At first, the day seemed quite uneventful. That is, until the event that I would let shape my day came to my attention. My darling four year old daughter walked into my office and announced that she had lost one of the earrings from a pair of earrings I had only put on her only three days earlier. These were not any ordinary earrings, but a pair of gold earrings that I had owned since I was a child, around the same age as she is now. I had put them on her for a Christmas show she was participating in, but they looked so cute on her, that I decided to keep them on her for a couple more days. It didn’t occur to me to think about the impact it would have on me if she lost them until it actually happened. I was surprised then when I became so stricken with grief that I began to cry.
I know it sounds silly that I would attach so much sentimental value to a pair of earrings, but I had no idea that they would trigger such a reaction from me. Initially, I had a mini panic attack while I simultaneously tried to ask her calmly about where she first noticed they were gone. Somewhere inside my head I found humor in trying to tap into the accuracy of the minute details of a four year-olds’ memory regarding a particular sequence of events. As if I could really place all my hopes on pinpointing the location of a single little earring on the same girl who likes to tell people she used to ride golden tigers through a forest on her way to her palace to see her three sisters. (She has one sibling…a brother.) Still, bless her heart, she tried her very best to recall into mind where she thought she felt it fall out of her ear. I wasn’t upset with her, and tried very hard to make sure she didn’t feel any repercussions from me while I experienced an inner freak out session.Based on her recollections and the lack of any on my part for even noticing it was missing in the first place until it was too late, I had realized that there was virtually no hope of ever recovering my lost earring. Upon that realization, I called my husband to express my disheartenment. As I explained what happened, and as he shared his sympathies with me, tears began to well up in my eyes. I needed to get off the phone since I was at work, and couldn’t afford to breakdown in front of the children where I work part-time as an Office Manager at a martial arts school. I remember taking a deep and heavy breath of acceptance, as I prayed for comfort to release me from this profound sense of loss I was experiencing. At the same time I was experiencing this profound moment, I also wondered why I felt so silly that I was so bothered over this material object. A few minutes later, my boss and good friend of mine came out of his office to express his sympathy for my loss as well. It was at that moment that I released the emotion that I was suppressing.
I went on and on to explain why those earrings were so sentimental to me. I told him that I had a habit of losing precious jewelry all my life (my late father’s wedding ring, my mother’s mothers ring, my baby bracelet, etc) and that what made these earrings so special was that I hadn’t lost them yet, and that I wanted to pass them on to my daughter for her posterity. He joked with me and said that losing jewelry was another thing I had apparently passed on to my daughter. It garnered a good laugh through my tears. But I further explained that the pair of earrings was one of only literally a handful of items I still owned from my childhood that I had kept in hope of giving them to my own children. I have had those earrings for as long as I can remember, and they were given to me by my parents, while my father was still alive. For me, those earrings represented the only material association I had left for my daughter to link her to her grandfather, my father, who passed away long before she was born, when I was eighteen years old. The loss of those earrings was symbolic of the loss of my father all over again. I didn’t realize that I had that much forgotten grief still stored up in my heart after all these years since his passing.
I am thankful that my friend (and boss) allowed me to express my emotions in the way that I did. I was allowed to go through a much needed mini grief process for emotions I had not completely dealt with. It helped me to recognize the true nature of the sense of loss that I was experiencing. Somehow, in my life, even knowing all that I know now about how families can be together forever since I became a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), I had been in a slumber about the eternal nature of my relationship with my own father. I had placed so much sentimental value on this temporary item of mortality to my own children that I had neglected the opportunity to teach them about the true legacy and lessons that my father’s life and death brought into my life. Being able to work through this situation, my eyes were opened enough to be able to see the bigger picture.
This singular event of losing a simple earring helped me to reawaken what I had learned, in retrospect, after the death of my father … to live life without regrets, without unfinished business, and to never leave words of love left unspoken. I have my own
legacy to pass onto my children through the lessons I have learned since that time, and from the knowledge and wisdom I have gained from the gospel. , and through the kindness of a friend.
I am grateful to Heavenly Father for the lesson I have learned. I can only attribute this to the faith that I had that there was a message in there for me somewhere. It is easy to hold on to the earthly treasures we attach sentimental value to, but what do we truly gain from them? We need to just be able to remember the sentiment behind the object, but to freely be willing to let go of the object. After all, we can’t take them with us after we move on from this world.
…Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. (Job 1:21)
When we become slaves to our material possessions, and if they become lost, we are left feeling empty, and a little lost ourselves. We need to replace these objects with things of an everlasting nature, like the scriptures and the gospel of Jesus Christ, to fill us up and make us whole. We also need to bring what we have learned into action in our own lives, and seize every opportunity inasmuch as we are able to, before it is too late.
How fragile life, how certain death. We do not know when we will be required to leave this mortal existence. And so I ask, “What are we doing with today?” If we live only for tomorrow, we’ll have a lot of empty yesterdays today. Have we been guilty of declaring, “I’ve been thinking about making some course corrections in my life. I plan to take the first step-tomorrow”? With such thinking, tomorrow is forever. Such tomorrows rarely come unless we do something about them today. (Thomas S. Monson, “Now Is the Time,” Liahona, Jan 2002, 68-71
On my way home from work, I said another little prayer to Heavenly Father. I asked Him to help me to accept His will in the way that I
