Losing

Losing

Transcript for Losing (full episode)

When this show came into my orbit and I started thinking about losing but redemption through loss, for some reason this song came up in my mind.

You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

I'm Jackson Roach.

In each episode, we pick a common human experience like healing or believing or joking and bring you stories that explore and deepen that experience.

Today we're bringing you stories about losing.

To start things off, I'm talking to composer Owen Ó Súilleabháin about the song he chose for the show.

And it's a really famous Swedish folk song called Vem kan segla för utan vind, Who can sail without wind?

And it's this really haunting Swedish melody and the words go, Vem kan segla för utan vind?

Who can sail without wind?

Who can row without oars and who can live without a good friend?

And then the second verse goes, I can sail without wind, I can row without oars, but if there's one thing I can't do, I can't live without a good friendship.

And I thought that that was a really nice theme for the show, which talked about losing and letting go.

But by communicating these ideas, there's some redemption in sharing these stories and in listening to these stories.

So I can lose the wind, I can lose my oars, but if I lose my connection to the other, that will devastate me.

And then perhaps suffering and loss is actually part of the regeneration process, you know?

Whenever you lose something, there's an emptiness, a hole, where that something used to be.

And you have to figure out a way to keep living your life with that loss.

Even though the emptiness will always be there, what can be gained from trying to fill it?

What can be gained from losing?

This episode has four stories about people who lose something and then look for new things to fill the emptiness.

In our first story, a lifelong dream gets derailed by a butterfly knife.

In our second story, an athlete's passion for her sport crumbles after an injury.

In our third story, a girl searches for something she isn't really sure she wants to find.

And finally, in our fourth story, a woman slowly and mysteriously loses her ability to hear.

In our first story, Gabe Lomeli thinks he has his life path laid out for him.

Here's Maddy Chang.

This is the story of a man who loses his dreams and with them the ability to dream at all.

He climbs out of this dreamless pit by helping youth develop their dreams.

And in the process, he creates new and improved dreams for himself.

When I was 12 years old, I remember my mother sitting me down at the dinner table and she said, hey, come here, I need to talk to you.

I think you're old enough for a conversation that I've been meaning to have with you.

She said, you have to get to college.

We don't know how you're gonna get there.

We don't know what it's gonna take, but you have to figure out how to get there by any means necessary.

She came from Mexico and she told me that she always wanted to go to college.

She loved school, but she never had the support.

Circumstances weren't right.

And my father was in the same boat as well.

But they wanted us to go to college.

So Gabe indeed made his way from Stockton, California to San Jose State University.

He began to construct some dreams of his own.

All he wanted was to become a youth correctional counselor.

And the reason I wanted to be a youth correctional counselor was because I wanted to give hope to the youth who maybe have like, you know, come from places like Stockton, California and maybe have some teachers and some counselors who said some things to them that kind of shaped their identity in a negative manner.

And they just need somebody to tell them like, hey, whatever you want to do, you literally can do it.

Maybe you have a different starting point than everybody else, but hey, you know, just keep grinding and keep hustling.

And I truly believe in making your dreams happen.

Gabe thought once he got this job, everything in his life would fall into place.

And I see the rest of my 20s as, boom, gonna buy a house, gonna go work, gonna get married, gonna have some children, finally gonna be a man, you know?

That's what it's all about.

One night, in Gabe's senior year at San Jose State University, he drives down to Monterey to see his girlfriend and go to her 21st birthday party.

At this party, a fight breaks out.

And then that moves out into the street and everyone's brawling and things are, you know, there's just blood everywhere and teeth are flying and people are breaking knuckles and dudes are being slammed on the street and on cars and people are getting tackled and girls are crying and yelling and screaming and no one knows what's happening and neighbors are popping the heads out and all of a sudden, pew!

You hear these cops come out of nowhere and everybody starts running away like cockroaches when you turn on the light, they're just gone, you know?

Gabe and his girlfriend leave amidst the chaos and head back to his girlfriend's house.

As they're walking down the street, a police car pulls up beside them.

The cop rolls down his window and says, Hey, are you guys looking for someone?

The next thing that I said literally changed the course of my entire life, and I yelled back.

I say, no, are you?

And he says, now I am.

And he opens this door and gets out.

And I'm like, damn.

The cop asks Gabe for his ID.

But when Gabe reaches in his back pocket, he realizes his wallet is gone.

I didn't know this at the time, but if you don't have an ID, you can get automatically frisked for no reason.

They don't need a reason to frisk you.

So he's pat me, he's like, and then he says, do you have any sharp objects or anything that I'm gonna poke myself with?

And my heart drops, because I know that I have a butterfly knife in my back left pocket.

Gabe's fraternity brother had given him a pocket knife a week earlier.

He had been carrying it around because it seemed cool.

It turns out it's illegal in California to carry butterfly knives.

So the cop handcuffs Gabe and takes him to jail.

He spends a week in a holding cell until his parents eventually bail him out.

I get back and I'm a changed person, mostly because I'm ashamed.

I'm ashamed that I'm at a university now and I got out of Stockton, California, I'm trying to make something of myself and I end up in jail.

Not only that, but I let my mom down, I let my dad down, and my little brothers and my little sister.

