Losing #30

By Lee Ann Stevens

I lost my first body part soon after I turned 70, a milestone that made it hard for me to deny the advancing years. It was number 30, a six-year molar, which means it had been in my mouth since first grade, when I had just learned to read and still wet the bed. Sixty-four years it had been in my mouth, and while it had been filled in my adolescence with the mix of elements that comprised the “silver” fillings of the 1960’s, it had been a reliable workhorse all that time.

Of course my baby teeth had come out in all their bloody glory at various points in my childhood, but those losses were expected and happily anticipated. They were a natural process of growth, and an opportunity for a visit from the tooth fairy. This was the first permanent loss, with no perks attached.

The tooth had to come out, I was told, due to resorption, something I’d never heard of, but that sounded to me too much like what my whole body will eventually do in its return to the earth. The tooth had started to bother me with a low level, consistent ache, like a regretful memory. When I went to my chosen dentist in my new town for a routine cleaning, I knew, in the back of my mind, what was coming.

“Anything bothering you?” the hygienist asked.

“This tooth here,” I said, pointing to it as I explained that my prior dentist told me what was happening with it and had said it would eventually need to come out. 

“Hmmm,” she said, probing and touching it, “yes, it doesn’t look good. The gum is inflamed.”

  She called in the dentist, who could stick his probe into the root, and the oral surgeon, who happened to be there for his biweekly time at the practice. They both examined it, and concurred that extraction and an implant to replace it was the best solution, and they would be able to do it that day. I returned to the waiting area and sat, running my tongue over the tooth I would soon lose, wondering how it would feel to go through the process of losing it. 

It wasn’t my first experience of loss, of course. When I was a child, my mother took my beloved blanket to the dump without asking me. My first marriage, which had been a congenial union, ended when he chose to spend too many evenings in bars instead of at home with me and our children. My second marriage, which lacked the natural compatibility of the first, ended when he committed suicide. Because of loans he’d taken out to save his struggling business, I had to declare bankruptcy and walk away from my house. I’d survived those losses, and grown from them, but this, losing a tooth, reminded me of the ultimate, inevitable loss which lay ahead.

Soon they called me back to a dental chair and the oral surgeon’s assistant fastened the paper bib around my neck and assembled the necessary tools. Because it was December, we chatted about the Christmas music playing in a loop from the speakers in the ceiling. Which songs we could tolerate hearing in every store for over a month and which drove us crazy. We both agreed that the season lacked the magic it did in our childhoods, when the time after Thanksgiving lasted forever and Christmas carols added to the joy we anticipated on Christmas morning.

Eventually the oral surgeon, who looked like he was still in college, came in and cheerfully greeted me again. He picked up a large needle to numb the lower right side of my mouth as he gave me an overview of what he was going to do. While the two of them discussed the pros and cons of attending the office Christmas party, he made sure all the necessary tools were at hand and examined my tooth again. He then selected pliers disguised as a dental implement, grabbed my tooth with it, and prepared to pull it out. 

“You may hear it crack as it comes out,” he said, before pulling so hard I thought my jaw would dislocate. 

It took some drilling, some digging, and more pulling before he was satisfied that all of it was out. As my body trembled from the shock of what he had just done, he used a drill that felt like a jackhammer to make a hole in my jaw, and inserted a metal screw into the hole. 

Around the screw, he then placed cadaver bone to help form a base for the eventual crown. So not only had I lost a body part, I had gained a piece of someone else’s. Someone dead. I thought of the people I knew, many of them close to me in age, who had died. Could I be acquiring a piece of one of two college boyfriends or one of several friends or former colleagues who had left this world?

The oral surgeon examined the toothless area of my mouth again.

“I’m pleased with this,” he said. “It went well.”

As I wondered how I’d be feeling if the job hadn’t gone well, he proceeded to complete a step that (he explained to me) usually took another appointment. 

“We’ll finish in a couple of months,” he continued, “when the gums have healed enough to add the crown.” 

He shook my hand, and moved on to the waiting patient in the next cubicle. I had no idea what to expect, but I felt the assault on my body continue to reverberate through my bones. I turned and said goodbye to the tooth then, lonely and bloody on a towel on the counter. Once released from the chair, and back out into the bright afternoon, I remained shaky as I stopped at the store to pick up my pain medication, as well as soup and applesauce, the only foods I could imagine eating. Later that evening, after I finally stopped spitting out blood, I retreated to the couch in my pajamas to sip herbal tea and watch something mindless on TV.

For the most part, I am at peace with the losses that come with advancing age – youth, beauty, and a body that was once less inclined to injury, wear, and breakage. I am at peace because I am grateful for the children and the grandchildren that came out of my first marriage, and the knowledge that I can survive anything that resulted from my second. While the inevitable loss of my time on earth, in this body, remains an unrecognizable shape and shadow on the distant horizon of my consciousness, I turn away from that hazy image for now. Instead, I use whatever remaining time I have to bask in the light of those I love. I listen to their stories, participate in their lives with whatever wisdom and support I can offer, and tell them my own stories, including the one about that day in December when I lost a tooth.

Lee Ann Stevens writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Publication credits include Bright Flash Literary Review, Straylight Literary Magazine,  Good Old Days Magazine, BoomSpeak, Story Circle Network Journal and publications, the Journal of Expressive Writing, Persephone Literary Magazine, Manifest-Station, and Pure Slush Lifespan Series.