The Mathematics of Loss

On the persistence of sorrow

The bureaucracy of ending.

The avocados kept ripening after she died. Perfectly timed for a Tuesday that would never come, brown-spotted by Thursday, inedible by the weekend when I finally thought to look. This seemed important, though I couldn't say why. Perhaps because ripening implies faith in consumption, in someone being there to notice the exact moment of readiness. The fruit didn't know to stop hoping.

I have been thinking about systems that outlive their purpose. The body's insistence on growing fingernails after the heart stops. The way ice caps continue their ancient melt even as we document their disappearance. The peculiar persistence of things that should know better than to continue.

Her nightgown, still damp from the last fever, hung in the bathroom three days. I touched it each time I passed—cotton gone soft from too many washings, the kind of soft that happens when something has been loved past its intended lifespan. The fabric held the particular smell of illness, antiseptic and something else I couldn't name but had learned to recognize. Sweet decay, perhaps. The smell of systems failing slowly, then all at once.

Outside, what used to be lawn had turned to dust years ago, though the city still sends water bills as if hope were a public utility we could meter and tax. The neighbors have given up pretending their yards will recover. We plant succulents now, if we plant anything. Things bred for abandonment, for the long betrayal of rain that doesn't come.

The house insurance form asked for "date of loss." As if loss occurred on a specific Wednesday, at 3:47 PM, witnessed and documented. As if the weeks of not eating, not speaking, not looking toward the window were merely preamble to the main event. But I have come to understand that loss is not an event but a condition, like the slow rise in global temperature—so gradual you don't notice until the damage is structural, foundational, irreversible.

They don't prepare you for the paperwork that follows death. Death certificates to be copied, accounts to be closed, utilities to be transferred. The bureaucracy of ending. I spent hours on hold with the gas company, explaining that the account holder had died, please discontinue service. "I'm sorry for your loss," the representative said, reading from a script, before asking if I'd like to set up a new account. As if death were merely a change of address.

The same week, I received a notice that the city's last public fountain had been permanently shut off. Water conservation, they explained, though everyone understood it was something larger than conservation. It was acknowledgment. The fountain had been built in 1952, when people believed water was infinite and civic beauty was a reasonable investment. Now the basin fills with cigarette butts and optimistic weeds that sprout after rare rain, only to brown again within days.

I found myself buying groceries for two. Placing items in the cart with the automatic precision of ten years' practice—her yogurt, the crackers she ate when nothing else would stay down, ice cream I'd bring to the room in small bowls she'd let melt while pretending to want it. The checkout girl remarked that the produce section got smaller every month. Drought pricing, she called it, as if scarcity were just another market condition to adjust to rather than the new shape of the world.

In the final weeks, she spoke about temperatures constantly. Too hot, too cold, never right. I adjusted the thermostat every twenty minutes, cranking the air conditioning while the state issued rolling blackout warnings. The contradiction felt appropriate. Nothing about dying follows conservation guidelines. Nothing about love does either. We burned through electricity like grief burns through reason—extravagantly, necessarily, without regard for what reserves remained.

Her purse holds nineteen receipts from the pharmacy. CVS, Walgreens, the place on Fourth Street that stocks the specific brand of throat lozenges she insisted tasted different from all others. Each receipt timestamped with its own small emergency—2:42 AM, 11:23 PM, 6:15 AM. The purchase history of someone trying to buy their way out of inevitability. The same impulse that keeps us funding research into carbon capture technology while the seas rise around our laboratories.

I've started leaving windows open at night, though the air quality app sends hourly warnings about particulate matter. The house needs to breathe, I tell myself, though what I mean is that I need to believe something still can. The air tastes of smoke even when there are no visible fires, the way grief tastes of metal even when you're eating ice cream. Everything flavored by invisible burning.

The Department of Water Resources still sends updates to her email address. Reservoir levels, precipitation predictions, emergency conservation measures. I've entered the password fourteen times but can't bring myself to unsubscribe. Someone should be keeping track, even if that someone is dead. Especially if that someone is dead. The reports arrive with mathematical precision: snowpack at 11% of normal, groundwater depletion accelerating, mandatory restrictions in effect indefinitely.

Indefinitely. A word that has come to define everything.

The lawyers want to know about assets. The house, the car, the savings account she mentioned but I never located. They don't ask about the drawer full of phone chargers for devices we discarded years ago, or the cabinet stocked with twenty-three bottles of vitamins she took religiously until she couldn't. The careful accumulation of someone who believed preparation mattered. Who had lived through the war and saved everything—twist ties, rubber bands, aluminum foil folded and refolded until it became a silver prayer for scarcity that never came.

Until it did.

I think about her hoarding now as a form of prophecy. She saved because she had learned not to trust abundance. Had learned that plenty could evaporate as quickly as morning dew, which no longer forms on grass that no longer grows. Her closet full of winter coats seemed excessive when she bought them, insane when she died in June. Now I understand she was preparing for a future where cold became precious, where the luxury of being too warm was something to stockpile against the long heat that would eventually arrive.

Television weather has become a different language. Heat dome, atmospheric river, unprecedented meteorological event. The meteorologist wears the same expression the oncologist wore when explaining metastasis—professional sympathy mixed with something that might be resignation. No one mentions that weather used to be small talk, something to fill silence rather than explain catastrophe. Now the forecast carries the weight of prophecy. Five days of triple digits. Air quality unhealthy for sensitive groups. Fire danger critical.