I'm not being a good role model.

College graduation neared and Gabe began applying for jobs at correctional facilities.

He was finally going to fulfill his dream of becoming a youth correctional counselor.

But he started receiving letters that all said the same thing.

Dear applicant, dear Gabriel, Mr.

Lomeli, thank you so much for your application.

But we regret to inform you that you are automatically disqualified due to your weapons violation on your record.

And when I saw that, I could literally see doors closing in my face.

As the letters came in, just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

And with every rejection letter that came in, I lost a little more hope, a little more hope, a little more hope.

And I had not taken that into account.

I had not taken the fact that I had a weapons violation, a misdemeanor, because of that butterfly, not that I had gone to jail for.

I had not taken into account that that would affect my opportunities later on in life.

Gabe had defied the odds to make it from his high school in Stockton to San Jose State University.

He was finally graduating with a degree in psychology and social science.

He was ready to go to work and become an adult.

And yet, here he was, zero prospects on the horizon.

He was no longer a student.

He was broke, unemployed and sleeping on couches.

His dreams of becoming a correctional officer were over.

To make matters worse, he had just found out that his girlfriend, who he thought he was going to marry, was cheating on him.

The heartbreak was Gabe's last straw.

I thought I had experienced a broken heart.

You know, I had friends die in high school due to, you know, violence in Stockton.

I had been betrayed before.

You know, I was with my grandpa when he died.

I was holding his hand when he passed away, when he left this earth.

So I thought I knew pain.

I thought I knew pain like that.

But when my girlfriend at the time did this to me, it was a pain that I had never experienced before.

So at that point in 2008, that's when I feel like I lost.

I lost everything.

Everything that I had planned for.

I wanted to go to college.

I wanted to get a job and I wanted to get married and I wanted to have kids and a house.

And that was taken away from me.

And I didn't have anything else.

And that was the darkest time in my life.

And it felt like somebody literally just came into my chest and took a chunk out of it.

And I was walking around with emptiness inside of me.

A friend helps Gabe get a job at the Boys and Girls Club of Redwood City.

Put an application.

And would you believe it?

I can't work for the state of California because of my weapons violation.

I can't work for the county because of my weapons violation.

But I can work for the local Boys and Girls Club working with little kids, elementary school kids and high school kids.

And I'm like, whatever.

So I take this job as an after school mentor.

One day, Gabe is in the office and he comes across his boss, Peter, while Peter is editing some video footage on the computer.

He asks Peter, Can you make music videos in there?

And he's like, yep.

And when he told me that, wow.

I could not even think about anything else because I'm like, this man knows how to video edit and has editing software and I have footage of this music video sitting in my house right now.

And when you're broken hearted and you're broke and you've been in a dark place for a long time, when you find something that looks like even a glimmer, a slight ray of sunshine, when you see that, oh, you hang on to that for dear life.

So I said, I'm like, I need to do this.

Gabe had shot a music video with his fraternity brothers back at San Jose State.

He had never gotten around to editing the footage, so he took up the music video as a side project.

He began shooting and editing videos for friends and got involved with the music business in the Bay Area.

He was then able to combine his new video editing skills and his passion for youth education to get a job with the philanthropic arm of Adobe, where he became an Adobe lead educator and the director of the Adobe Youth Voices P-Pod Foundation.

And now my job, my full-time job, was to work with students in the area, from kids who were excelling in academics all the way to kids who just got out of Juvenile Hall.

That whole range, I would show them how to tell their own stories, because a lot of these kids thought they didn't have a story, let alone a story worth telling.

We would teach them how to find their own story and then how to tell it through a media platform, whether it was through video, through photography, through rap or through R&B or through singing or through mixtapes or through dancing or poetry or whatever it was.

And I led that whole crew.

So we had a full-blown professional music studio, and we would teach these kids how to do that.

And that led to amazing opportunities.

From an outsider's perspective, Gabe's life was on the mend, but he was still walking around with a heavy heart.

Losing everything had left a hole.

And though he had made impressive professional progress, he was still empty on the inside.

Looking back, I often tell people, it was like being in an ocean, in an ocean storm at night, you know?

Like, the moment that you stop kicking and moving your arms, that's the moment that you start drowning.

The moment that I stop grinding, the moment I stop hustling, the moment I stop working, I'm gonna die, you know?

So Gabe keeps on moving in the state of constant stimulation.

Through a friend, he hears about the learning, design, and technology program in the Stanford School of Education and decides, on a whim, to apply.

I became fearless, you know?

And I was like, hell yeah, let's do it then.

So I committed one year to doing it, studying GRE, studying, you know, getting my letters of reference, everything, putting hours, did everything I had to do.

And I went ahead and applied.

Gabe is in the studio with his students when he gets the letter back.

I'm sure he knows.

Congratulations.

It's our pleasure to inform you that you got it.

You know, I've never seen a letter like that.

I've never seen a yes, you're in or yes, we want you.

You know, I've seen letters that say, sorry to inform you, you're disqualified, blah, all this, you know, disqualified, this misdemeanor, this weapons violation, you know, try again next time.

Thank you for your application.

I've seen that, but I've never seen an acceptance letter before.

You know, they knew my story.

