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

by Kathryn Schulz

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.