What is lost.

We lose stuff.

A lot of it is small, miniscule. An earring (though i’m still wearing silver hoops i bought on the street in San Francisco some, um, 34 years ago), an address, even the occasional old friend (via Facebook most recently). Once left my cherished Pivetta Ventana hiking boots in a rental car, overhead bin or cab trunk in the early ‘90s. That was tough. And there’s gotta be more than that, but it’s mostly not worth recollecting.

Then there’s the loss that is always recollected, that never leaves. It’s personal.

Here’s my list.

My mom. She died of cancer at 73. That slow death gives the living time to prepare, mentally, for what’s to come. But painful for the one dying. I knew my mom didn’t know me when i showed up in ugly thick-framed black glasses and she didn’t chew me out for it. It wasn’t just that, even at 39, i realized 73 was young to die, but that i still feel i never got close enough to her, asked her the questions i wanted to know the answers to. (But i also know there were questions she just wasn’t going to answer. I didn’t get the open-book persona from her.)

Chris and Catherine. Each of them, there one day, joking around, laughing, then gone the next, in bolts of lightening separated by a few years, a thousand miles and some 14,000 feet in altitude.

The Rocky. Not an individual but a collection of some of the most talented, dedicated and innovative individual journalists i’ve known. Like my mom, you kind of knew the end was near. Unlike her, however, i don’t think the Rocky suffered from a fatal malady. Indeed, corporate suits praised the staff for some of the best journalistic storytelling in the nation. But those guys weren’t in it for good journalism that will keep citizens in a democracy informed about their world. They’re in it for the money. And where the money comes from is the rub that faces journalism today.

The Rocky’s demise isn’t just a tragedy for the journalism community. Rocky Editor John Temple noted in Friday’s talk to the Colorado Press Association that losing 200 workers has an exponential ripple effect. One friend realized she no longer needs a babysitter three days a week. Another will lose the landline. Those are the tiny impacts. Then there are these questions: How will they pay for their children’s college tuition? The mortgage? In this economy, where will they find another job?

The biggest losers, though, are the citizens who will lose a key source of information about their community. What citizen journalist would devote the time and expertise to produce work such as the Pulitzer-Prize winning Final Salute or Beyond the Boom, the 2008 series on Colorado’s oil business or Laura Frank’s Deadly Denial?

I only worked at the Rocky’s presentation desk one or two nights a week since last June. But i had many friends there when i took that part-time job and made many, many more friends.

So this loss is personal, too.