They knew I had a criminal record.

They knew I was from Stockton, California.

They knew about the broken heart.

They knew all of that, you know.

And now, you know, we're preaching to them, like you can do whatever you want, shoot for the stars, chase your dreams at all costs, make it happen by any means necessary.

Yes, you can go to college.

Yes, you can lead your family.

Yes, you can change the course that was laid before you and stuff like that.

And now they're seeing their director, their mentor, living into the very words that I'm giving to them.

You know, it was so special.

It was a moment of triumph for Gabe.

Not just the acceptance, but also walking the walk of what he had always preached to his students, to dream big and to go after it.

What he didn't realize was that he himself was in need of the lesson.

He had forgotten how to dream after losing what he thought was everything a few years back.

I wanted to be a youth correctional counselor so I could inspire and encourage people and let them know that they can be whatever they want to be.

It doesn't matter where they're from.

Anything that they can dream of or imagine, they can do it.

Now, I wasn't able to do that as a youth correctional counselor, but guess what?

I do that every single day now with my students here at Stanford University and the courses that I teach.

So I'm glad that I went to jail and had criminal record and I took the hard way because now I'm able to come back and relate to those people.

I could even relate to the people who are working through broken hearts.

So that void, that loss that was in my chest, it's not all the way filled back up yet, you know?

There's still some things that we got to put in there, but in a way I feel loss is a good thing because it makes you search for the right things that you're supposed to put in there.

When we get pieces of our chest taken out, maybe it's because that piece shouldn't have been in there in the first place, and we gotta figure out what belongs in there.

Gabriel Lomeli is a lecturer in the design school at Stanford.

That piece was produced by Maddy Chang with help from Will Rogers.

This piece and all the other pieces this hour feature original music by Owen Ó Súilleabháin.

In our second story, producer Justine Beed interviews Amabel Stokes about a series of small losses that led to a really big one.

Runners are experts at winning and losing.

What they win and what they lose is usually clear cut, marked by a finish line.

But losing is often much more complicated than finishing last.

Amabel Stokes, a sophomore at Stanford and a former member of the university's track and field team, knows what it's like to win and lose, on the track and off.

It was in grade nine, and it was the first race of the season, and I knew one of my main rivals was going to be there, and it was a twilight meet, so it was at night.

I could feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins.

About an hour before the race, I warmed up, I was prepared.

I walked myself through how I would run that specific race, my strategy of starting out hard and then lessening the pace slightly on the back straight and then speeding up again around the 300 bend and then giving it everything I got, everything I had in the final stretch.

And so the time came to race.

The official told us to take off our sweats and we got onto the blocks and I could just feel my heart beating in my throat.

All I could think of was how much I wanted to win.

And the official pressed the trigger on the gun and we were racing.

We were head to head for most of the race, but just before the finish line, I managed to pull ahead and I won.

And after the race, I lay down on the ground.

Well, that's a nicer way of putting it.

I collapsed and I looked up at the stars and I just thought to myself, this is what I'm meant to do.

Winning feels great.

Coming out on top, especially after racing and pushing her body to its limits, left Amabel feeling overjoyed.

I feel as if my emotional spectrum has widened because of running.

I've been able to reach highs that I haven't felt through any other means, but I've also reached lows that I haven't felt through any other means as well, because no matter how rewarding track can be, it can also be very disappointing.

But disappointment is also a part of racing, losing hurts.

At the end of my grade 10 year, I was at nationals, and I managed to make it to the finals of the 400.

I was extremely nervous.

It was the biggest race of the season, the highest level race that I ever had the chance of running in.

And so I really wanted to prove myself on the national level, to break out onto the national stage of athletics.

And I knew that I had the chance of really going somewhere in track if I did well in this race.

But what happened was what happens to a lot of athletes in their sports.

In the middle of the race, I felt a pull in my hamstring, and it suddenly felt as if I was running through water.

I managed to finish the race, but with incredible pain and disappointment.

I was disappointed because I lost and I didn't perform to the level that I expected I would perform.

I had to stop running for the rest of that season and just do rehab workouts to make sure that my hamstring would recover and I could start racing again for the next season.

In spite of her big loss and injury, Amabel was recruited for the Stanford track and field team for the 100 meter.

She still loved the sport and the opportunity to go to a great school, especially on a sports scholarship, was too good to pass up.

By the time I came to Stanford and after doing a year of varsity training and I started to think of all the things that I could be doing with my time because I'm also passionate about the arts, I love acting, I love creative writing, I love public speaking, I love doing so many other things and because I was running I didn't have the time to do anything else.

Running didn't feel good anymore.

When I fully realized that I didn't want to pursue track anymore was just before the big meet and before my race.

I was warming up and it was pouring with rain.

I just felt that I didn't really want to be there.

That all the nerves that I felt before a race, all the mental strains and pressures that I felt because of running weren't necessary in my life anymore.

Her heart wasn't in it and she lost the race.

Just like every other time Amabel lost a race, it was hard.

But leaving track altogether was a deeper kind of loss.

I feel that I've lost some structure in my life because with track and field my world revolved around sport and it was just a cycle of work, eat, run, sleep and then the same thing would happen every day of the week.

