Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

by Kathryn Schulz

This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses, without distinction, the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy. My father died peacefully, at seventy-four, tended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy; what shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration. History, which I had always loved even in its silences and mysteries, suddenly seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale, especially where

could offer no record at all. The world itself seemed ephemeral, glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable; the idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.

Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has the power to instantly resize us against our surroundings; we are never smaller and the world never larger than when something important goes missing.

It is this harsh corrective to our sense of being central, competent, and powerful that makes even trivial losses so difficult to accept. To lose something is a profoundly humbling act. It forces us to confront the limits of our mind: the fact that we left our wallet at the restaurant; the fact that we can’t remember where we left our wallet at all. It forces us to confront the limits of our will: the fact that we are powerless to protect the things we love from time and change and chance. Above all, it forces us to confront the limits of existence: the fact that, sooner or later, it is in the nature of almost everything to vanish or perish. Over and over, loss calls on us to reckon with this universal impermanence—with the baffling, maddening, heartbreaking fact that something that was just here can be, all of a sudden, just gone.

Still, given the overall effects of trauma, it is peculiar, and borderline cruel, to imagine that it ultimately operates on us for the better.

Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom during that difficult fall could I distinguish my distress over these other losses from my sadness about my father. I had maintained my composure during his memorial service, even while delivering the eulogy. But when the son of the deceased stood up to speak at the second funeral, I wept. Afterward, I couldn’t shake the sense that another shoe was about to drop—that I would learn at any moment that someone else close to me had died. The morning after the election, I cried again, missing my refugee father, missing the future I had thought would unfold. In its place, other kinds of losses suddenly seemed imminent as well: of civil rights, personal safety, financial security, the foundational American values of respect for dissent and difference, the institutions and protections of democracy. For weeks, I slogged on like this, through waves of both actual and imagined grief. I couldn’t stop picturing catastrophes, both political and personal. I felt a rising fear whenever my mother didn’t answer her phone, hated to see my sister board an airplane, could barely let my partner get in a car. “So many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote, and as much or more than my specific unhappiness, it was just that—the sheer quantity and inevitability of further suffering—that undid me.

Disoriented, anxious, injured, ill: given all this, it is hardly surprising that, for some time after my father died, I was also spectacularly useless. I had lost, along with everything else, all motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, that was because action felt like acceleration, and I dreaded getting further from the time when my father was still alive.

To make matters worse, this boredom offered no protection from the capriciousness of grief. We think of “boring” as synonymous with “predictable,” but I found the process of grieving to be simultaneously volatile and tedious. In this, it resembled the experience of being in the hospital while my father was dying; the emotions were enormous and erratic, the days cramped and repetitive. Like stress, depression, and physical pain, grief wears us down by the mere fact of always being there.

There is no honor in feeling awful and no betrayal in feeling better, and no matter how dark and salted and bitter cold your grief may be, it will never preserve anything about the person you mourn. Despite how it sometimes feels, it has never kept anyone alive, not even in memory. If anything, it keeps them dead: eventually, if you cannot stop mourning, the person you love will come to be made only of grief.

You learn something about grief from grieving, but it is a lonely, threadbare knowledge, hard to describe, bespoke in almost every detail. I was vexed to discover, after my father died, how useless I was when called upon to console someone else in the face of death, how almost impossible it was to say anything at all that, in accuracy or helpfulness, could best the average platitude. Even when I was talking with my sister, whose sorrow pains me more than my own and who is the only other person on the planet to grieve my father as a father—even then, I don’t think I ever once said anything remotely comforting or useful. What comes to mind now is being on the phone with her one afternoon some months after his death and, into the silence following a sad acknowledgment of how much we both missed him, saying only “Ugh.”

To be bereft is to live with the constant presence of absence.

Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s

Most of what follows is an account of that experience. But just as every grief narrative is a reckoning with loss, every love story is a chronicle of finding, the private history of an extraordinary discovery.

And sometimes it just looks like growing up, since much of life’s meaning comes from things that, as we get older, we must track down on our own: friends, happiness, purpose, our vocation, our soulmate, ourselves.

But in the meantime, it is worth saying a thing or two about how he found it, and about that problem more generally—about how, given the immensity of the earth and our own comparative tininess, any of us ever find anything.

It doesn’t matter, in moments like that, whether you believe that God has blessed you, that fate has smiled on you, or simply that, in a stochastic world, very unlikely odds have broken in your favor. What matters is that you will feel the presence of some force outside yourself—one that, whether or not it is intrinsically benevolent, occasionally and indisputably produces benevolent ends.

