It’s like an open wound, a sore in your mouth which your tongue keeps running over…it stings every time, but you can’t help doing it. This is what happens when you lose–or, to be precise, misplace– something.

It can be something very small, like a set of house-keys; but it is essential to your daily life and though you can get along without it, you can only do so for a while. After some time, you will have to take some positive action about its absence. You are not sure if you have mislaid it or really lost it….there is the first frenzy of looking anywhere and everywhere, and that slowly peters out into going about your daily business, with the occasional poking and prying into more and more unlikely places as you hope that the unexpected sight of the lost object will suddenly reward you for your effort. Your thoughts,too, keep returning to the lost object in the middle of all your other work, and you also ponder about the difficulty of replacing it or getting something else….You wake in the night dreaming that you have found it somewhere and as you wake up, the feeling of relief gives way to anxiety again.

In the case of the misplaced object, the exercise ends when it is suddenly found…generally following a brainwave about where you might have left it, or a sudden, totally unexpected find as you are doing something else entirely. But if it lost….slowly acceptance seeps in and you set about doing the things necessary to cut it altogether out of your life…you try not to let your feelings get the better of you if it was something you had a sentimental attachment for, or thought of as highly valuable for financial or other reasons….it’s worse when it’s someone else’s, and you have to explain its loss.

If this is the case with an inanimate object, I can only imagine how it must be to lose a member of the family, or one’s spouse…. Loss, an inescapable, universal, and yet uniquely painful part of existence…