It was a structure and routine that I didn't particularly enjoy.

While Amabel is happy with her decision to quit track, the transition to a life without track was a jarring one.

I didn't want to do, I didn't want to run anymore.

I felt as if I had put my body through enough pain and I had learned all the lessons that I could have possibly learned from track and field.

Leaving track, letting go of competitive running, didn't feel like a total loss to Amabel.

In the end, she felt she won more than she lost.

So rather than losing it, I feel as if I've just released it, and released track and field, let it go peacefully and happily, and moved on to new exciting things that I really love doing.

That piece was produced by Justine Beed and featured the voice of Amabel Stokes.

You're listening to State of the Human, the radio show of the Stanford Storytelling Project.

This episode is on losing and what people do to move forward after a loss.

So far, we've heard stories about losing invisible things.

Gabe lost his dreams, Amabel lost her passion for running.

In our third story, we'll hear about losing something a lot closer to the bone.

Quick warning, this story contains pretty graphic descriptions of blood and body parts, so if you're squeamish or not in the mood, you might want to skip forward about 15 minutes.

This story is by Maddy Berkson.

It was a beautiful day in Suspail, a small and rural town in the south of France near the Italian border.

Suspail was my family's final destination after a week of hiking in the Swiss Alps, and we were staying with some family friends.

The family friends had a lovely stone house with blue trim and a matching guest house.

The house was set in a valley that was lined with olive trees.

At the edge of the gently sloping property there was a bubbling river studded with boulders and pebbles.

Freezing clear water run off from the surrounding mountains meandered around the edge of the property.

We went swimming there every day pretty much, and we would walk down like a quarter mile and there was a big crumbling foundation of an old mill or something and we would jump off of that into the river.

That's one of my younger sisters, Julia.

Every day both my sisters played with the other kids of the other families who were visiting Suspbell.

Between all the families there were ten kids, most of whom were somewhat cherub-like in appearance.

One family was from England, and all the English kids were pale, small, and sprinkled with freckles and red shocks of hair.

Most of the rest were adorned with dainty blonde locks.

One day we were having an elegant European brunch on the patio.

Here's my mom and dad.

Well, you could hear the sound of forks and knives on plates and grass being mowed.

Gilbert, I think, was mowing the lawn, so it probably smelled like grass.

Gilbert, a quiet groundkeeper, lovingly maintained the property.

Gilbert had a muscular, powerful stature.

His hands were thick and meaty and were cloaked in rough skin that had been darkened by days of working under the sun.

His palms were calloused and his fingers resembled sausages.

That morning he was mowing the lawn on a small lawn mower.

He bobbed in and out of sight as he crested the rolling hills of the property.

The grandfather always sat at the head of the table and he was busy slicing into a juicy tomato picked from the garden.

As the meal was coming to a close, cheeses were rewrapped and bloodied corks returned to wine bottles.

Playful chatter floated up to the house from the kids playing in the pool.

As we were sitting and clearing the table, a dark figure came plodding across the freshly cut lawn towards the house.

It was Gilbert with his back and shoulders hunched over, his hands pressed against his stomach.

I saw him walking up between the two houses towards my sister and I saw kind of the interaction between the two of them and the way he was holding his arm that something was really wrong.

A glass of wine fell and broke, and the adults on the patio came running down the steps towards the hunched figure.

Marlise came running over, screaming, emergency, emergency.

When someone screams emergency, emergency, and the person behind them is holding his stomach, and he used to be riding a lawnmower, your mind jumps to, is he holding his guts in or something?

Nobody knew exactly what had happened to Gilbert.

Daniela and her sister rushed Gilbert into a car.

The car door is slammed shut, then it spewed dirt and pebbled down the driveway and out onto the road.

Daniela, her sister, and Gilbert sped down the winding road toward the closest fire department in town.

You know how fast Daniela is as a driver.

Daniela and her sister sat in the front seat, while Gilbert sat in the back, clutching his arm.

Soon, they arrived at the fire department in town.

But to their surprise...

There was absolutely nobody in the whole building.

All the doors were wide open, the windows were all wide open.

There was not a person in sight.

It was at this inopportune time that the nature of Gilbert's injury was finally revealed.

We actually took a look for the first time at Gilbert's arm and hand, and that's when we realized that not only did he get cut badly, but that his finger was missing.

Gilbert's pinky had been sliced off by the lawnmower.

The pinky was nowhere to be found.

Frantic, Daniela and her sister decided to drive further down the road towards a hospital in Nice, unfortunately many miles away.

After a few minutes of increasingly wild driving, they flew past a group of firemen in town.

The term for firemen in France is pompiers.

The pompiers were eating and chatting with shop owners in the town square.

The women pulled over, leapt out of the car and screamed their story in French, pointing to a bloody Gilbert in the back seat.

The pompiers whipped into action.

A large man in an apron stepped up onto the table and began bellowing commands and pointing.

The fire chief called to one of his guys to go get the box out of the ambulance for body parts.

I guess they have a special box to collect body parts.

Gilbert was shepherded into an ambulance.

Two of the pompiers hopped into a truck and Daniela and her sister hopped back into their car.

All three vehicles sped back towards the house.

To retrieve Gilbert's missing pinky.

