Lost and Found

Eleven weeks. Almost three months since the unimaginable happened. At least, I tried not to imagine it. I avoided it like the plague—little good that did me. We talked around it sometimes, but I always changed the subject, hoping the day would never come. This one, where I live now. Well, I never said I was logical.

Rob was the objective one. He could accept whatever came his way and adjust. Pragmatic, he liked to call it. Stoic, was the way I described him. Either way, he faced life head on. It’s the same way he faced death. As a firefighter, his job required that. As a husband—same thing. More than once, when either of us faced medical challenges, I asked him fearfully if we were going to die, hoping he’d laugh it off and tell me to stop worrying. “Eventually,” was always his deadpan response. Not helpful, but logical.

There just weren’t many things that caught him off guard. Except when he lost things. And he lost a lot of things. Keys. Sunglasses. Uniform shirts with fire department badges—that’s a big no-no. Sunglasses. Paperwork. Gloves. Sunglasses. Things just seemed to up and walk away. Especially tiny little handwritten notes he’d left on his desk six months earlier and needed right this minute. And sunglasses.

But the worst thing he had a habit of losing was his wallet.

In 2001, while we were on our twenty-fifth anniversary trip to Scotland, at the very moment Rob was supposed to pay our B&B owner for a complete kilt the man had just sold him in his downtown shop, my husband reached into his empty pocket and came up with a blank stare. And I knew. It was a quiet bus ride back to our room in Edinburgh. Those three flights of stairs felt like thirty, but thankfully when we opened the door, there was his forgotten wallet, lying on the bed. Why no one has developed a wallet with a built-in satellite tracking system, I will never understand.

It wasn’t just his wallet he’d misplace. His debit card had a way of disappearing, too, because he didn’t always put it back in his wallet. Losing things was Rob’s hobby. But usually he found them again—except for that uniform shirt and badge.

The last time his wallet disappeared was during his hospital stay in Show Low. I got worried about it after the first couple of weeks of his illness and asked the nurses to look for it, but with no luck. Though we searched our home in Heber repeatedly, we never found it. Worried, I decided to shut down one of his credit cards, but when I called American Express, I discovered someone had made a purchase on his card two days before his death, while he was unconscious in ICU.

I was livid.

A call to hospital security was futile. They referred me to the Show Low Police Department who filled out a report that had zero to no chance of ever accomplishing anything. It was salt in the wound. Though I knew there were no photos inside and I’d already closed other accounts, I still wanted the wallet back because it was his. Anything of his that I can locate is another connection to the husband I lost.

It was just one more in a long line of losses. My beloved. Our future together. My security. Our home. Peace. And, at times, my faith. How something as small as a man’s wallet could encapsulate all the things I’d lost is hard to explain, but it did. And just like everything else, there was nothing I could do about it.

If only I’d figured things out sooner, I reasoned, maybe I could have held on to him. If I’d known he’d be so susceptible, one of the miniscule percentages of people who would never recover from a virus that almost everyone else overcame, I could have done a better job of protecting him, I thought.

What was that missing thing I overlooked that cost me everything? Why couldn’t I figure it out? And, more importantly, what difference did it make now? Suddenly, it became two questions—why did I lose him, and why does that question torment me?

I knew it’s part of grief. Still, the questions remained, unanswered. I needed to find a way to put them to rest—so maybe I could rest. It’s hard enough living day after day without Rob without adding to the suffering this way.

Three weeks ago, as I stood in Katy’s garage sorting through some things I was going to donate and those I wanted to take to storage, she asked, “Are these tennis shoes yours or Dad’s?” I looked them over, trying to place them. “They’ve been in here for a while, but they don’t belong to any of us,” she added.

“Dad’s,” I said after a minute. I almost tossed them into the give-away pile, but since Rob and I wore nearly the same size shoe, I decided to hang onto them. Maybe they’d make a good pair of knock-arounds to wear when I help with the animals. You need dedicated shoes when you walk through the pasture where nineteen birds do their business in public. Everything’s contaminated after an experience like that.

“Let’s toss ‘em in the back of the truck til I decide what to do with them,” I told her. “When I have time, I’ll see if they fit me.”   

I left to run some errands, making a quick stop at my storage unit. Loading up one of their flatbed wagon things with everything I’d carried in the truck, I picked up the shoes and chucked them out of the way. One of his tennies looked odd, though, and I could see there was some paper inside it. Maybe it was one of those tiny little handwritten notes he used to leave everywhere. It feels like Christmas when something else of his turns up now so, curious, I picked up the shoe and looked inside. Something dark filled up the toe, and I had to work at it to pull it out.

It was Rob’s wallet.

Two months to the day after we lost him, I found his missing wallet. Everything, including his driver’s license and some cash, was still in it. I don’t know how or why his American Express account was compromised, but even the card was still there. For a brief moment, I stood staring in disbelief at the wallet in my hand, then put my head down on the back of my open truck bed and cried my eyes out.

For weeks, while I called nurses and searched high and low for something I was sure I’d never see again, it had been hidden in the toe of an unrecognized pair of tennis shoes shuffled around in the garage. Lost. And found. Hidden. And revealed. Safe. And sound. I had nothing to do with his wallet going missing. And, honestly, I had nothing to do with its return. God knew where it was all along and gave it back to me when there was no hope of my ever finding it again.

Does that seem coincidental to you? Me neither.

I had nothing to do with Rob’s illness. I had nothing to do with the turn it took or the way it took my husband from me. We think answers will lessen the pain of our grief, but they don’t. We even think we’re responsible for explaining why things turn out as they do, but we aren’t. Because we don’t know. We are not in control.

“Deep down,” my son told me recently, “we want to blame someone. It can’t just be tragic.”

But it is. It was a tragedy. It was no one’s fault.

I keep saying I lost Rob when what I mean is I can’t be with him right now. He’s not lost. He’s not dead either. He’s just not here with me. That sounds like I’m making a fine distinction, maybe even playing around with words. But I’m not.

He’s not lost. He knows exactly where he is. I just miss him more than the moon would miss the sun. And I can’t explain why things ended here like they did. I wanted more time with him. We all did. We’ve been robbed and God understands that and grieves with us while we’re away from one another.

Rob is not lost.

I’m just lost without him.