Letter from the Editor
What We Lost, What Remains
The fire happened 30 years ago this March. I was twelve. I got off the school bus thinking about my report card and carryout pizza and my basketball game later that night. I wasn’t thinking about an electrical short in the basement and running next door to call 911.
My mom was out picking up the pizza. She arrived home to fire trucks at the curb and her three children on the lawn.
We watched the firefighters pull hoses into our house. There was a moment when we couldn’t find our dog, but when he came trotting up the street, we were all accounted for. We’d all gotten out. We were lucky.
The fire was contained and extinguished in a matter of hours. But our house was uninhabitable, and we would end up losing many of our possessions to the smoke and flames and the water needed to put them out.
We lost irreplaceables: Photos. Baby keepsakes. My mom’s wedding dress. We lost most of our toys: Barbies and dolls. Our Fisher-Price castle with the trapdoor and swinging staircase. My brother’s workbench and model airplanes. His vast collection of rocks, minerals, and shark teeth neatly sorted into ice cube trays. Worst of all for me, somehow, was losing my maroon team-issue basketball shorts—the ones my mom had told me to locate for my game that night. It was the image of the holey mesh melted to the drum of our dryer that pressed hardest into my chest.
Our home was significantly damaged. Months later, when repairs were complete, we would inhabit the house again, but it—for reasons related to the fire and others more deeply entangled—never again felt quite whole.
So many have lost beloved people and possessions and homes to fire already this year, and so many are praying hard they won’t. My fire experience is just one, and different in marked ways from the losses caused by wildfire. And yet, three decades later, I still remember how it felt to hold gratitude and relief (for escaping, for survival) alongside sorrow for all we lost.
This issue of the Under Review takes on disasters, fire included. Some are natural, others man-made: tumors, a plane crash; a bike wreck imagined, traumatic brain injuries sustained. In these pieces are losses of loved ones and childhood illusions; distant warfare and relationships gone bad. The narrators in these pieces chronicle disaster and reckon with it. They speak life into some of the hardest parts about living.
That is what art can do. It can get to the places we aren’t ready to go, don’t want to go, in daily laundry-doing, breakfast-eating, shower-taking life. It’s also a way to gather the pieces of those things that are incomprehensible and put them together in a way that makes some sense, that helps us get our hearts around it, if not our heads.
Maybe sport is, in its own way, a vessel for this kind of processing, too. Call them moves dictated by network dollars, or call them small mercies for people craving something familiar and perhaps cathartic, too: Don’t cancel the NFL wildcard playoff game; move it 400 miles east. Don’t cancel the Sugar Bowl; pause to pay respect to the people who lost their lives in a willful act of violence, and then play the game. Let playing be an expression of life. Let play be a way of being alive.
Just a couple of hours after the firefighters had rolled up their hoses and driven their truck away from our charred house, I was on the basketball court in a pair of shorts borrowed from a friend. As an adult, I have wondered why I was allowed to play that night. As a parent, I understand the impulse to preserve any shred of normalcy for my children when bad things shake their world. And now, maybe more than ever, I understand that this is something else that sports can offer us: a place to be and be held, to stay connected to something about ourselves when everything else has suddenly disintegrated.
Sports don’t make everything ok. Sports don’t replace what has been lost. But participating in what we love, as a player or a fan or as someone who’s just there for the dips, wings, and high-fives, it helps keep us tethered to life.
We can do something to remind ourselves we’re still here: read a poem, or write one. Hit the heavy bag. Go to your travel league game. Be with your teammates. Run the floor. Heave a wild three.
Our job right now is not to jump to rebuilding, or wholeness. Today, we survive it. Today, we remain.
