There are some writing prompts that are fun.
There are some that make you think.
And then there are the ones that stop you cold.
“What would you do if you lost all your possessions?”
For most people, the question is hypothetical. For me, it isn’t.
Years ago, during one of the lowest periods of my life, I lost nearly everything I owned.
I’m not talking about things damaged in a move or misplaced in storage. I’m talking about walking away and never seeing most of it again.
The loss came during a time filled with grief, confusion, exhaustion, and circumstances so overwhelming that possessions became the last thing I could fight for.
Before that happened, I had packed up a home full of memories. There were family heirlooms, wedding gifts, handmade quilts, photographs, baby clothes, treasured keepsakes, and all the little objects that quietly tell the story of a life.
Like many people, I believed those things would always be there.
Then life reminded me otherwise.
When people imagine losing everything, they often picture the practical problems first. How do you replace furniture? Clothes? Dishes? A refrigerator?
Those things are expensive and difficult to replace.
But surprisingly, those weren’t the hardest losses.
The hardest losses were the things that carried memories.
Photographs of moments that would never happen again.
A lock of hair from a child’s first haircut.
Keepsakes with no financial value but enormous emotional value.
The ordinary objects that become priceless because of the stories attached to them.
Those are the things that hurt.
Yet as painful as that experience was, it taught me something important.
Possessions are wonderful servants but terrible foundations.
Everything we own can disappear.
Houses can burn.
Storage units can flood.
Vehicles can be stolen.
Life can take sudden turns we never expected.
The memories remains.
The love remains.
The lessons remain.
The character we build remains.
If I lost everything tomorrow, I’d grieve. I’d probably cry. I’d definitely complain.
But I’d also know something I didn’t know back then:
Most of what truly matters cannot be packed in a box.
It can’t be stolen.
It can’t be sold.
And it can’t be left behind in an apartment hundreds of miles away.
The people we love.
The kindness we’ve given.
The faith we’ve held onto.
The strength we’ve developed by surviving difficult days.
Those things stay with us.
If you’ve experienced a loss like that, my heart goes out to you.
And if you never have, take a moment tonight and hug someone you love.
Take a picture.
Write down a memory.
Tell someone how much they matter.
Because in the end, those are the treasures that survive long after the possessions are gone.
PROMPT: What would you do if you lost all your possessions?
Ouch! This is a painful question for me. I’m not sure I can even find the words to fully describe the emotions I felt when I first read this prompt. I’m not even sure I’ll end up posting this on the blog. Why bring up something that’s part of the messy gob of painful experiences that entail the sad events this prompt brings up?
I think I’ll only share a portion of my experiences surrounding the “lost possessions” question. Otherwise, it’d take me many days to write about “everything” that happened. As with so many of us who’ve experienced trauma to any extreme degree that it could be (and is) officially diagnosed as PTSD, the events are difficult to parse out in bits and pieces. But I will try to keep this story succinct and concise. I will keep this story only about the “lost possessions” and little else surrounding that time period.
Let’s just say, I was in one of the lowest points in my life. I felt alone and isolated. I had two small children in a place I’d never, ever, considered living in. The house in Salt Lake City was very large, built over 100 years earlier, and had been divided up into different apartments. I was given most of the main floor. From the main entryway, my place was on the left, with a front door that had seen its best years long ago.
An old entry door with key marks tells a story of frequent use, and perhaps, attempted tampering over many years. The marks reveal a history of people entering and exiting, and can also point to break-in attempts from less-than-gentle hands.
Years of sun, rain, snow, and temperature shifts had left the wood faded and cracked. The last paint job was chipped, peeling, and worn down to the bare timber in places, with several ghost outlines of previous hardware.
The metal doorknob and keyhole escutcheon plate (the decorative plate surrounding the lock) was worn smooth and dulled. That plate had a collection of minor dents, nicks, and dings from keys repeatedly hitting the surface. Marks from lock picking or tampering were easy to see and caused my heart to tremble a bit when I first saw it.
Unlike the subtle signs of everyday use, I knew a picking attempt leaves fresh, shiny scratches on the edges of the keyhole. These marks are often finer and more linear, left by the thin, metallic tools used to rake the pins. Someone had recently picked that lock, and that worried me. These were fresh, sharp scratches. Of course, the owners denied everything, saying, “Oh no! You safe here, you see”, in a broken Asian dialect.
The brass was tarnished to a dark patina, while some parts of it was iron, pitted with rust. The area immediately around the keyhole showed a “halo” of polished or shiny metal. Caused by the constant friction of a key jiggling against the hardware as someone finds the lock in the dark or while fumbling with groceries.
A starburst pattern of small, fine scratches radiated out from the keyhole onto the surrounding wood or paint. Someone’s key had missed the mark over and over again, like a miniature game of darts.
