop writes, “so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” Theories abound about this poem, but to me, it seems clear: this is a woman trying to convince herself that what’s gone—what’s been taken—doesn’t cut to the core. A woman who is longing, however failingly, to accept the impermanence of this life. “Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love).” That’s the thing about loss: it’s never the grand, abstract concepts that we miss (father, grandmother, health, romance). It’s the small, startling realities—“the hour badly spent,” pacing up and down a hallway or watching Fantasia on the couch, the backyard spats and late-night calls.
Maybe Bishop knew that. Maybe the art of losing is the exact opposite of what her poem seems to suggest—not pretending the losses don’t matter, but acknowledging that they do, while still retaining the eyes to see the small, startling realities in what remains. If anything is “of the mercy of God,” I think it must be this.
When my brother calls again, he confirms that he does, indeed, have scabies, and now he’s covered scalp-to-foot in a prescription-strength cream meant to end the infestation. “I don’t want to host parasites,” he says. “I don’t want to keep falling for unavailable men,” I reply. We take a breath, and both erupt into laughter.
