Lost and Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness
Kathryn Schulz (2022, Random House)
In the fall of 2016, Kathryn Schulz lost her father. He was seventy-four, so one of the things she lost was what might have been another couple of decades of delight in his company. The first section of Lost and Found is an extended consideration of what it means to lose things, from the smallest shirt button, through keys, and jobs, and friends, and so on up to glaciers and species. It’s a wonderfully personal look at a perennial and universal problem: “Like being mortal, being slightly scatterbrained is part of the human condition: we have been losing stuff so routinely for so long that the laws laid down in Leviticus include a stipulation against lying about finding someone else’s lost property.”
Her atheism, and her Jewish heritage, dispose Schulz against a belief in life after death. Her father is entirely gone, not sitting around in heaven. It pleases her, on the other hand, to imagine a place where all the lost things are collected. L. Frank Baum called it the Valley of Lost Things. “In my mind,” Schulz says, “it is a dark, pen-and-ink place, comic and mournful as an Edward Gorey drawing: empty clothing drifting dolefully about, umbrellas piled in heaps like dormant bats, a Tasmanian tiger slinking off with Hemingway’s lost novel in its mouth, glaciers shrinking glumly down into their puddles, Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra atilt upon the ground, the air around it filled with the ghosts of nighttime ideas not written down and gone by morning.”
The period after her father’s death felt to Schulz like a visit to that random, melancholy world. She lost her balance, she lost her way. It was hard to know what to do, because she’d never imagined what would happen after the worst happened. Not only could she not write, she could scarcely read. “I did not exactly feel lost, as my father was to me. I felt at a loss–a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins.” Exhaustion, irritability, boredom, occasionally sadness itself–all these had their way with Schulz, unpredictably and uncontrollably.
The second section of the book, about falling in love, largely overlaps the first section in time, beginning a year and a half before her bereavement. I think Schulz is wise to treat them separately, but the connections between losing and finding keep making themselves felt. How much of either, for example, is due to our own efforts, and how much to the larger forces of the way the world is? How much is simply the luck of timing? For a long time, she was a single woman in her thirties, with a quiet home north of New York City and an established writing career. One fine spring day, a friend of a friend stopped in her town to break up a long drive, and they had lunch together. A few more emails, another meal a week later, and C. became the woman Schulz was going to marry.
As with loss, Schulz gives us love on all possible scales, from the smear of jam on early-morning pancakes to the outer reaches of the Solar System. There’s the feeling of deep, homely comfort, and a profound astonishment, as of a new planet discovered. They agree on the weighty matter of baby corn (they disapprove); they have vastly different views on religion. Schulz leaves it alone, while C. is an Episcopalian with a serious church habit, yet the matter rests easily between them.
Their origins seemed worlds apart, too: Schulz came from a wealthy Midwestern suburb, C. from Maryland’s rural Eastern shore. Schulz started to worry about that gap on their first trip to see her parents, but, really, she says, “Most of us fit only partially into our past selves, and most of us are only somewhat at home in our former homes. Even if we love them, even if we sometimes long for them, even if we know them down to the last ancient orange spatula in the kitchen utensil drawer, we inevitably outgrow them; the world is so big that anywhere you’re from eventually becomes parochial by comparison.”
I love the writing in this book, and the thinking. I love its specificity, and its sense of spaciousness. It ends with a wedding, which abides in a haunting photo of Schulz and her mother, and the broad expanse of Chesapeake Bay where her father would have stood: “In a single image, it honors my joy together with my grief. That seems right to me. Life, too, goes by contraries: it is by turns crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting.”
Let the people say, Amen.
Any Good Books, February 2023
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