The sensitive groups, it turns out, include everyone with lungs.

I drive to the reservoir on Sundays now, though calling it a reservoir requires imagination. Each week, another ring of bleached earth exposed, like geological tree rings marking years of plenty we didn't know were finite. The dock extends into empty air. Someone has left a boat there anyway, balanced on cracked mud and the kind of optimism that borders on madness. Or faith. I can no longer distinguish between the two.

She would have found this funny. Not the dying—she had no patience for gallows humor—but the idea that grief arrives with paperwork. That love, in the end, becomes a series of phone calls to cancel services, close accounts, transfer utilities. That the most intimate relationship of your life reduces to a customer service issue. Please hold while we process your bereavement.

The box of ashes weighs less than her Christmas fruitcake. This strikes me as wrong in some fundamental way, though the mathematics are probably correct. Cremation reduces the human body to three to nine pounds of ash and bone fragments, depending on size and bone density. The Internet knows everything except how to prepare you for the particular lightness of carrying someone you love in a container designed for transport. For the way absence weighs more than presence ever did.

I have read that the last glacier in Glacier National Park will disappear within the decade. This seems related to my mother's ashes, though I cannot explain how. Perhaps it is the finality of it. The way certain endings arrive not with drama but with quiet mathematical certainty. Water temperature rises, ice melts, glaciers retreat at measurable annual rates until they cease to exist. Body temperature rises, organs fail, breathing becomes labored until it stops entirely.

The parallels are almost too obvious to mention, which is why I try not to think in parallels. Try not to make the world's dying mean something about personal loss, or personal loss mean something about the world's dying. But meaning makes itself whether you invite it or not. Connections emerge like weeds through concrete—unwanted, unstoppable, growing in the spaces where systems have broken down.

Last Tuesday, I found myself at the nursery buying plants I have no intention of keeping alive. The salesperson, a woman about my age with sun-damaged skin and careful hands, recommended drought-resistant varieties. "Nothing requires much water anymore," she said, gesturing toward succulents bred for abandonment. But I chose jasmine and roses anyway, things that require daily attention, faith in rain that may not come, the kind of unreasonable hope that feels revolutionary in a landscape learning to live without nourishment.

She asked if I wanted to sign up for their watering service. "A lot of people forget," she explained, "especially if they're going through something." I wanted to tell her that forgetting was not the problem. That remembering was the problem. That every time I turned on a faucet, I remembered the sound of the oxygen concentrator in the bedroom. That every weather report felt like a medical prognosis. That I was buying flowers for the same reason I kept her email subscription active—because someone needed to bear witness, even if that someone was unprepared for the particular weight of witnessing.

Instead, I said no thank you and loaded the plants into my car, their roots still damp with the kind of optimistic watering that assumes rain will continue, seasons will cycle, that the systems we've always depended on will somehow continue to function despite all evidence to the contrary.

The drive home took me past the old shopping center, half-empty now, its anchor stores replaced by urgent care clinics and payday loan offices. The signs of managed decline, the infrastructure of getting by rather than getting ahead. In the parking lot, a few cars clustered around the remaining businesses—a small market, a laundromat, a place that cashes checks and sells phone cards. The economy of people making do.

I thought about the last conversation we had that wasn't about pain medication or ice chips or whether the blinds should be open or closed. She had been talking about the neighborhood, how it was changing. Not gentrification—the opposite. The slow withdrawal of investment, of attention, of the assumption that things would be maintained indefinitely. "It's like watching something die by degrees," she said, then immediately apologized, as if naming the process might accelerate it.

But she was right. There is a particular quality to watching something end slowly enough that you can track the stages. The way paint peels before buildings are abandoned. The way breath becomes conscious work before it stops entirely. The way seasons begin to fail at their appointed tasks—winter too warm, summer too long, spring arriving early and leaving too soon, like a guest who realizes they've overstayed their welcome.

At home, I arranged the new plants on the windowsill next to the ones she had tended. Hers, predictably, were dying despite my careful attention. The jasmine dropping leaves, the small rosebush producing buds that opened for a day before browning at the edges. Mine would likely follow the same trajectory—hope purchased, briefly sustained, eventually surrendered to the mathematics of a world learning to live with less.

But for now, they were green. For now, they reached toward light that still streamed through windows of a house that still held the particular silence that follows love. For now, the systems held, the foundations supported the structure, the small rituals of care continued even as the larger systems revealed their limits.

This, I have come to understand, is how we live now. In the space between what was promised and what remains possible. In the gap between the world we prepared for and the world we inherited. Tending small things with unreasonable dedication while the larger systems rearrange themselves around us, learning new shapes of scarcity, new definitions of enough.

The ashes sit on the mantle next to a photograph from her seventieth birthday, when she still believed in the future tense. When we all did. Before we learned that the future was not a destination but a daily negotiation with loss, a constant recalibration of what love looks like when the conditions it was designed for no longer exist.

Outside, the first stars appear in air too thick with smoke to reveal the full constellation. Enough light to navigate by, not enough to see clearly where we're going. Which seems, lately, like the most honest description of everything.

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean