Latter Day Sinner

There are three times when I lost most of my possessions and I suspect each of those times has something to say about how I would deal with losing all of them. The first time was when I graduated highschool and went straight into the Army. My possessions were still out there but I was entirely and the good will of the military for my clothes, food, and shelter. The little bag of personal effects I brought with me got stored after I put my civilian clothes into it. For several weeks I didn’t own anything. And after a summer of Basic Training I went off to college and could only take with me the things that would fit on the plane. My parents kept a lot of my stuff for safe keeping but it was halfway across the country.

I’ve talked elsewhere about Dodge Street. I lived a very Spartan lifestyle but I still accumulated a few things in the years I lived on the edge of society in the center of town. But again I decided to go to college. I packed up everything that would fit in my new dorm room and gave away or abandoned the rest. I was only in the dorms for a year before I was married and had some of the stuff my parents were keeping shipped to our new apartment.

The most recent loss was when the house we lived in for 16 years went into foreclosure. We only had a couple of weeks to move everything we had to storage and find a new place to live. This was especially hard for the kids. They’d been in one place most of their lives. My wife and I understood what was happening and why we couldn’t go back. Our autistic children did not and could not comprehend the loss. It took years to stabilize the family after that.

If the house caught on fire, destroyed everything in it, and ruined the SUV in the process we would again be faced with children who didn’t know why or even what had happened. I fear for them and their peace of mind more than my own. If we lost all our things but no one was hurt I would be grateful for that at least. But it is difficult to know whether we would be able to restore a sense of regulation and comfort for them even if we all survived.