Back at the estate, its inhabitants had resumed their prior tranquility.

The only remaining evidence of the accident was a thin trail of blood, which threaded from the driveway down the stone steps beneath the patio, across the lawn, and around the mower.

People were just pretty much getting back to their regular activities, either finishing brunch or sitting around the table, talking.

I probably got some food, maybe a fresh baguette.

The tranquility was again interrupted by a small ambulance that came squealing down the driveway.

It screeched to a halt, then two uniformed paramedics jumped out of the van.

The paramedic pompier were both very fit and tan and sported tight jumpsuits, making them look a little like porn stars.

Carrying the special ice box and some bags, they ran down the driveway, down the grassy lawn, and towards the mower.

We were all enlisted to help find Gilbert's missing digits.

Not everyone was so enthusiastic to help find Gilbert's pinky.

I mean, we were concerned.

We just didn't want to have to encounter a dismembered finger.

And I was really shocked.

I kind of like went back to the kitchen.

I didn't want to go outside, but I looked out the window.

I was looking at the field as if I could find the finger from a glance.

Some of the younger kids emerged from the water to investigate the commotion from afar.

They watched the paramedics flip the mower on its side and scour its blades and the surrounding cut grass.

The paramedics then fell to their knees to search the lawn.

When they noticed the small pale figures wearing bathing suits, they called in French and waved them over.

Soon, most of the kids were on all fours, foraging around the flipped mower with the paramedics.

We all got rakes and hose from the shed and formed phalanxes so as to cover ground more efficiently.

Everybody who was staying at the house was on that hillside looking through the grass, picking up every little leaf and every blade of grass to try to look for the finger.

I think I might have been barefoot.

Age ranging from like 6 to 80.

Very, very small, but even though she's about 10, and with blue eyes and she was wearing some kind of like nightgown or something.

The youngest was my niece who was 6, I think, at the time, was there looking through the grass.

And then all the way up to my father was also pretty squeamish.

He was also looking.

So there were all these little children, very beautiful, blonde, and redheaded children, and they were in sort of lined up across the field.

And they were moving slowly across the field with their heads down, looking for the finger.

If you're far away, it just looks like a beautiful scene.

But if you're close up, you know what they're looking for.

And it was a little grisly.

It's a little bit surreal to be looking for a finger on a beautiful, sunny day in France in the nicely cut lawn.

It was a weird feeling to prowl the grass for Gilbert's severed pinky.

Since the chances of reattaching a renegade digit to its owner decreased rapidly with time, we were frantically scouring the lawn.

With each second that ticked by, the future of Gilbert's pinky became more and more bleak.

At the same time, our urgency was checked by a secret but shared trepidation of actually finding the decapitated pinky.

Would it still be bleeding?

Would it be discolored?

Would it be swollen and gross?

Would it be moving, searching for its owner, iron giant style?

We kept recoiling in horror whenever we spotted dead organic detritus that was perched on the grass, which we always thought was the pinky at first.

Since we couldn't find it, we started imagining and talking through various grisly scenarios.

Some people even took a stab at comic relief.

Somebody was cutting bread and then somebody was like, don't cut your finger off.

After what seemed like a very long time, there was finally a breakthrough.

Someone suggested that we turn the mower over again, because possibly the finger had somehow gotten stuck under the mower or in the works.

You know when you mow wet grass, there's clumps of grass that come out the back end of the mower.

So he was sort of individually looking through some of these wet clumps that adhered to the mower.

And he suddenly shouted out that he found the finger.

And everyone gathered around, all the children gathered around him.

And he put the finger in some kind of gauze.

Then he put the finger in a plastic bag that he had.

And he put the plastic bag in the cooler.

I stole a quick peek at the elusive pinky as it was being packed up.

The pinky was coated in a fine layer of freshly cut grass.

And I spotted some stringy stuff hanging out of the end.

The others were not so keen to see it.

I didn't want to see it.

I was frightened.

And I didn't want to see it.

I don't think I would have been able to look.

The pompier ran the box back up to the ambulance in the driveway and it squealed away.

We put the rakes and hose back right at the mower.

The adults went back to the patio and we kids returned to the river.

I thought great mission accomplished.

Gilbert and his pinky were rushed to a big hospital in Nice.

Fertuitously, a nationally renowned hand surgeon was on call when they arrived.

After some discussion with Gilbert, the surgeon decided to ditch the detached pinky altogether.

We had taken too long to recover it in the lawn.

Instead, the surgeon began focusing his efforts on mending Gilbert's neighboring finger, the ring finger, since that too had sustained considerable damage.

Gilbert was in surgery for a long time as the surgeon tried to fix his dangling ring finger.

Back at the house, the kids and adults reflected on the day's events.

I felt terrible, I felt kind of guilty that we were having such a beautiful time, that we were eating lovely food, and I felt guilty with just returning to that.

How awful it must be to be a working man and to lose your finger mowing the lawn of someone's summer house.

It just seems so trivial.

Why do people have lawns?

Why do they have to be mowed all the time?

Looking back on this day makes me think about what loss really means to the person who has lost and to those around him.

None of us could fill the hole that Gilbert's loss created.

Some of us approached its edge and tried, but it was hard and weird.