Of all the things that can make finding something difficult—false positives, false negatives, moving targets, incorrect search areas, lack of resources, the vagaries of chance, the general immensity of the world—one of the thorniest is this: sometimes, we don’t really know what we’re looking for. Maybe you are trying to find the perfect wedding gift for that notorious Friend Who Has Everything. Maybe you are trying to find someone to date in order to someday have a wedding of your own. Maybe you are trying to find a drug that will impede the development of plaque in the brain. In all of these cases, you are looking for something that is wholly new to you and, in some instances, wholly new to the world. How, then, are you supposed to find it?

For another, it means that there is no reason to organize one’s life around the pursuit of love and, therefore, no reason not to organize it around work or friends or travel or volunteering or whatever else you choose to do with your time—an expansive, autonomous, fulfilling vision of life for which I am grateful, not least because it has historically been denied to women.

How those companies themselves generate matches is its own mystery, since the algorithms they use are proprietary. One way or another, though, they codify what is obvious about looking for love: to turn up a potential mate, we must somehow narrow the search area, impose upon the giant pool of possibilities some restrictions with respect to geography or physiology or taste in TV shows or preferences about household pets. One difficulty with doing so, as almost anyone who has ever tried online dating can tell you, is that no matter how numerous and specific such constraints may be, they will still screen in plenty of terrible matches. But the more serious problem is the opposite one: those same constraints, the ones that we ourselves select, may screen out someone perfect—because, in matters of love, we have no real idea of what we are looking for. Or, rather, we have a great many ideas, any of which may be wrong.

But my religiosity, such as it is, ends there. Questions about goodness and justice, suffering and evil, the origins and ends of the universe, the nature of the self, how to treat one another, how best to live our brief lives while we have them: all these are of passionate interest to me, but I have never found satisfaction or solace in any faith-based answers to them. By constitution, education, or both, I am profoundly skeptical of religious authority, and although I am deeply interested in the many fathomless mysteries of the universe, I do not believe that an omnipotent creator numbers among them.

Every couple fights, of course. Even if you are lucky enough to find a partner who is as committed to your well-being as you are to hers, no one person maintains perfect equilibrium all the time, and no two people glide smoothly along through a life consisting exclusively of tenderness, lust, and contentment. To begin with, you must contend with whatever issues, external as well as internal, you and your partner brought into your relationship when you met. These are all but unlimited in number and variety, although they often take broadly recognizable forms: health problems, financial worries, unhelpful habits formed in earlier relationships, the inward toll of how a culture treats its different individuals, and the aftermath of past emotional trauma. In some cases, that trauma can render the very idea of love suspect. For those who have experienced love chiefly as withdrawal or cruelty, who have had it wielded against them by parents or partners or others and were made to suffer in its name, it can be difficult to believe in a version that is tender and generous, let alone find it and sustain it. A regrettable truth about our species is that our capacity to love is matched only by our ability to harm and hinder that capacity, and one measure of how fortunate you are with respect to fate, family, and society is how much you have been left free to find happiness with another person.

It was good to laugh so much, and unexpected. Helping your aging parents move out of their longtime home is an exercise in watching the literal merge at every moment with the symbolic: the necessity of parting with so much all at once, the doors that close permanently behind them, the diminishing of the space they occupy in the world. I had thought, beforehand, that I would feel, in the midst of all this, a terrible two-way sadness, a sense of loss about the future as well as the past. But what I actually felt, along with the pleasure of being with my family, was tremendously lucky. I had learned, during my father’s long decline, to be just as grateful for what didn’t happen as for what did, and so I was relieved to be moving my parents out of that house while they were still there to laugh alongside us, before every hour we spent in it and every object we took out of it would have been steeped in grief.

He would have reminded me about the world’s shortest poem about fleas (“Adam / had ’em”) and understood its relevance: how even at the extremes of human experience, rejoicing or grieving, in paradise or newly expelled from it, we are still just another lowly creature at the mercy of the world. The

Aristotle, by contrast, regarded happiness as the “supreme good,” and understood it as something less like transient gratification than like full human flourishing, inextricable from thoughtfulness, inextricable from virtue.

even in the upbeat version, the tale ends with the getting, precisely at the moment when most of us believe love really begins.

To what convulsion, to what accident, do we owe that encounter? For those, like C., who believe in God, or in a universe otherwise ordered in part by watchful and benevolent forces, such meetings, like all wonderful finds, have a straightforward explanation: they are blessings, godsends, miracles. The lover and the beloved were meant for each other—indeed, in a very literal sense, made for each other—and their encounter was never not going to happen. In that vein, you sometimes hear couples say that they were destined to meet. But among those of us without that faith, and perhaps even among some of the devout as well, I suspect that the opposite feeling is at least as common: a kind of amazed gratitude, given the wild contingency of life, that such an unlikely thing could ever come to pass. That is how I feel: that finding one’s beloved is an “Astonishment,”

In everyday life, we seldom fully focus on conjunctions like these, any more than we focus on the word “and.” Yet multiple simultaneous experiences and emotions are so common that by the time we reach adulthood, the very fabric of our life is made of patchwork. We know by then that the world is full of beauty and grandeur and also wretchedness and suffering; we know that people are kind and funny and brilliant and brave and also petty and irritating and horrifically cruel. In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, “Life is and.” He meant that we do not live, for the most part, in a world of either/or. We live with both at once, with many things at once—everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.

