A few weeks ago, America lost retired Laker’s basketball player Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi Byrant in addition to seven other victims to a helicopter crash. Because everyone deserves to be mourned, I will mention the names of departed: John Altobelli, Keri Altobelli, Alyssa Altobelli, Christina Mauser, and Ara Zobayan.
I am not a sports fan; neither do I understand the finesse one needs to play basketball. But I am a human being who understands what it means for one’s life to be taken away from them unexpectedly. As a graduate student, I also understand that the process of mourning becomes a complex issue of learning to balance emotional and mental energy in addition to dedicating enough time to studies. Most of the time, you are left with no source of upliftment for yourself and you can easily fall into the pit of what it means when you are losing.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”
So what is this art of losing and why is it, according to Elizabeth Bishop so hard to master? I want to define losing as the exchange of something valuable for something less valuable or nothing at all. When we lose time we should have spent on an assignment, we have gained worry and anxiety about the potential success of our research. When we lose a friend, family member, a national legend, we have exchanged them for the idea of death, which we have constructed as human beings to make sense of eternal breathlessness.
“Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.”
But sometimes, the exchange might bring something profitable: when you lose a partner to an evolving taste of love, you gain self. Even with the loss of a body, you have gained an appreciation for the living. I saw many Instagram posts circulate on how everyone should be grateful for always returning home safely as many do not have that pleasure. This helicopter crash has invited us to re-love ourselves and our neighbors.
“I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.”
The art of losing is hard to master because we have not counted our losses from the beginning. We have not determined the possibilities of not starting with what we began with and how that might affect or change us. The art of losing is not to be confused with the art of failing. We have more control over our failures than our losses.
So what does one do, in a graduate program when they feel that they have lost or that they are losing? Mourn. The ancient Egyptians mastered the art of losing: they embalmed their dead and mummified these bodies. You must allow yourself to give into the emotions of nothing that you have now gained. Wail, throw yourself on the floor, curse, relive the moments, only if they were good. But count your costs before you mourn. For in mourning, you would hate to accrue more losses.
“—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
This post includes excerpts from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art
Afua Ansong is a Ghanaian American writer, dancer, and photographer, and is co-editor of the URI English Graduate Student Blog. Her work interrogates the challenges of the African immigrant in the United States, exploring themes of transition, citizenship, and identity. Her chapbook American Mercy is available through Finishing Line Press. Her work can be seen or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Frontier, Newfound and elsewhere.