What they call a "Total Loss"

may be the road to reclamation.

I wrecked my own minivan. It was an underwhelming parking garage car accident resulting in the insurance company declaring my Toyota Sienna minivan a “total loss.” I was shocked. The insurance guy was not. On the phone, he said they’d be taking possession the next day and I needed to collect my things from the vehicle, which was parked at a body shop. I got there and was told to “pull around back and just follow the road to the left” where I entered a car graveyard. Cars were parked in rows like headstones, all of them dead for one reason or another, never to be resurrected. The writing on the windshields mimicked deep granite inscriptions about a life come and gone. 

I found mine at the end of the second row and felt immediately tender at the center for the thing. Here it was, this inanimate object that holds no sentience and yet I wanted to embrace it, call it by a name. Like seeing a corpse, it was the shell of my car, but the soul was gone. Some parts had already been stripped without my permission, rubbing in that this thing was gone and not coming back. 

I brought two bags - one for trash, one for keep. Then I remembered the lesson I’ve learned in the recent past, when cleaning out a space after a “total loss”: our trash tells the truth about us. Some trash isn’t just trash. It’s a doorway to memory. I emptied glove boxes and consoles and seat back pockets and with each piece of mundanity I was sent - chutes and ladders style - down memory lane. 

A business card from the Children’s Hospital sent me racing 90 miles per hour on the freeway while Jeremy drove and I gave Zion CPR in the back seat. That was the summer of too many questions and not enough answers, when the seizures were relentless and my back cramped from sleeping at the hospital. 

A crumpled playbill for the older boys’ high school senior plays took me back to their final bows, the stage makeup on their collars, their arms full of grocery store flowers, and my sense of knowing that it’s hard to find that sense of clubbish belonging again in adulthood but how I hoped that, some day, they would. 

I kept headphones and an old ipod, Marvel and Star Wars movies used to silence little boys of all ages on long roadt rips to mountains and oceans. I found tickets to the high school graduation and a parking pass for my oldests’ college move-in day. I can still see his stubbled face as we drove away from him, still feel my urge to turn around and watch him until I couldn’t see him anymore. I found the first batch of respiratory masks we ever bought, when there was something called a global pandemic spreading through the country. My  mind played a slideshow of our family in that time; crisis-schooling, wiping down costco orders left on the porch by another faithful instacart shopper, and the five of us quarantining for over a year because of Zion’s intense health risks. 

I found remnants of thresholds; piles of paperwork - transferring the car from my ex husband to me, marking the end of an era and beginning a new one - where my name was the primary on all my accounts for the first time in my adulthood. And then, new love. I found fabric swatches from when my then girlfriend, now wife, and I went couch shopping. I went back to those early days, when we U-hauled our lives, divided up drawer and closet space, and decided to just buy a couch on facebook marketplace because when you’re in this kind of love you don’t need to prove it with more expensive shit. I found the rainbow handheld fans she and I got at our first joint Gay PRIDE parade in Lawrence, Kansas. I can still see the tears in her eyes through the blur of my own as we wept at how good it felt to be seen and safe, even for just a moment.

There were piles of other memories that came to me but those are the ones I hold close for myself, the car, and whoever happened to share it with me. 

After all the stuff was sorted and the last of the loose change and gum wrappers were cleared out, I sat alone in the car and I spoke to it as if it could hear me. I thanked it for all it held, what it carried me through, carried us through, and witnessed. From curving mountain roads to first kisses at the airport. From beauty to ashes and back again. Then I said goodbye and closed the door for the last time. 

Driving away I saw the bumper sticker my wife gave me months ago, knowing my obsession with the Mary Oliver poem, Wild Geese, “Honk if you let the soft animal of your body love what it loves!” I laughed, remembered the few people who had been behind me in rush hour, read the line of the poem and laughed or honked in recognition before snapping a photo. I snapped my own, before driving away.

When I came out and some of our people heard about the divorce, they wanted to know if every moment of joy leading up to it was all a lie. “We thought it was real” and “You seemed so happy” were among the top objections. I think what they were trying to say was, “There is no way it could have been real if it ended.” 

I get it. I have wandered through the aisles of bitterly-written divorce books in Barnes and Noble. It’s commonplace to believe that divorce makes marriage a total loss. I have pushed back against this dualistic framework in every way possible. I hope I always do. My marriage to Jeremy spanned two decades, half of my life, gifted me with three sons and the village of a family who have sworn to love and raise them for life. I gave myself to my marriage and my family, fully. It was real. It was long and big and deep and held millions of little moments and secrets that are just for us. 

It was as real as I knew a marriage could be. I was as happy as I believed I ever deserved to be. I didn’t know, didn’t even dare to pray that there could be more, that I was allowed to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves. As my therapist once said, “when we know better, we do better.” So I drive on and with me I carry with me a collection of memories so precious and experiences so true, they paved the way for me to be an even realer real, a truer true. Which, if anything, feels like a total reclamation. But never, not ever, a total loss. 

* Image Credit: Library of Congress, Music Division.