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

by Kathryn Schulz

In the end, this may be why certain losses are so shocking: not because they defy reality but because they reveal it.

Still, I know that those successes, like all such successes, were fragile and contingent. Experience teaches us nothing if not that all the things parents seek for their children—safety, stability, happiness, opportunity—are neither equitably distributed nor permanent conditions.

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.

What I had been missing about my father—talking with him, laughing with him, sharing my thoughts and feelings in order to hear his own in response—was life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights.

But the most important thing that had vanished when he died, I realized in that instant, is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out.

All of my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it...

My father is not in my life in the same way he used to be in my life: everywhere and unmistakably. I imagine this is true for almost everyone who has lost someone they love. 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.

They are still here, unlike him, and I assume they always will be, as enduring as the love that made them. This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.

The twenty-seventh of those symbols dates back to ancient Rome, when scribes, resorting to cursive to write more rapidly, linked the two letters in “εt,” the Latin word for “and.” You can still make out those letters today in certain fancier versions of the character, like this one: &

To solve this problem, students were taught to use the Latin phrase per se, meaning “in itself,” to indicate that they meant the character, not the word. Thus instead of saying “X, Y, Z, and,” they dutifully said, “X, Y, Z, and per se and”—a phrase that, over time, grew blurry from repetition. It is our language, then, that turned the Latin “&” into the ampersand.

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.