An electrical current ran through me when I looked down at my iPhone’s screen: three missed calls from my daughter Kendall. I punched the call back button.

“Hey, what’s up girl,” I tried to keep my voice casual. Nonchalant. Vaguely disinterested.

We Deagles are well trained. After living the worst-case scenario, we’re quick to lead with, “I am fine” when placing an unexpected call. Or three.

She ponied up the rote response. Then she shouted in anguish, “I lost the ruby ring!”

“Okay, okay, walk me through this, where did you lose it?”

“We were in the backyard, cleaning up after Chloe’s 21st birthday party, and I was throwing the leftover ice out of the cooler, and I guess maybe it slipped off my hand and…and…and I’m never going to find it, Mom!”

The amps on that electrical current had turned into a megawatt transmission, my body buzzing, my heart pounding. This wasn’t just any ring. It was Mike’s. She’d taken it from the safe deposit box and to a jeweler, reshaped it, resized it, made it her own. Her own talisman of her late father, worn lovingly on her finger every single day.

“Okay, put some jeans on because I think you need to crawl around in the backyard on your hands and knees. And someone in NOLA must have a metal detector, right? And where are Rachel and Elina, can they help?”

And. And. And.

God knows what I actually said. We were both crying. Then solutioning. Then crying again.

I couldn’t have cared less about the ring. All I cared about was her broken heart.

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We do this.

We lose the people we love most in the world… then take the tattered remnants of that love and suffuse them into things: rings, watches, necklaces, totems of all shapes and sizes.

We keep them close, comforting ourselves with the evidence that our loved one was once real and here and breathing, and even though they were impermanent, we still at least have this bit of permanence to hold onto.

But, in fact, they’re just another thing to lose.

So, we end up facing a choice. Stash these totems away in a safe deposit box. Keep them in the climate-controlled dark, behind lock and key, protected and untouchable.

Or.

Wear them. Live with them out in the open, letting them remind us of those we love, while knowing they might slip off our finger in a New Orleans backyard while throwing ice out of a cooler.

While we cannot control whether people come into our lives or leave, objects we can control. We can manage that risk. So oftentimes we do. We choose the safe deposit box again and again, because it’s the one place where loss has a solution.

But it’s a false bargain.

Because a life spent protecting against the loss of things is a half-lived life.

I don’t use that phrase out of hand; I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. About a decade, in fact. Yes, we all have to orient around safety and security to a sensible degree. But when we get too focused on what we could lose, we start to hear ourselves say, over and over again, “I can’t.” I can’t because it’s too risky. I can’t because something could go wrong. I can’t because I might end up feeling (more) pain or losing money or hurting someone I love. I have come up with at least a million reasons for “I can’t”. But after steeling my spine and carefully examining each one, they almost never involve creating opportunities for more joy or growth or possibility or healing.

Living by “I can’t” ensures our life never expands into something more. We think this is a sacrifice we’re willing to make — protect what we have, while forfeiting what we could have had — but in truth no safe deposit box can hold back the relentless force of entropy. So our defensiveness only ensures we will lose things (albeit possibly more slowly), while gaining little.

We simply must embrace the horror of letting ourselves live, and risk, and lose. Else we’ll “protect” our way right out of a well-lived life.

Ten minutes later, I was looking for a paper bag to hyperventilate into when Kendall called me back.

“I found it! It was in an area I searched in before, I swear, but this time I saw it. Maybe the ice had melted? I don’t know! Oh my God!!”

“Oh thank God, thank God, thank you Daddy!” I shout-cried back into the phone.

Then this from Kendall, “I’m never wearing this again! I want to put it in the safe deposit box! I HATE THINGS!”

“I hate things too!” I replied.

But, really, I don’t.

She took to her bed, completely wrung out. The gin and tonic I’d talked myself out of earlier in the evening suddenly became a necessity, so I drove the four miles to the liquor store before it closed, sending a selfie surrounded by bottles as she lay prone in her bed.

“WE ARE TRAUMATIZED,” she texted back.

A truer sentence was never uttered.

She took a long nap. I let the gin infuse my bloodstream, the electrical wattage of the day spinning itself out like an unplugged generator.

When she woke up hours later, she shared her revised plan, “I’m going to get two tiny rings for either side so this thing never slips off again.”

She found Mike’s ring — her ring — this time.

There will come a time in the future where we will not be so lucky. Because sometimes rings just stay lost… and our hearts break. Again.

Our vulnerability, the wet blanket that no one invited to the party, is the guest that never leaves.

I could see a world in which Kendall put that ring back in the safe deposit box. Maybe she would only pull it out on special occasions, like graduation, Christmas, her wedding day. Maybe.

Or, possibly, this: a world where, over and over, she decides not to risk it at all. Instead she comes up with a different totem that doesn’t mean as much to her, and wears that regularly: a bracelet with Mike’s name and birthday engraved in it perhaps. It never belonged to Mike, so she knows she could get it replaced, no biggie. Meanwhile, the ring just sits in the dark box, mostly forgotten. It’s almost like it ceases to exist.

But what would be the point of that? She’d protect herself right out of the feeling of joy it brings her every time it sparkles. She’d protect herself from the warm bloom in her chest whenever she sees a friend admiring it, then gets to share the story of her dad. She’d protect herself from the pride she feels at the weight of Mike Deagle’s ring on her finger, keeping her company as she crushes classes and internships and follows in his powerful footsteps. Just like he always knew she would.

Yes, it’s just a ring. But it’s also a metaphor: the safe deposit box life doesn’t let the light in.

It’s a tough bargain. Still, I’d rather be terrified but giddy every time we see the ruby catch the light, than safe but never basking in the glow.

To fear… and the possibility we find on the other side of it,

Sue

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