More generally, it is how we wrest order from confusion, transforming life’s boundless list into something more like a story, full of structure, information, and meaning. Granted, this ability is not without drawbacks; it is also why we leap to conclusions and why we are so susceptible to conspiracy theories. Still, it is almost impossible to overstate how emotionally, ethically, and intellectually impaired we would be if we could not perceive connections among seemingly dissimilar things.

Life, I understood acutely, would give us plenty of reasons to come together in sorrow. And so it seemed to me incumbent on us to create reasons to come together in joy, as a gift to ourselves, our families, our friends, and, in some strange way, to the world itself, to its precarious balance of shining and terrible.

That picture has been on the wall beside me the whole time I have been writing this book. After the shock of first seeing it wore off, I came to love it very much, partly for the way it makes my loss visible and beautiful—it feels like the closest thing I have to a picture of my father at my wedding—but chiefly because, in a single image, it honors my joy together with my grief. That seems right to me. Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can’t get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling, can’t strain out the ostensible impurities in pursuit of some imaginary essence, and we shouldn’t want to if we could. The world in all its complexity calls on us to respond in kind, so that to be conflicted is not to be adulterated; it is to be complete.

star. I knew what he meant, and I knew that he would have felt the same even if he had never met so much as a mayor and never even seen a meteorite. Because I, too, feel that

way: that my days are exceptional even when they are ordinary, that existence does not need to show us any of its more famous or spectacular wonders to fill us with amazement. We live remarkable lives because life itself is remarkable, a fact that is impossible not to notice if only suffering leaves us alone for long enough.

Lately I have found this everyday remarkableness almost overwhelming. As I said, I’ve never been much for stoicism, but these last few years, I have been even more susceptible than usual to emotion—or, rather, to one emotion in particular. As far as I know, it has no name in our language, although it is close to what the Portuguese call saudade and the Japanese call mono no aware. It is the feeling of registering, on the basis of some slight exposure, our existential condition: how lovely life is, and how fragile, and how fleeting. Although this feeling is partly a response to our place in the universe, it is not quite the same as awe, because it has too much of the everyday in it, and too much sorrow, too. For the same reason, it is also not the feeling the Romantics identified as the sublime—a mingling of admiration and dread, evoked by the vast impersonal grandeur of the physical world. This feeling I am talking about has none of that splendor or terror in it. It is made up, instead, of gratitude, longing, and a note I can only call anticipatory grief. Among English words, its nearest kin might be “bittersweet,” a translation of the Greek term Sappho coined to describe the ex...

It is true what people so often tell you in the face of hardship or heartache: life goes on. I have always liked that expression, hackneyed though it may be, for its refusal of easy consolation, for everything that it declines to say. It does not promise an end to pain, like “time heals all wounds” and “this too shall pass.” It does not have the clean-slate undertones of “tomorrow is another day.” It says only that things—good things, bad things, thing-things; it does not specify—will not stop happening. That is not so much a reassurance as a reminder: you will not just get to sit there for as long as you want, drinking your sorrow neat. Not only will your own emotions begin to distract you; sooner or later, the rest of the world will likewise resume asserting its many needs. Well before you feel you are ready, you will have to go to work and clean the kitchen and pay the phone bill; you will have to listen to other people talking about the Nats game or the Congressional Black Caucus or daylight saving time; you will get mad about something unrelated, and laugh about something unrelated, and look at your partner and think about nothing at all except taking off her clothes. And the same goes for happiness. Nobody ever says “life goes on” after someone falls in love, but it does. As wonderful as those early besotted days are, you will not get to spend forever gazing into your beloved’s eyes and making middle-of-the-night pancakes and staying in bed together until two in the ...

As a result, the feeling of “and” is not just a feeling of conjunction; it is also a feeling of continuation. The abundance toward which it gestures—the sense that there is always something more—is not only spatial but also temporal.

This radical discrepancy between the scale of our own lives and the scale of the rest of existence can leave us feeling two different ways. One of them, akin to the feeling of losing something, is that the universe is dauntingly large and we are terrifyingly insignificant. The other, akin to the feeling of finding, is that the universe is dauntingly large and yet here we are, unimaginably unlikely and therefore precious beyond measure. As with so many other contrasting feelings, most of us will experience both of these eventually. It is easy to feel small and powerless; easy, too, to feel amazed and fortunate to be here.

To all of this, loss, which seems only to take away, adds its own kind of necessary contribution. No matter what goes missing, the object you need or the person you love, the lessons are always the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.