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

by Kathryn Schulz

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 ...