The Shape of Space

The shape of spaces carved by loss.

I grew up thinking that negative space was empty. I felt that the loss of something was the lack of it. And I moved in the world as a child who danced among voids, between voids, sometimes lost in voids.

As children we were allowed to wander into the desert, to build rock forts among the sagebrush, to hunt for imaginary treasures among the rocks. Occasionally we found caves, rock hollows, empty spaces between rocks and claimed them as our forts, too. We inhabited these places under the scorching heat of the Mojave, in the shadows of the foothills. We felt feral.

We filled those windy voids between rocks, those empty spaces, with childhood stories brought to life as we acted them out. Fairy tales, radio detective stories, bedtime stories—we brought that which was not alive to life in our play. I was shaped by them and in them, and they built shapes within me.

Those tunnels for wind took on a different meaning sixty-two years ago when my father died. And my mother became incapacitated by the void left in his passing. We became feral.

What is between the proverbial rock and a hard place of my childhood caves? The wind and the shape the air takes as it passes through them, and as it passed through me and the voids within me and my siblings.

I thought that the loss of my father meant that he wasn’t here with me. I had lost his voice, his words occasionally visited, but his laughter became only an echo in the cool morning air. And it has taken decades for me to understand that the shape of my father, securely lodged within me, has shaped me as surely as the wind shapes the desert caves in the foothills. The wind and the water and the quaking of the earth itself shape all they touch. I have lived with that, too. And yet, deep within me, all of these decades later, the shape of my father is still here, an indelible, adamant space within me.

It is that void, along with the void of uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents and a niece and a son that have hollowed out within me great caverns of capacity that can hold more than I ever dreamed possible. It is their shapes within me that have become deep reservoirs of whatever good I have known.

As a child, I did not understand this, mostly because I had thought those places were empty. Void. But they weren’t. They were too full of the love I had for those whose presence I was missing, and the pain of grief was a searing wind with no place to go.

As a child, I did not understand these things. It took time to grow into that understanding. All the kind people who tried to reach me, they thought without success, they shaped me, too. They grieved with me: I can see that now. Even the small moments of a smile, of laughter, of a job to do, of new shoes, or a book—all those small kindnesses echoed within until the reservoirs began to fill and I could reach out and begin to give back, too.

Today, I heard about a friend whose adult child has died. And I ached for her grandchildren’s journey ahead. I ache and I hope. May all the spaces shaped by loss within them be come reservoirs of good.

May all the children who have lost parents this year be filled with the good of the many who surround them. May they be filled with good.