All that misaligned hardware meant only one thing: A violent, forced-entry attempt can bend the lock, warp the door frame, or create chipped circles of paint where the lock’s fixture was twisted or forced.
The door itself was very warped and it sagged slightly on its hinges from decades of opening and closing. This caused it to stick or scrape against the door frame; every time the door was opened, it sounded like we were entering into a haunted house — or more appropriately — a hell house.
The very first shopping trip out was to purchase a new lock and key, just to ease my mind.
Down the small entryway was a very small apartment; in the middle of this entry was the stairs. I don’t know how many apartments there were upstairs, but from noises coming from above us, there were several people who inhabited this address.
We moved in on the first Sunday, the 4th of January in 1976. Just a few days before, on Jan. 1, 1976, it was -2 degrees (F) or -19 degrees (C). It was miserable.
Bundling up against the biting January chill that had gripped the midwest since New Year’s Day—when the mercury plunged to -2°F (-19°C), turning breath to ice and fingertips numb—we crammed our lives from a sprawling 4-bedroom country farmhouse with acreage into a cramped apartment 40 miles away.
On that raw first Sunday, January 4, 1976, trucks groaned through slushy streets, furniture scraped against frozen doorframes, and boxes—oh, so many boxes—teetered like dominoes in the wind. What was once a home in Springville, of open spaces shrank to echoing walls and no laundry, a miserable rite of passage under gray skies that promised little mercy.
As we walked into this place, I was afraid to put the baby down until the playpen was set up. The place looked like it’d been vacant for years; piles of dust and street debris everywhere and even a most disturbing discovery – a dead rat! The rat’s carcass was shrunken and withered, its fur matte and dry. Its skin was stretched taut over the bones. Its features were sharp, with sunken eyes and bared teeth, frozen in its final state. The body is often in an out-of-the-way spot, such as behind the stove, in a cupboard, under the sink, or deep inside a closet. This indicates the rat likely sought a dark, secluded place to hide as it died.
But this one died in the hallway between what would be the dining room and kitchen. Unlike a recently deceased animal, the body didn’t have a strong, putrid smell. Instead, we noticed a more subtle, stale, musty odor that indicated a rodent presence.
We knew this wasn’t a new visitor. The dehydrated state suggested the rat was trapped without water or access to an exit for a long time, long before we moved in. Rodents can enter apartments through tiny gaps, including holes larger than a quarter-inch around pipes and behind walls. A single dead rat means you have access points that are still open.
Rats are social creatures, so where you find one, there are often more. It is likely the first rat is a sign of a larger, active infestation that needs to be addressed.
Notifying the landlord did nothing. But I had babies to protect, so I went to work immediately, using disinfectant and a whole gallon of bleach for a bleach-and-water solution. I put Tracy in my homemade papoose, and put Corey in the playpen, promising him it wouldn’t take long for me to fix things so he could get out of what he must’ve thought was his prison.
The owners kept the furnace blazingly hot 24 hours a day. They used coal and it was cheap, so they didn’t care. At first, when we first walked in, the heat quickly warmed us, but it soon became a nightmare. When we complained, she said, “OK, you open window? Yes, open window.” With the windows open to let fresh air in, (and the bleach smell out), I scrubbed and scrubbed.
We had no phone. We knew nobody. We didn’t even have a working car! My Cougar was in the shop. And we had no laundry hookups. With 2 babies, we needed to find the closest grocery store, pharmacy, and laundromat quick.
So, the morning after moving in, I packed the kids in a shopping cart and walked around the neighborhood until I found the places we needed. Poor Tracy, at 8 months, had a terrible cold. She was miserable, her runny nose barely allowed her to breathe.
I hated taking her out, but I had no choice. She was breastfed, but her stuffy nose bothered her so much. It was difficult for her to nurse, so all I could do was to hold her, and rock her to sleep with a vaporizer going. Corey was toddling around; he was such a good boy, just turning 2 and very loving to his “Sissy”.
Everything stayed in boxes. All the furniture stayed where it was dumped. My 2-month-old fridge that we were still paying on, sat in the living room. My high school pictures, my homemade quilts, the babies’ photographs, their clothes, Corey’s hair from his first haircut, wedding gifts, family heirlooms, all stayed where we left them. I cleaned and cleaned that apartment as best I could, between holding and rocking Tracy and playing with Corey.
On January 29, I was woken up to the news that my baby Tracy died in the night. We walked to the corner store and called 911. Everything was a blur. Corey and I spent the night at the Bishop’s house and he drove us to the airport. I watched Tracy’s casket come off the plane. My mother and siblings picked us up from the airport in LA in her Pinto. She brought along a big Hershey bar for me and treats for Corey.
The funeral was in Westminster. Since my name was on the rental agreement, the landlord didn’t allow anyone in the apartment. We didn’t have the money to go back and get my stuff, so it remained there.
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