Permission to grieve the weird losses

Or, an elegy for the Honda Civic known as Mr. B

I was twenty-two years old, about to open the package that contained license plates for my brand new Honda Civic. I hadn’t yet named the car, but I wanted to. I sent up a small prayer that the letters or numbers on the California plates might hold some clue as to what the car’s name might be.

I smiled when I saw them. The plate contained three letters: MRB.

“Mr. B,” I said to myself, and it stuck. That was his name. Even after I moved to Washington State nine years later and got new plates with different letters and numbers on them. Of course he was still Mr. B.

Sadly, as of last weekend, Mr. B is no longer with us.

After a long and eventful life, Mr. B was totaled in an accident. The insurance company estimated it would cost around $15k to repair him, which of course is much higher than his estimated value. I was not surprised to see “total loss” show up on the insurance claim page. But I felt sad nonetheless.

RIP, Mr. B.

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Despite his human-like name and the way I’ve always referred to him as a “he” and not an “it,” I am aware, of course, that Mr. B was an inanimate object. He was not part of the family in the way a human would be. He was not even part of the family in the way a pet would be.

And yet—he and I had a special bond.

Not Mr. B, but in the general ballpark / Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Mr. B was there when I first met my husband, Ken, through the young adults’ fellowship group at the evangelical church I was a part of for eleven years. I remember carpooling with Ken in Mr. B to church camping trips before we started dating.

My parents first met Ken—still before we started dating, but things were perhaps trending in that direction—when they dropped me off at Ken’s apartment complex at the end of a family vacation, because I’d lent him Mr. B for the week. (He didn’t have a car during his first year in California.)

My parents’ first impression of Ken was seeing that he had gone to the trouble to wash Mr. B thoroughly before returning him. They approved.

I rarely washed Mr. B. And I wasn’t always careful with him, especially in my twenties. He endured multiple parking tickets, two trips to the tow lot (in my defense, I lived in places with difficult parking situations that often called for a little *creativity*), one speeding ticket, and one oddly placed dent from the time I managed to parallel park on top of a large tree root. But he persevered.

Mr. B served as my faithful partner in college ministry for years, taking students off campus for boba or Chick-fil-A, to church services, to the beach and to woodsy retreats. When the end of the quarter came around, I would let students know that Mr. B loved nothing more than taking people to the airport, and they should tell me when their flights departed so he could give them a ride.

Until the end of his life, Mr. B had a stain in the backseat from the time a student didn’t realize he had sat on an open chocolate bar on a warm summer day. (The student showed much more concern for his pants than for the car. I’m over it, of course.)

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Mr. B moved with Ken and me from the Bay Area to SoCal, and then from SoCal to the Seattle area. He’s road tripped between the Bay Area and Seattle more times than I can count, and a couple times between Seattle and SoCal.

He’s been to Vegas a couple times, although he didn’t love it there. (Okay, fine, maybe that was me.)

He loved National Parks (okay fine, maybe that’s me too), and has ventured as far as Montana (Glacier), Arizona (Grand Canyon), and all over Utah (Bryce, Arches, Zion). And of course, a little closer to the places we’ve called home—Yosemite, Joshua Tree, the Olympic peninsula, Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. Rainier many times.

I’m glad Mr. B got to see Going to the Sun Road / Photo by Brett Meliti on Unsplash

Last year, during the worst of my awful mystery stabbing leg pain, sitting in Mr. B seemed to help. I spent hours in the driveway, working on contract projects, cat jumping in and out of the open windows and sometimes settling down for an extended nap on the floor of the back seat.

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I share all this to say that Mr. B was special. And I share it because I suspect I may not be the only person who gets a little attached to an inanimate object now and then.

As we replace poor Mr. B, I feel a little bit like a kid whose family dog just died. People ask if they’re going to get a new puppy, and the kid says, through messy tears, I don’t want a new puppy, I just want Snickers back!

And that’s okay. I’m here for the sadness of it, or I want to be.

Perhaps sometimes we find ourselves grieving something but also not quite sure if we should be. Maybe we feel that we shouldn’t be so attached to an inanimate thing. But we are attached, and that’s the reality of it, and maybe that’s all right.

In a past evangelical life, I would have wanted to get to a place where I could say, It was just a car. People are what matter. Eternity is what matters. Mere things are not worth being sad over.

Or perhaps, slightly more harshly: Get your priorities straight. It’s really not a big deal. Keep the main thing the main thing! (Have you heard that one in church?)

All this might be true—and yet, Mr. B was not just a thing. He was a thing that held memories, so many memories. He was a thing solidly attached in my mind to people I love, to people I once knew, to work that meant something to me, to who I was five, ten, fifteen years ago, and who I am now.

He was a thing that stuck with me through so many Big Life Changes, through hard times and good ones. A steady constant through fifteen eventful years of young-to-mid adulthood.

And I’ll miss him.

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I wonder—Have you felt a loss like this? Something that may feel small or trivial in the grand scheme of things—and especially in this time we’re living in, in a world full of terrors new and old for so many people who are vulnerable in different ways, and for all of us, really—and yet still something that mattered to you?

Maybe it’s a home you had to move away from, or the glorious locks you cut to look “professional” for a job, or the azalea plant that died during a too-hot summer, or a particular cereal you loved but the store no longer carries. Anything at all that you feel sad about, but you might feel a little weird about feeling so sad about, but you’re sad about it anyway.

Consider this your permission to grieve. (Not that you need my permission—but sometimes it’s helpful to hear these things from someone else.) You have that permission, even in this time. Even in this world full of so many bigger losses.

It’s okay to love something, bond with it, cherish its memories, miss it when it’s gone. And maybe God, rather than chastising us for getting our priorities wrong, meets us in these moments of weird grief.

In this with you.

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If you need more…

It was fun to be able to write a guest post for

Holy Heretics

, a blog (and podcast) I very much appreciate. The post is here, if you’re interested: it’s a letter “To a Young, White, Week-long Missionary.”