Around 2020 I decide to make my birthday private on Facebook.
For many years, it had felt special to hear from friends far-and-wide on FB, but as the years passed, it started to feel like a performative social duty and that I, past age 50, could not ask my pituitary to downshift for the once-a-year dopamine marathon. Worse, reciprocating “Happy Birthday” at 1,200 friends a year had become about as joyful as priapism. So I hid it, and my birthday became invisible to most of the people I know, and it was nice to shed the conceit that my birthday matters.
Flash forward. I’m 55 today and our home is gone. Destroyed in Tuesday’s Eaton fire. It’s the home we started in 2016. Me, my wife, my mother, our dear friend Nadya, and our beloved dogs Hampton and Benny all built it together. My mom and Nadya both moved out almost two years ago, but it was still our home.
Everything Shana and I built and collected over the last 20 years together is cinders. Every piece of art we’d collected; my (our) entire collection of design works started when I was 12 or 13; every memento, big and small from every trip together; every letter or card we wrote to one-another; every piece of furniture we meticulously collected and (often) restored together; every single thing I retained from father’s death 10 years ago; eight or nine Palm Beach suits, arduously hunted down and restored; irreplaceable, hand-made furniture passed to me from long-gone Danish relatives, things of theirs that (probably) deserved to be repatriated to a Danish museum; all the beautiful books we’d collected or had given to us by friends and family; vital, well-used tools…
The loss is vast and we won’t be able to start tallying it until we get back home this Saturday. I’m sure we will recover some items which will gain new import having passed through fire; but I feel pity for the items we’ve forgotten ever owning.
90% of the things that burned are utterly fungible. But many things in that fire were tokens of our existence and experiences; so many things, purchased second-hand over decades, were also tokens of other people’s existences, each with stories curated and held in trust.
The teak Danish-modern secretary I bought at the PCC flea for a smoking deal. When I took it apart to clean, refurbish, and oil, I found someone’s old mail trapped beneath a drawer. I put those things in an envelope, along with a couple of new things, and “re-hid” them for some future owner to find.
Things matter, they have lives that can extend WAY beyond our own; things convey other lives to our care for a time and, in turn, convey our lives to others’ care.
Loss is awful and mysterious. It fills me with awe. It is all-encompassing and relentless. It comes for everyone and finds us no matter what. We ourselves are matter, coalesced and organized by vast processes that began 14 billion years ago.
The absolute, 100% guarantee that you and your 8-billion fellows will experience loss is the fact upon which all meaning and all value is conditioned. And, as a person trained in statistics, I have to tell you that most loss is arbitrary, blameless, and meaningless. In a truly material sense, loss is just a physical change of state from an unlikely, meaningful, ordered condition to a prosaic, meaningless, disordered condition. And it is the iron law of the universe.
So, we’ll probably going to be fine. Like every human ever, we will accept this loss, gather our resources and whatever shards remain, rally our wonderful friends near and far, and make new things, a little bit better.