Others didn't even get near the hole.

And still others saw Gilbert's loss, not as a hole at all, but as a mountain.

The missing pinky was something that erupted in the midst of a beautiful day, and it formed an obstacle that we were forced to traverse.

In any case, the idea of Gilbert's missing pinky was hard to grapple with because his loss was not ours.

While Gilbert lost the piece of his body, all we lost was the day's tranquility.

The difference is what made that afternoon in Suspbell so surreal.

That piece was produced by Maddy Berkson with help from Nina Foushee.

When you lose something important, you will never be able to completely replace it.

In some ways, you'll never even be the same person as you were before.

Your old life is over, but learning to live your new life, realizing that it still is your life, it's through that painful process that you grow.

It's very clear that loss is everywhere, and each of us struggles to figure out what to do with it.

Now, what have you lost your best friend, not to death or illness, but over an argument?

It was that abrupt and that harsh.

That was the end of a very intimate, deep, long-standing close friendship.

This is Dr.

Fred Luskin, director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and author of the bestseller, Forgive for Good.

Luskin has helped communities all over the world with conflict and loss, from Northern Ireland to South Africa.

It was so dramatic, like I'm still trying to reach towards him, and he's telling me the reasons why he's running away at a hundred miles an hour.

Reasons that Luskin couldn't understand.

It was hard at first, really hard.

My world was destabilized.

I just became bitter.

There was just this person who, for whatever reason, had pulled away from me.

I got hysterical at it.

I created a monster.

I was filled with righteousness and anger and bitterness and all this stuff, and I stayed that way for years.

Luskin's no stranger to loss.

A decade ago, his 20-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident, and four years ago, he lost his wife to cancer.

But the experience that taught him the most about loss was much earlier, on a day that his best friend suddenly stopped speaking with him.

I mean, I lost faith.

It was a crisis of faith.

But this isn't a story about what happened to Luskin.

It's a story about what he did next, about how he started on the path toward forgiveness, and about what he would eventually gain from losing.

My wife looked at me and said, Fred, you got to stop.

You're letting this ruin your life, and it's ridiculous.

You're too bitter.

We have a whole life ahead of ourselves.

What are you doing?

This is the kindest woman I know.

And if she's fed up, then any normal person would have been fed up with me months ago.

Thank God I had somebody around who could shout loudly enough in my ear, Fred, you're on the wrong course.

It was about confronting not the past, but what he was becoming in the present.

And not only did he change his course, he made a decision to let go of the past that I had created of bitterness.

The only person dragging around garbage was me.

Luskin came to the decision to jettison that garbage.

And once he did that, he not only understood himself a little better, but others as well.

And it led me to understand deeply the upheaval, woundedness, the fear, the agitation that occurs when people are hurt, when they're abandoned, when they're lied to, when their wife or husband cheats on them, somebody steals from them, when their boss fires them with no merit.

This is how bad we get.

This is how ugly we get.

This is what happens to us when life makes no sense.

I reported that to myself and then to other people.

The majority of people who retain their bitterness and go to their grave hating people who have harmed them.

This is a wonderful antidote to that.

An antidote for a teacher is, well, to teach.

Leskin is a lecturer.

It's in his nature to learn and then teach what he's learned.

I've taught hundreds of thousands of people the things that I learned from going through this.

You can teach people to be kinder, more generous, more patient, more loving, more grateful, more compassionate.

I believe that we are hardwired to have very loving, pro-social experiences even in the midst of people who have been cruel to us.

If people are loved, they learn to be kinder.

And in case you're wondering about what happened to that friend that helped Luskin to forge this whole new path in life, well, he applied what he learned and what he teaches on himself, on forgiveness.

Well, we're the best of friends again.

I'm meeting him.

That's where I'm going now, to have dinner with him after this is over.

That was Dr.

Fred Luskin of the Stanford Forgiveness Project.

Our last story for this episode is about Jody Louise, a mom and a teacher who spent 10 years of her life losing something.

This is Jody.

Oh, mostly I've been sniffing.

Plants are so happy.

It smells so good to have all the rain.

And she was in her mid-20s when she first noticed something was wrong.

I remember it very specifically.

My husband and I were in the car probably close to 1995 and we were lost.

So rolled down the window and asked someone where to go.

And he was standing right by my window and I couldn't hear or understand anything he said.

And I remember asking him, what did he say?

Could you hear him?

And he said, well, yeah, Jodi.

And I remember being very, very worried.

And so I started going to doctors and the long process of trying to figure out why I was losing my hearing.

I tried all the tests and we have no idea why my hearing degenerated.

I just had some sort of strange, undefined neurological loss of my hearing.

What does it sound like?

Thank you It sounds like it's a void, it's a gap.

It's a conversation and it's noise without any words.

Jodi's hearing loss was gradual, but over the next few years, it became harder and harder to tell sounds apart.

And eventually, she started to lose them altogether.

I lost sounds one after another, one bit of music, one sound, a decade of losing things.

You know, I lost my children's laughter, and I lost visiting with friends.

You know, as I began to lose my hearing, I measured it based on how big the group was that I was getting together with.

So I used to be able to do book group with 12 people, and then 10 people, and then eight people.

