The first time I lost my beloved silver pendant, I knew where I had left it—in a patient office at a clinic far from home. I could remember I had unclasped the chain, laid it on a little bench behind the curtains where I had undressed from the waist up and then slid my arms into a blue cloth gown with those ties that never quiet close the gown correctly or all the way.

I had not realized I had left the silver pendant until it was too late, and when I went back, the office had been cleaned and prepped for the next line of patients and then cleaned again overnight. Am I remembering this correctly? I was told to check the Lost & Found. You’re probably imagining a small clinic with a few patient rooms and a little brown box labeled Lost & Found with some credit cards, a bracelet or two, a wallet. Think again. Think bigger. Think clinic with many floors and also many buildings. Think Lost & Found with so many items there are multiple boxes and cabinets and drawers, and these are filled with papers and sweaters and IDs and keys and coats and scarves that someone thought they had, or counted on having, or counted on keeping. None of us likes to lose something that we believe we were meant to keep.

But this is what happened long ago, eight years, maybe nine, with my pendant. I wore that pendant nearly every day, and I had it, and then I didn’t. It was gone, and there was nothing I could do to get it back—except file a claim at the Lost & Found, hoping the pendant and chain would get turned in, that they might return to me one day after all.

I flew home and left that far-away clinic, and time passed, so much time that I lost hope. And the calls came, one by one, with updates on my health and good news and bad news and then good again so that I didn’t know what to expect with each call. When my phone rang once more with the clinic’s area code, I braced myself. But it was good news this time: they’d found my pendant and were sending it home to me.

I can’t tell you how my spirits soared, maybe because I had believed I could not get anything back, that a thing gone once was gone forever.

The years passed. I wore that pendant nearly every day. And as the years flew by, I was losing things, or maybe the better way to say it is they were being taken away, some small, some too big. This is the way of life. Some things come; some things go. I was trying to accept, am still trying to accept, trying to say that serenity prayer, trying to remind myself that there are so many things I cannot control.

And then about a month ago, I was in another town in another place, and I had that pendant in my hands and I was walking from one room to the next and I was deciding I would not wear the pendant that day after all—I had on a high-neck shirt—and that’s all I can remember, not because I fainted but because I let myself get distracted by a call or text or something I thought I needed to do right then and there and that now I realize of course I did not. By the time evening arrived, or maybe by the next morning, I could not find the pendant, and I looked through every room I’d been in, searched the pockets of every article of clothing I’d worn and combed through every nook and cranny of my terribly large purse. No pendant. Had I really lost it a second time? Was I really that careless?

Apparently, I was.

I left that place and those rooms, and there was nowhere else to look. I wanted my pendant back, but it was gone, and there was nothing I could do to get it back. You must learn to let go, I told myself, a thing I have told myself every day for the last year and longer.

But I wanted my pendant back. I wanted more than my pendant back.

Days passed and then weeks. I told myself it was just a necklace, small and silver. Still, I prayed to St. Anthony, but how in the world was St. Anthony going to give me back my necklace, and wasn’t St. Anthony perhaps busier with other, more important things?

Seven days ago, I returned to the place I had been when I’d lost my silver pendant the second time. I looked around all the rooms once again, but there was nothing. I searched pockets, that big purse. Nothing. The next morning, out in the parking lot, as I walked to my car, something shiny glimmered on the ground.

There it was, my beloved silver pendant, nestled in the mud and leaves.

I rushed toward it, scooped it up, determined to never lose it again. I held it firmly in my hands.

Had St. Anthony listened? Or was it just luck? I’ll never know. But I am grateful.

I can’t get everything back, and I want so much more returned to me. But this life is about acceptance, so I will wear my little silver pendant, and I will keep moving forward, trying to learn how to let go of all of it all along the way.