The Art of Letting Go

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.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. …

—Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”

In December 2016, when I lost my close friend the novelist Sydney Blair to a sudden and fatal attack of pancreatitis, my then-83-year-old father tried to console me. “December,” he said, “thins the herd.”

I don’t think my father meant his remark to come off as pat and callous as it sounded to me in my bereavement. The son, grandson, and great-grandson of farmers, he likely knew the phrase from the pragmatic agrarian practice of removing weaker animals from a flock in order to sustain a healthy population through months of relative cold and scarcity.

Despite the undeniable ruthlessness of my dad’s sentiment, it also had a ring of truth. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is in the months of December, January, and February when the greatest number of Americans die. The reasons for the statistics are no doubt myriad—colder temperatures bring winter diseases that can tax the body, particularly the respiratory system and the heart. Darker days mean fewer benefits from sunlight, and many people find the exigencies of the hibernal holidays stressful and even depressing. The elderly and folks with preexisting mental and physical conditions are especially susceptible to any of these factors, let alone a combination of them.

In December 2025, as I begin to write this essay, my father is a hale, hearty 92. He’ll turn 93, God willing, in the first month of the new year. But his advanced years, my own aging, the anniversary of my friend’s death, the ending year, and a host of other forces, personal and cultural, have me thinking more than I usually do about loss: about the people, things, skills, knowledge, emotions, and places from which, for one reason or another, whether by volition or force, we can and do become separated. “Sundered,” as Emily Dickinson puts it.

Things we can lose: count, patience, time, a train of thought, games, elections, one’s virginity, a bet, hair, teeth, hope, heart, control, one’s mind, face, keys, one’s moral compass, names, steam, power, friends, skills (how to use a slide rule, solve multiplication problems, sign a paper check, diagram a sentence, calculate the number of cups in a pint), loved ones, affection, weight, houses, cities, innocence, one’s temper, countries, passwords, muscle mass, faith …

In English, lose is an old word, coming from the Old English losian (“to perish, lose”) from los (“destruction”). It is akin to the Old English lēosan (“to lose”) and the Old Norse losa (“to loosen”). The word stems from the Proto-Germanic root *leus-, an extended form of the Proto-Indo-European *leu- (“to loosen, divide, cut apart”). Given the precarity and violence of life in fifth-century Britain, it is little wonder that loss joins other foundational Old English vocabulary essential to human life: fire, water, earth, sea, bread, father, mother, child, night, day, and love.