Nothing to Lose

By Robin J. Silverman

Inside the dream I prickle with panic. Flames fill the apartment — long, greedy tentacles consuming everything in their reach. I know nothing will survive. I run around, as though through Jell-O, seeking something precious I must save. But what? I search frantically through my room, my mind. What is it I can’t bear to lose?

I struggle awake, fear and sweat clinging to me. I lie there, trying to understand what the dream means, to decipher what possession could be so important. I’m a college student, living in student squalor. I have nothing of value.

Years later, an explosion blasts a family I know awake. A gas leak forms a fireball that tears through the house, launching the sleeping parents, waterbed and all, into the night sky. They come down through a tree, which breaks their fall, and land in a wading pool in the crater that had been their backyard.

He, who sleeps naked, seeks a way to cover himself. She, extremely nearsighted, fumbles for her glasses to look for her children. Miraculously, all of their injuries are minor. Even the family pet, discovered several days later in the rubble looking like a cartoon cat with its paw in a light socket, survives.

But every thing — cars, roof, walls, furniture, appliances, knickknacks, clothes, keepsakes — is gone. It’s my fire dream come true. I’m horrified at the magnitude of their loss.

Twenty years after my fire dream. I have a home, two Hondas, a Power Mac. I live in a different sort of squalor, born of lack of control over my cohabitants — husband, child, dog — rather than of poverty. I have so much more to lose now. I sometimes have variations of the dream with the same frantic search for the thing whose loss will devastate me. The dream fills me with dread. Every time, I awaken feeling there’s something I can’t bear to live without. But, again, what? In my waking mind I ponder, “If my house burns down, what possession would I risk my life to save?”

Sentimental I’m not. I take after my mother, who abhors clutter. And like my mother, getting rid of stuff I no longer want or need gives me a sense of control. I’m more concerned with preserving the endangered space in my home than filling it with keepsakes. While my husband creates a shrine to our daughter, building it with old pacifiers, discarded teeth, the tubes the surgeon removed from her ears, I eject as much as I can — outgrown clothes, useless tchotchkes — packing them into boxes destined for Goodwill.

Sometimes I look around the mess that is my home and wish for a tornado to blow everything away (I live in Kansas, after all). The toys never played with. The books long since read. The countless scraps of paper my daughter brings home from camp or school. Still, I wonder: How would I feel if, like the exploding family, I lost it all? After the relief of having my loved ones intact wore off, would I mourn the loss of my possessions?

Would I replace them all, as that family did, with newer, bigger, better?

I read an article about using video cameras to record the events of our lives. The writer muses about exchanging the enjoyment of the event — be it vacation, graduation or sunset — for the ability to preserve it on tape. Her conclusion: We’re so busy recording things we forget to experience them.

I don’t own a video camera. I do have hundreds of photographs that serve as a record of my life. Sweet sixteen, senior prom, wedding, pregnancy and everything in between and beyond. Maybe they’re what I’m searching for in the dream. It would pierce my heart to lose those first pictures of my daughter, all cheeks and hair and eyes, or the ones that capture her delight at getting her own puppy for her seventh birthday or of that puppy standing guard over her as she lies on the couch recovering from her tonsillectomy. But even those are just things. Images of experiences I hold forever in my soul. If I lose the photos, the experiences are mine to keep. It’s the living that’s important, being present and experiencing the dailyness of life.

Forty years after my fire dream. I have a bigger house and more possessions. These days, I’m more interested in divesting myself of stuff than accumulating it. I remember when my mother reached this stage in her life. I thought her morbid when she started passing down her possessions to me and my sister — the 50-yearold Russel Wright dishes; the almost-complete set of crystal, rainbow-colored drinking glasses; the copper-trimmed wooden salad bowl she got as a wedding gift from her sister, who died years ago.

Now I understand. My possessions, especially my four-bedroom house, weigh on me. There’s too much: space to fill, maintenance needed, attention and time required. The heft of my stuff seems to increase as my time left on earth diminishes. It seems such a waste to spend my remaining years consumed by the need to replace the fence, paint the family room, clean the chimney, mud jack the front stoop.

As I age, nostalgia wanes. After my mother dies, I realize that having her things doesn’t lessen my pain at no longer having her. My memories of her comfort me; her dishes don’t.

Deciding to throw things away — cards from birthdays long past, photos of occasions I barely remember, clothes I don’t wear — gets easier. What am I saving them for? I used to think I needed to save things as a record of where I’ve been. Now I realize I carry what matters inside me.

I’ve suffered the pain of parting with things I couldn’t live without — Fifi, the stuffed poodle from a favorite aunt whose leg I ripped while using her to pummel my sister; Moody, the toy giraffe from a dear cousin, stolen off my desk in first grade; the pearl ring my grandmother bought at a pawn shop for my eighth birthday, vanished; a yellow Mustang, my first car, inherited from my grandfather, driven until it would go no farther. Just things. No significance, really, other than the ones I assigned them. Their true value lay in their connection to people, my loved ones, who remain a part of me as long as I live.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood the dream all along, interpreting it too literally. Maybe my inability to find something to save is the point. Through the years, I’ve learned to appreciate everyone I have — my family, my friends — and the accumulated experiences, some painful, some joyful, of nearly 60 years of living. A life well lived, filled with love and loss. What more do I need?

I have nothing to lose.