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

by Kathryn Schulz

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. That’s what I realized while talking with my friend—that everything that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.

feel.

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.

As Latin took hold throughout Christendom, becoming the dominant and in some cases the only written language, the “&” spread along with it. When Latin eventually receded (thanks in part to Dante with his vernacular poetry, Gutenberg with his vernacular printing, and Martin Luther with his vernacular preaching), its script was left behind, complete with the “&”—a kind of philological fossil, still written as the Roman scribes had done but pronounced in whatever way the locals said “and.”

In short, we know that, as 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.

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 is easy to ignore all those other people, to regard ourselves as linked only to our own family and community. Yet our moral power, like our intellectual power, comes from asserting connections that have previously been invisible or overlooked. That is a solemn reason to nurture our sense of connection; and yet the more densely we are tied to others, the happier we are. Many of us have occasionally felt the world to be as Bishop describes it in her poem: disconnected, fragmentary, devoid of logic and meaning. And many of us have occasionally felt ourselves to be disconnected as well—felt that, whatever the state of the world, we stand apart from its workings, unable to muster interest in doing anything or, alternatively, convinced that nothing we do will matter. These are not pleasant feelings. To be disconnected is to be lonely, indifferent, estranged—in one way or another, cut off from the rest of humanity. As a psychological state, it is at best distressing and at worst dangerous, both for the people experiencing it and for those around them. One famous description of hell holds that it is a place where “nothing connects with nothing,” suggesting that the absence of attachment to the rest of the world is both an abdication of goodness and a form of suffering. By contrast, the more deeply connected we feel, the more fulfilling we typically find our lives.

And we love as we mourn, with wildly variegated, equally sincere emotions. In addition to everything lofty and lusty, love is also being hurt when your wife is brusque with you or annoyed when you realize that your husband has walked past the cat vomit all day without cleaning it up; it is alternately intervening and forbearing when your beloved bites her nails, and listening patiently as your partner vents at length about his boss when you really just want to get back to reading your book. There is no enduring love on the planet, nor ever has been, that isn’t characterized by these crisscrossing moods.

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.”

I, too, feel that way: that my days are exceptional even when they are ordinary, that existence does not need to show us any of its more famous or spectacular wonders to fill us with amazement. 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.

“Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not?” asks the Unetaneh Tokef, that eerie and lovely liturgical poem that Jews recite on the Day of Atonement. And when we do each reach our end, “who by sword and who by wild beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangulation and who by stoning?” Those lines are evocative but incomplete, and it is easy to lie awake at night adding our own verses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.