To Let Go or To Give Away

Something I loved was destroyed, and my reaction completely surprised me.

I went to the beach last week alone. I’ve been doing trying to do that at least once a week lately. I talked about why on Instagram, but ultimately, it’s been so grounding in the way anyone who’s touched the sea likely knows.

While I wrote in my journal, small rain drops started wetting the pages and sprinkling my face, light at first and then so steadily that I gave up my alone time, threw my things into my bag (thankfully waterproof) and made my way through the windy rain back to the car.

The storm rolling in over the beach.

Two nights later, after putting my kids to bed, I went to my bag for my book and found it in a puddle.

In my haste to keep my things dry from the rain on the beach, I’d thrown my water bottle into my bag (not just waterproof, but watertight). My book, my journal, and some other belongings had stewed in my bag for 48 hours until I discovered them waterlogged. My book was dripping. The pages’ ink in my journal had fun together and the glue in the spine had separated, the pages falling away from each other.

I’ve journaled since I was 19. (Here’s a post I wrote about why I journal from 13 years ago.) I have dozens of journals from so many chapters of my life. I used them for my book, looking back at events and timelines that have gone almost completely from my waking memory.

I started journaling because my mom told me she wished she’d journaled… wished she could remember exactly what it was like to hold her kids when they were babies. Ironically, my journalling tapered off when my kids were born. I chalk this up to the busy hands needed to care for two babies so close in age. What free hand did I have for a pen?

So, the journal in the water in the bag was the only journal that I’ve used for the sparse entries I’ve been able to make since the kids were born. All the entries for the last five years. Pre-covid stuff. Covid stuff. Uprising in Minneapolis stuff. Moving stuff. Maui stuff.

The water made most of the pages illegible.

As I pulled the pages from the water, I almost had an out of body experience as I observed myself react. To my own surprise, I didn’t care.

If you know me, you know this is not actually my MO. Every item in my house has a story. Everything is a potential heirloom because all of it is packed with memory, with experience, with meaning. Had you asked me months ago about such a scenario as the one with the journal soup, I would have told you that I’d likely weep, perhaps have a bit of rage, curse words popping off like firecrackers while I pulled my belongings, including this precious journal from the water.

But there was no rage. No tears. No cortisol running through my body. No adrenaline. Just a couple quiet f-bombs.

As I laid out what is now left of my journal by the dehumidifier in the basement, I saw a page still half-legible. Delighted, I parsed out enough words to conjure a memory I’d totally forgotten:

We’d gone on a family beach trip right before Covid shut down the world. I’d carried my barely-toddling daughter into the shallow waves. She kept saying, “Suit… suit… suit…” and I didn’t understand why. Then I realized she wanted to be naked in the ocean. How she’d even had the idea, I couldn’t tell you. But she wanted to feel the water on her skin.

Grateful to that wet page for that memory, I remembered something else from that trip. I’d gone snorkeling to an area far from our beach where my husband and I knew we’d find large pillars of magnificent coral. On the way back, we crossed a large area of shallow water and sand.

To my shock and delight, I spotted a whole, precious sand dollar. I gently lifted it into one hand, examined it carefully, at once overjoyed by my luck and scared that I’d break it immediately.

I made a sort of cage of my fingers and let it move loosely in my hand. This worked to protect the sand dollar until a big wave pushed me up into higher water. The pressure of the water pushed the sand dollar against my palm, and it shattered.

I stopped swimming. Another wave, this one internal and filled with emotions washed over me.

Why did I stand up in the shallow water then and weep? Why did losing that sand dollar hurt me so much that my husband had to stop and hold me while my salty tears fell into salty water? I’ll never have such luck again, I thought. And just like that, something so precious is gone. I felt the weight of my life, the preciousness of these passing days falling out of my hands.

I thought of that sand dollar laying out the wet pages of the journal that held all my writing about my kids’ youngest years.

But I didn’t weep. I didn’t worry it at all.

I thought simply, They’re here. Don’t worry. My children are here. They are safe and asleep in their beds.

Here we are, two gay dads with two of the most beautiful, kind, sweet children in the world safe and asleep in their beds.

Two gay dads. In this world. With two beautiful babies. Safe and asleep and tucked in and surrounded by a community of people who love them.

Meh, I thought. I’d like to have the journal. But I don’t. Oh, well.

I do think it’s living so very close to the Maui fires that’s changed me. And the transition to a new life, leaving another behind. And living through Covid and the Uprising and the world full of such incredibly urgency.

Why is this my season of letting go? Why is this the time in which I’m suddenly so much more interested in what I can give away than what I might lose?

I’m not sure. But it felt good. It felt right to let those pages go. The memories I’ve lost in those pages are still in my kids. They are in me. Even if my mind can’t remember them.

I suppose this is what it’s like to learn to let go.

It’s not so much that things I’m letting go of aren’t important. It’s just that I don’t get to control whether or not every important thing in my life stays a part of my life.

I want to hold all of it and never let it go. But that’s not possible. The only power I have, I suppose, is to give it away.

I suppose that’s why I’m publishing my book. I suppose that’s why I’m sharing this with you now.

Was it Helen Keller who said, “What we have once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us…”?

And can I say this now? - “What I have loved deeply, I’d like to give to you.”