I would go to book group, and I would just want to know what people are talking about.

I just want to know what even the topic was about.

Imagine going to dinner with your best friends, and there's about eight of you, and you sit down, and there's a glass wall between you and all of your friends, and you can see them talking, and you can watch them have all their interaction, but you have no idea of what's going on.

That's it at the very worst for me, and I get that every day.

During that time, Jodi and her husband, Gielin, had three kids, Sage, Tristan, and Andre.

You know, my daughter, Sage, when she was born, I could hear her cry, I could hear her laugh, and I could hear the difference between the two.

By the time my third son was born five years later, I couldn't tell if he was laughing or crying.

When my son was in fifth grade, he made this very funny comic strip about how often I burnt rice.

But I did, I burnt food all the time because I couldn't hear any of the beepers.

I'd walk in front of traffic, my kids would pull me out of the street.

I think all my kids are pretty good about keeping me from getting run over at this point.

Sound by sound, the whole world was becoming silent.

The sound of water on the creek, birds.

Used to be these birds, every spring I would hear them and they would make me happy.

And pretty soon I said, are the meadowlarks still there?

And he was like, oh yeah, they're still there.

But I couldn't hear the meadowlarks anymore.

I couldn't hear the owls at night.

I couldn't hear the coyotes.

It was just one thing after another.

At the same time, I kept going and doing more and more tasks.

Every time I went to the audiologist, you know, you go into these soundproof rooms and they give you beeps and you press the little thing, a little button when you can hear the sound.

And every time I went to the audiologist, I was waiting longer and longer and longer times before I could hear the sounds, and it was really heart wrenching.

After 10 years of gradual decline, Jodi had lost almost all of her hearing.

I had 14% word recognition in this ear and 5%, and that's in a perfect condition, you know?

14 out of 100 words.

It's, think about a conversation where you get 14 out of 100 words.

There's a lot of missing things.

Jodi started to consider getting a cochlear implant, a device that can help some deaf people hear by electronically stimulating the cochlea, the inner ear.

Well, for years I wasn't a candidate because I didn't know why I had my loss.

And then because of interesting turn of events, I had an opportunity, I had a doctor who said he felt that a cochlear implant would help me.

The decision to get a cochlear implant is tricky because the surgery permanently damages whatever's left of the auditory nerve.

So if Jodi decided to go for it, she'd be destroying all that was left of her natural hearing.

And we were trying to figure out, well, what would I get from this?

They weren't expecting much.

He said, well, we really don't know, but we hope you'll be able to hear fire alarms and fire trucks now.

That's how bad my hearing was.

When fire alarms went off at the schools, my kids had to tell me, Ms.

Louise, it's a fire alarm.

Eventually, considering how little of her natural hearing was left, Jodi decided to go for the surgery.

And then I waited until I had no word recognition at all before I did that because I wanted some natural sound, even if it was a little bit.

And so my only music I was listening to was drums.

Those drums would be the last music she'd ever hear with her ears.

So then you go in and they do the slit behind your ear and they pull that skin back and they drill a hole about the size of a quarter, an indentation in your skull to fit the receiver and drill a tunnel from that back to your ear for the wires and then a couple holes through the inner ear so those wires can be jammed up against your auditory nerves.

And that's all the implant part.

That's the inside.

Patch it all up.

And then after a week you get to put on the external part which is attached by this magnet here and dangles.

After recovering from the surgery, Jodi sat in her audiologist's office in total silence, waiting to see what would happen.

Then they switched it on.

It was my voice sounding unrecognizable.

I couldn't even recognize it, just sound.

Total cacophonous noise.

It wasn't anything I could recognize at all.

I got this cochlear implant, a surgery, which is pretty major, and then they put it on, and my voice sounded like Russian in a tin can.

It was horrible.

I cried, and I cried, and I cried.

I was so disillusioned.

None of the sounds are the right sounds.

It's digital.

It's code.

That my brain tries to wrap around a memory of a sound and make it more smooth and less mechanical.

What it really sounds like is if I'm in one of those great big metal tunnels, you know, that they put under the road and it's really echoey and I'm speaking with a bunch of chuckmunks.

Sorry, you sound like a chuckmunk.

The implant fell short in a lot of ways.

They're really uncomfortable.

And they hurt and they fall off when I bike and when I swim.

I can't hear anything except to take them off.

You know how weird it is to be in a lake and not hear a sound.

They like to advertise that you can listen to music and that's possibly true if you've never really heard music before and you don't know what it's supposed to sound like.

But I remember what music is supposed to sound like and it's not supposed to be discordant and scratchy and screechy.

It's supposed to be beautiful.

Decorate the Christmas tree, put on the Christmas music, and I have to ask each time, what song is being played?

And it doesn't sound Christmassy at all, but we put it on and I just started tuned out.

How long have you had your cochlear implants now?

I've had my right for eight years, and I've had my left for four.

And they're incredible, and I'm incredibly grateful for this opportunity to hear what I do.

But I'm still deaf.

I mean, like here, you wouldn't believe, right?

I don't seem deaf to you, I'm doing just fine.

But if a car goes by and we're talking, I miss everything that is said during that time.

