Loss

 When I was fifteen I was seeing a dermatologist weekly for acne treatment. Danny, a schoolmate, and a personal hero was in the next examination room, walled off by a curtain. Danny was a star athlete, very handsome and very popular. I was nerdy, skinny and felt my nose was grossly big, and I only seemed to make friends with the outsiders. Danny was a true insider.I overheard the doctor tell Danny to come back next week for the biopsy report. And next week I heard the doctor tell Danny—I think his parents were present, too—that he had cancer. A few weeks later Danny died.He wasn't a close friend, He was nice to me but it was always clear that we were only classmates, He would readily  extend a hand and be  the first to say "Hi." But when he died I felt an excruciating emptiness, an agitation wrapped in sadness that I suppose was a form of grief, an anxious and consuming grief. As if a part of me—a part I did not know I had—was sheared off. I didn't understand the feeling. I was afraid and ashamed to talk about it. I kept it hidden. Until it wasn't there anymore.Pain, the actual sensation, is never remembered. That makes bearing second and third and more children bearable. We remember that there was pain. But its magnitude, its verisimilitude is unreproducible.So I remember Danny and I remember the horror at hearing about his cancer. And I remember him.Vividly.  But the sense of loss was gone.Not long after I answered a posting to read for a blind student. His name was Robert and, though he could read braille fluently, there were no such versions or audio recordings of the texts he needed to read. So I read for him. We became friends. He was a musician and when he found out that I danced he tried to create for himself some image of what that was like. He would describe images he could construct of people's faces and of trees and buildings.I went off to college in Chicago and he moved to New York for graduate work. We spoke on the phone. Only a few months later his roommate called to tell me that Robert was killed in a head-on collision on the infamous Long Island Expressway. He was a passenger, of course. His death was another huge hammer blow. 

It was my first experience of an irreparable loss. That part of me, indescribable and incorporable, had been amputated

.Yet through these years I never felt that these losses formed barriers against making new friends. or falling in love and getting married, or taking the risk of having children. As an M.D. the true risks that children face as they pass through every year, every decade is never out of mind. We just live with the hope and expectation that they will be spared. But fear or dread of loss was not impeding.I think, too, that when one is young friendships lean forward. As if we're together at the prow of a ship, ever pushing onward. No one is expected to fall off. Others come on board, not as replacements, just as part of the continuing voyage.Then came the AIDS epidemic and suddenly peers were diving into hideous graves. My college roommate, he who forced me to take a hospital job to prove to myself that I really wanted to go to medical school, he fell victim to that plague. That loss was different. Not just magnified by the epidemic that engulfed us all. It was my first experience of an irreparable loss. That part of me, indescribable and incorporable, had been amputated. And the phantom limb sensation endured. To this day I feel something is missing.Not too many years later our family dog died at age fourteen. My two sons had grown up with him and he was their boon companion. The mutual fondness, the love, was huge. Both boys went on to acquire dogs of their own. But I could not repeat or replace that loss.So you move on. Perhaps no longer at the proud prow of a ship surging into the future. You walk slowly along a winding, jagged path, barefoot. Counting steps. Careful not to fall. Stopping to chat and share a meal, have a laugh, allow yourself to be astonished at the grandeur and the sordidness around you. And you keep walking, holding on. To someone. To something.