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.

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.

Sufficient financial resources may ward off certain kinds of hardship, and sufficient love and support may leave us better equipped to face life’s inevitable difficulties. But to be prepared is not to be spared. Our parents cannot protect us from experiencing loss forever, because, in the end, barring a worse tragedy, we will lose them. —

The brain is the deepest and most mysterious of all the Valleys of Lost Things, and it is heartbreaking what can go missing there:

Yet for all this variability, a kind of sameness shapes the experience of death for many of us today, because so much of it takes place in hospitals. A hundred thousand plots unfold in just one setting; it is as if we had all wandered into the same upsetting dream. And while a hospital can be, in many ways, a good place to die, it is a strange and difficult place to begin to mourn.

Traditionally, mourning is a public and a structured process. We attend viewings and funerals and memorial services, cover our mirrors, sit shiva for a week, recite the kaddish for at least a month, wear black for a year and a day. Grief, by contrast, is a private experience, unconstrained by ritual or time.

The loss of someone you love is too immense an experience to take in all at once. Only belatedly does it begin to reveal itself in its fullness, after the terrible king tide of grief has receded, leaving all kinds of strange things behind.

the creators of quest narratives understand the intrinsic pleasure of discovery, and they know that they can convince an audience to stick with them simply by deferring it.

According to Theory of Optimal Search, the challenge of looking for something is twofold: “how to search and when to stop.”

figuring out what to seek in life has been a central concern of philosophy for thousands of years.

The difficult lesson I learned in my previous relationships was that there is a limit to how close you can get to people who do not care about the same questions you do, not through any failure on their part but simply because their minds orient along different meridians than yours.

the world is so big that anywhere you’re from eventually becomes parochial by comparison.

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.

all the ways we can put the world together, “and” is the most fundamental, the first and simplest knot we learn to tie.

What, then, is the feeling of and? Above all, it is a feeling of association, a subtle awareness that two or more things have been brought into relationship.

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. —

As it happens, there is a word for things that are “only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’ ” That grammatical construction is known as polysyndeton, meaning “many bindings.” It shows up frequently in the Old Testament—for instance, when God calls down a drought upon Jerusalem: “upon the land, and upon the mountains, and upon the corn, and upon the new wine, and upon the oil, and upon that which the ground bringeth forth, and upon men, and upon cattle, and upon all the labour of the hands.”

polysyndeton is an effective rhetorical device in part because of the long, slow, wave-form shape it gives to sentences. The effect is sometimes incantatory and sometimes ecstatic; in either of two directions, it conjures a sense of awe.

Whatever you think about the supra-human organization of the cosmos, we ourselves organize it all the time, and the ability to do so is one of the most distinctive features of the human mind. It

Love really is that clear and constant stream, but it is also desire and tenderness and admiration and gratitude. And grief really is that terrible fracture, but, as I learned after my father died, it is also anxiety and irritability and yearning.

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.

all that we have, we will someday lose. Of every kind of “and” that we experience, I find this one the most acute—the awareness that our love, in all its many forms, is bound inseparably to our grief.

One of the difficulties of writing about one’s own emotional life is that it is impossible to know how representative it is—how much it overlaps with or diverges from everyone else’s inmost experience.

I have never forgotten a heartbreaking line in a letter I once received: “How fortunate I have been—and yet I wanted it to last longer.” That was from my great-uncle, widowed after sixty-two years.

We find things and lose things at all stages of life, but the overall distribution shifts over time, and loss strikes both more often and with more devastating intimacy as we age.

Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and no matter how much we find along the way, life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories; the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.

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.