Up to this point in the interview, I hadn't even been paying attention to all the passing cars and skateboards and airplanes, as hearing people were programmed to tune them out.

But with her cochlear implants, Jodi can't do that.

There's still so many situations where I can't hear.

I try to avoid situations where there's refrigerators and running water, situations where there's lots of background noise.

I avoid phone calls, I use text whenever possible.

I avoid large groups.

Large groups being groups of four.

There are five people in Jodi's family, which officially makes them a large group.

Dinner is awful because everybody's eating and everybody's clanking and there's plates and there's knives and silverware and talking at the same time and people put food in their mouth and they talk and then you can't read their lips and the conversation goes really fast.

But the silverware, oh my gosh, it's awful because what happens is my right processor mutes when there's loud high-pitched sounds and it would get so cranky.

You guys, quit being so loud.

Quit scraping.

And then one year for Valentine's Day, my husband got bamboo silverware and it's the best because it's really quiet and it's not that high-pitched.

So my processor doesn't mute because of all the clinking of silverware and it's so good.

Jodi's family is still learning to adapt.

Because it's a lot of work to live with me.

You need to make the effort to get into the same room with me and look at me, say my name before you talk.

And so that requires effort, something we have to work on a lot.

When Sage left, it was very hard because at the dinner table she was often the one who would help me out, let me know what was going on, tell her brothers to slow down and be quiet so I could hear her.

So when she left, there were some hard times, hard conversations, me breaking down at the table until the boys realized, OK, wait.

We need to work harder at that.

Now it's my eldest son who reminds people, who helps me.

And your husband?

He took a while.

He really wanted my cochlear implants to fix everything.

But he's a very supportive person.

And you know, honestly, if he hadn't pushed me so hard, I probably would have not worked as hard as I have.

I had to relearn all my sounds, I had to relearn my own voice.

I had to relearn everything.

It was incredibly hard work.

Learning to hear with a cochlear implant takes a lot of practice, but Jody's taking it step by step, sound by sound.

My hearing continues to improve because I continue to work and put myself in challenging situations.

So I continue to learn new sounds.

I can hear the beeper in my car, and so I don't leave my lights on as much.

And I can hear the beeper on the stove so I don't burn my food as much.

And here's the thing that's really great.

You probably don't pay attention to this, but you never overfill your water bottles or your cups because you can hear the pitch changes.

I used to spill water all the time.

I'd overflow everything.

I don't do that anymore because I can't hear the water filler.

And I can follow conversations now one on one.

I can teach much better.

And so then it's a process of rediscovering sounds.

When you imagine the future, what do you think about?

I really hope to be able to hear my family at the table.

That's my, always my goal, is that I can not hear 10% of the conversation, but 80%.

And that's what I keep working for.

I'm deaf.

I have two cochlear implants, but I'm still deaf.

And I'm a deaf person in a hearing world.

And this is something I have to struggle with day in and day out.

Not one day goes by where this isn't a really difficult thing at some point for me.

But it's better all the time.

The quality of the sound continues to improve over time.

Are there any sounds that sound anything like they did before you lost your hearing?

Well, if I work really hard, then I think some voices are approaching that.

If I let my imagination go, I think some voices, I've gotten some bird sounds.

And just the other day, I realized I could hear the ducks on the pond when they flapped their wings and the water was splashing on the wings.

And it was really exciting to be able to hear that.

I think there's more and more all the time.

It's those little things like the birds' wings flapping on the water.

It's turning because I hear a child laughing over there and I can find that child's laughter.

Seems like when it's so easy to hear something, we don't even pay attention to it.

We just take it for granted.

That's how it always is, isn't it?

I do the same thing.

I take walking from place to place for granted.

I take my breathing for granted, but it's not something that we really should take for granted.

When you lose something, you gain an understanding somewhere else.

It's millions of miracles that make this conversation possible, this breath possible, and that's something to focus on.

And it will be okay.

It's going to be okay.

Thank you so much for talking to me.

Oh, thank you.

And you know, you don't have to use any of this.

You know, I have never done anything like this.

That story was produced by me, Jackson Roach, with help from Maya Lorey.

This episode of State of the Human was produced by me, Nina Foushee, Jon Kleiman, Will Rogers, Christy Hartman, Claire Schoen, Jake Warga and Jonah Willihnganz.

Special thanks to Gabe Lomeli, Amabel Stokes, Olivia Berkson, Julia Berkson, Mitch Berkson, Claire Richards, Daniela Roop, Gilbert Genere, Fred Luskin and Jody Louise.

Thanks also to Maddy Chang, Justine Beed, Maddy Berkson, Emma Heath, Maya Lorey and all the members of the Stanford Storytelling Project who helped workshop these stories.

Natasha Ruck, Kate Nelson, Eileen Williams, Rosie La Puma, Tamu Adomair, Louis Laferre, Emmerich Anklum and Dustin Deanhart.

All the music you heard during this hour was originally composed and recorded by Owen Ó Súilleabháin.

Based around the musical backbone of the Swedish folk song Vem Kansikla.

You can hear more of Owen's music at www.owenandmoley.com.

That's M-O-L-E-Y.

We'll also put a link on our website.

For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Stanford Continuing Education, the Program in Oral Communication and Bruce Braden.