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

by Kathryn Schulz

father could not have known, that day in New York Harbor, that the most difficult parts of his life were already behind him. But I do think he had an intuition that, in putting so much distance between himself and his past, he was incurring losses of a different kind—the kind that, for immigrants and refugees, are often the price of making a home in a new place. His native language,

Even if we are fortunate enough to have them in the first

place, they, too, are susceptible to loss, liable to be swept away at any moment by forces far stronger

than we are—stronger, sometimes, than whole peoples and nations. War, famine, genocide, pandemic, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, mass shootings, mass starvation, mass financ...

as if catastrophe left moral and emotional clarity in its wake.

Dante, who, unlike most mere mortals, were temporarily permitted to slip into the netherworld.

an unlikely location: the eyeglasses end up in the oven,

found myself too drained and preoccupied to focus.