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

by Kathryn Schulz

shocking: not because they defy reality but because they reveal it. One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost—and, conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there. A missing wedding ring can turn the modest geography of an urban park into the Rocky Mountains. Losing sight of your child during a hike can turn a peaceful stretch of stream and forest into a formidable wilderness. Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has

concerned Edward Said’s definition of exile, as a loss so profound that it darkens all future achievements. This my father—a man who found as much as he lost, including enduring happiness—could not entirely endorse. But he knew intimately the cost of assimilation, one of life’s stealthiest forms of loss, as well as the abiding yearning for an unrecoverable home.

insignificant by comparison. Indeed, a heightened sense of what is trivial versus what actually matters is one of the few things that supposedly emerges from a disaster not merely intact but enhanced, as if catastrophe left moral and emotional clarity in its wake. After witnessing so much distressing loss, the theory goes, we will understand what is really important in life and stop worrying about all the rest. This idea inverts the logic of Elizabeth Bishop: our largest losses, it suggests, can help us cope with our

“And” does none of these things. It is a connection made of nothing but connection; two things, three things, ten things coexist in a sentence, but grammar is mute on the subject of what, other than that single word, might bind them. This no-strings-attached combinatory power makes it a particularly easy conjunction to master: of all the ways we can put the world together, “and” is the most fundamental, the first and simplest knot we learn to tie. Young children, who may not grasp the specific relationships implied by other conjunctions, are fluent and profligate users of this one. From the plot of Frozen to the first day of kindergarten, life as little kids narrate it is just one long string of “and then—and then—and then.”

That semantic versatility reflects an existential truth. Our chronic condition involves experiencing many things all at once—some of them intrinsically related, some of them compatible, some of them contradictory, and some of them having nothing to do with one another at all, beyond being crowded together in our own awareness.

Life, too, is a perpetual “and” machine, reliably delivering us a mixture of things to experience all at once.

we have enumerated less than a paragraph’s worth of the countless and-able things of the universe. Like finding something or losing something, this quality of endless conjunction has the effect of making the world seem extraordinarily large and our own place in it vanishingly small. It also mimics a kind of imaginary primeval state of knowledge, as if everything in existence has been tossed down haphazardly in front us, leaving us to determine what relationships, if any, govern it all.

Instead, life is made up of countless unrelated fragments, “Everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and.’ ”

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.” As you’ll see if you read that example out loud, 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. Not by accident is there so much polysyndeton in the Bible.

It is perfectly possible to believe in a creator God while holding that, outside of certain basic laws of nature, much of what appears to be deliberately connected is merely thrown together by chance. And it is perfectly possible to not believe in God at all, yet still feel that there are meaningful relations all around us—that everyone and everything is here for a reason, and that, in deep and important ways, we are all connected.

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 is why we can look at a night sky full of stars and see a bear and a cross and a warrior with his sword, and it is why we can recognize the influence of Oedipus Rex on Hamlet, and it is why we know that ostriches are distantly related to dinosaurs. 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.

comprehension emerges when we can see the links between things. But something else emerges under those conditions, too. If conjunction lies close to the origins of thought, as Hume believed, it also lies close to the origins of morality. The more closely we believe ourselves to be connected to other people, the more likely we are to hold ourselves at least partly responsible for their well-being. As our current turbulent era has made exceptionally clear, the actions we take or do not take—in the face of pandemics, prejudice, authoritarianism, resource use, climate change—affect even strangers, even those who live far away from us, sometimes even those who are not yet living at all. It

Like grief, love rearranges existing relationships: I am bound now to C.’s entire lineage and she to mine, and they are bound to each other in perpetuity.

But even the strongest sentiments are intermittent and inconstant, forever obliged to share the stage with other members of emotion’s ensemble cast—grief with gratitude, anger with boredom, happiness with irritation, frustration with amusement, and on and on, in endless permutations.

Love is the totality of ways you feel while in love; grief is the totality of ways you feel while grieving. Everything else is just an abstraction, a stream or a tree limb in the mind. “One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness),” C. S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed. “One only meets each hour or moment that comes.” And whether you are living through happiness or cancer, the hours change and change. We all have, as Lewis wrote, “many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst.”

The world overflows with possibilities—with places to visit and things to learn and books to read and skills to master and people to meet and causes to champion and trajectories to pursue—but only a tiny fraction of them are available to each of us. As a result, although we all like to feel that we make choices about our life, much of what we do amounts to choosing against things, to making our peace with everything that we will never get to do. From the age of six or seven until my early twenties,

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.

Walt Whitman, who understood the world’s abundance as well as anyone who ever lived, understood this, too. Leaning on the railing of that Brooklyn ferry, dazzled by the view, he traveled over the waters and the centuries, then looked back and saw himself inseparably connected to everyone else who had undertaken that same journey. Life may exceed us, he knew, but for now it is also made of us. We are the “and,” a part of the continuation of things, the binding between the present and the future. That is all we have, this moment with the world. It will not last, because nothing lasts. 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.