Losing Hand-Written Work

On the eve of Saturday, July 20, 2013, I watched a movie called “Life Of Pi”. There were a few scenes that saddened me, but none so deeply as the part where the hand written notes flew out of the boy’s hands.

The next morning, I was cleaning my room. I had a few of my old journals in a pile, and set out to put them back where I normally store them – in a big bin with the rest of the past 23 years worth of them.

I remembered that a few weeks earlier I’d had necessity to temporarily store the bin in my 19-year-old daughter’s room in the basement, so I went downstairs and asked her for them. She handed me an empty bin, saying, “You mean this? I’d been using it for shoes…”

She pointed at a pile of boxes in the living room, saying, “The journals might be in there somewhere.”

It was a daunting mess that had accumulated as a result of my daughter having moved from one room to another, wherein she had rearranged various items I’d kept stored in the spare room, but I finally got through all of it after several hours.

None of my journals were found.

I searched the whole house and property, asking everyone if they had any idea where my journals might be. Nobody claimed to know. One family member said they had seen them in the basement a few weeks ago, and, as they realized they were not in their usual place, they put them back to where I normally keep them.

I’ve been beside myself with heartache over losing these hand-written accounts that spanned half my life, dating back to 1990, including details of all my pregnancies, births, cute events from the childhoods of my kids, stories from living in the wilderness of Alaska, and so much more.

I’ve had a lot of trauma in my life, but the journals represented the everyday and the good. I could look back at them and remember that things weren’t always bad.

I wanted to save those journals for my kids as a legacy, but now they are gone.

It is hard to shake the fear that my daughter is lying to me about not knowing where they are. I suspect that she wanted the bin for shoes while she was rearranging her living quarters, sought out the bin, removed my journals, disposed of them, and didn’t give it another thought until I asked about them. Even if she is behind this, I’d feel better knowing than not knowing, and I would forgive her if she told me the truth. She knows this. We discussed it. Yet she insists she doesn’t know anything about their whereabouts.

My heart is broken. I feel like a large chunk of my physical body has been removed from me. I feel violated. I feel I am in limbo, not knowing for sure if the books are gone for good.

I cry sometimes as I think about it. I don’t know what hurts more – the loss of my books, or the thought that they might have been thoughtlessly taken by my own adult child who is lying to me.

With writing I do on the computer, I can and do back it up. With hand-writing that fills book after book, it would take years to scan and save it if I worked at it eight hours a day.

I am trying to be strong about this and get over it. I know it is only a material thing, not a life, that has been lost. Still, it feels like a part of my own life has been lost, and so it hurts accordingly.

I think back to how deeply I felt the pain of the boy in Life Of Pi losing his hand-written work. Little did I know it was a foreshadowing of what I was about to discover had happened to me.

Have you ever had your hand-written work disappear? How did you heal up from it? Or did you ever heal up?

UPDATE: I forgot to update this post. A few weeks after I wrote it, the journals were found in a tiny room beneath the basement stairs, behind the water heater.

UPDATE TEN YEARS LATER: It is now August 24, 2023. I can now say that I know who hid my journals in that little room behind the water heater. It was my ex husband. He was the one who “found” them there at the end of August 2013, after letting me suffer over their disappearance for six weeks. He saw me crying. He pretended to sympathize. He acted completely innocent. Oh, but he knew that was my one possession about which I cared. And he did it again in the summer of 2021, shortly after he and I split up permanently. He sent our then-13-year-old son into the house while I was out of town and had him steal my box of journals.

How do I know this? The ex phoned our daughter that day — ON MY PHONE — which has a call recording app on it. It deeply disturbed our daughter, who was only 11 at the time, to hear her father tell her “When you guys get home, your mom is going to freak.” (I listened to the call as I went into a grocery store for snacks for the drive home. My daughter did not know I heard it. She was uncomfortably quiet all the way home, and I did not say anything about the torment that was going through my mind, either.)

It was four hours after the phone call when we got home. During the entire drive I was wondering what her dad meant. I expected something drastic like the house being burned down. When we got home and I discovered my closet door open and box of journals missing, it all made perfect sense as to how my journals disappeared ten years ago, too, and the one who “found” them was the one who had hidden them.

The next morning I went to the “church” where the ex had been attending. I told the preacher about it and implored him to talk to the ex about this. A few days later, I got a call from a man I didn’t know, telling me he had my journals to return to me, and a meeting was arranged to retrieve them. I now have them again. Over the past couple of years, I have somehow become less attached to them than I used to be. Mere survival has proven to be a bigger investment of my physical and emotional energy.

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Taking heart in the other post I published today: A Beautiful Spirit