Lost & Found | Kathryn Schultz
In the end, this may be why certain losses are so 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…Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has the power to instantly resize us against our own surroundings; we are never smaller and the world never larger than when something important goes missing.
It is this harsh corrective to our sense of being central, competent, and powerful that makes even trivial losses so difficult to accept. To lose something is a profoundly humbling act. It forces us to confront the limits of our mind: the fact that we left our wallet at the restaurant; the fact that we can’t remember where we left our wallet at all. 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 m, maddening, heartbreaking fact that something that was just here can be, all of a sudden, just gone. (P.19-20)
Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom during that difficult fall could I distinguish my distress over these other losses from my sadness about my father.
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This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses, without distinction, the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones.
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Most people, I think, are at least a little afraid of ceasing to grieve. I know that I was. However terrible our sorrow may be, we understand that it is made in the image of love, that it shares the characteristics of the person we mourn. Maybe there was a day in your life when you were brought to your knees by a faded blue ball cap or a tote bag full of knitting supplies or the sound of a Brahms piano concerto… Part of what makes grief so seductive, then, is that it seems to offer us what life no longer can: an ongoing, emotionally potent connection to the dead. And so it is easy to feel that once that bleak gift is gone, the person we love will somehow be more gone, too.
Thus our strange relationship with the pain of grief. In the early days, we wish only for it to end; later on, we fear that it will. And when it finally does begin to ease, it also does not, because, at first, feeling better can feel like loss, too. “The trees are coming into leaf,” the poet Philip Larkin once wrote,
Like something almost being said,
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
This type of circular mourning, the grieving of grief itself, is perfectly normal and possibly inevitable yet also misguided and useless. There is no honor in feeling awful and no betrayal in feeling better, and no matter how dark and salted and bitter coms your grief may be, it will never preserve anything about the person you mourn. Despite how it sometimes feels, it has never kept anyone alive, not even in memory. If anything, it keeps them dead: eventually, if you cannot stop mourning, the person you love will come to be made only of grief. (p. 66-7)
It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of a consciousness. Viewed from any distance at all, it is, I know, the most common of all losses, repeated every hour of every day since the dawn of history. But viewed up close, it is shocking, a whole universe flashing out of existence. I lost my father; my father lost everything. That is the absolute loss that his silence in the hospital foretold: the end of the mind, the end of the self, the end of being a part of all of this – the harbor, the city, the poetry, the world… Now we who loved my father are all that is left of him. p. 71
To be bereft is to live with the constant presence of absence p. 73
The enduring challenge of every relationship is to love across distance… We are called on over and over again to remember that the person we love does not always have the same thoughts, feelings, frames of reference, reactions, needs, fears, and desires that we do. But overall, the trajectory of a happy relationship, which begins with cherishing similarity, ends in cherishing difference. p. 145
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. It doesn’t matter whether those things are linked by affinity m, animosity, or difference; Cain and Abel are bound together as tightly as Romeo and Juliet, and both are bound as tightly as apples and oranges. It doesn’t even matter if they have no intrinsic link at all, because the effect of joining them with “and” is to create one.
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. p. 192-3
We all have mixed experiences, mixed emotions, mixed motives, even mixed selves. The most cheerful among us is not consistently happy, and the best among us is not consistently good… multiple simultaneous experiences and emotions are so common by the time we reach adulthood; the very fabric of our life is made of patchwork. We know by then that the world is made of beauty and grandeur and also wretchedness and suffering; we know that people are kind and funny and brilliant and brave and also petty and irritating and horrifically cruel. 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 in a world with both at once, with many things at once – everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything. p. 194-5
One way to think new thoughts, then, is to make, quite literally, new connections. p. 204
(Seeing the links between things) 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 so 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. p. 205
That picture has been on the wall beside me the whole time I have been writing this book. After the shock of first seeing it wore off, I came to love it very much, partly for the way it makes my loss visible and beautiful – it feels like the closest thing I have to a picture of my father at my wedding – but chiefly because, 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 turn crushing and restorative, busy and boring, awful and absurd and comic and uplifting. We can’t get away from this constant amalgamation of feeling, can’t strain out the ostensible impurities in pursuit of some imaginary essence, and we shouldn’t want to if we could. The world in all its complexity calls on us to respond in kind, so that to be conflicted is not to be adulterated; it is to be complete. p. 220
“I have often thought,” C’s father, Bill, once told me, “that for a completely average person, I have lived a remarkable life.” He had grown up without indoor plumbing and lived to carry a cellphone around in his pocket, its ringtone set to emergency-alert volume to be heard over his tractor; he had married the love of his life and raised three wonderful children; he had worked as a farmer, a grocery-store clerk, a custodian, and a caretaker all his days, yet he had met four presidents – one who gave a speech on the Eastern Shore, two who employed his oldest daughter, one who spoke at C’s college graduation; he had found, against staggering odds, a falling star. I knew what he meant, and I knew that he would have felt the same even if he had never met so much as a mayor and never even seen a meteorite. Because 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 is remarkable, a fact that is impossible not to notice if only suffering leaves us alone for long enough.
Lately, I have found this everyday remarkableness almost overwhelming. As I said, I’ve never been much for stoicism, but these last few years, I have been even more susceptible than usual to emotion – or rather, to one emotion in particular. As far as I know, it has no name in our language, although it is close to what the Portuguese call saudade and the Japanese call mono no aware. It is the feeling of registering, on the basis of some slight exposure, our existential condition: how lovely life is, and how fragile, and how fleeting. Although this feeling is partly a response to our place in the universe, it is not quite the same as awe, because it has too much of the everyday in it, and too much sorrow, too. For the same reason, it is also not the feeling the Romantics identified as the sublime – a mingling of admiration and dread, evoked by the vast impersonal grandeur of the physical world. This feeling I am talking about has none of the splendor or terror in it. It is made up, instead, of gratitude, longing, and a note I can only call anticipatory grief…. 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. (p. 222-4)
This abundance is one of the most wonderful things about life, and also one of the most difficult, because it throws into relief the constraints of our own existence. 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… I love my life and wouldn’t exchange it for any other, but I am not sure the faint contrails of longing left behind by all these other imagined futures ever fully disappear…we have, unavoidably, only our one lifetime, and no matter how energetic or interested or fortunate or long-lived we may be, we can only do so much with it. And so much, against the backdrop of the universe, can seem so very little. p. 232-3
That is the essential difficulty of our situation: life goes on, but we do not. p. 233
(Considering the discrepancy between the scale of the universe and the scale of our own lives can leave us feeling insignificant or amazed). On the whole, though, I take the side of amazement. I cannot look closely for any length of time at even so simple a thing as a pond and do otherwise. this is what I realized that day at the arboretum: that what serves us best, in the face of inexorable loss, is not our grief or our acquiescence but our attention. For now, at least, the world is ours to notice and to change, and that seems to me sufficient. It is true that loss will ultimately part us from it, but it is also true, as I said earlier, that we have many bindings. Our works of art, our honorable deeds, our acts of kindness and generosity: all of these link us in unseen ways to future generations. p. 234
None of us would be here without what came before us, and none of us can know how much and in what ways everything that will come after us depends upon our being here. Walt Whitman…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. p. 235
Time, in carrying on, will carry almost all of what we know of life away.
The second half of Lost & Found is as much a meditation on finding the most precious of human finds — which is never a possession — as it is a love letter to her wife, ending with a beautiful meditation on how these twin experiences illuminate the central truth of life:
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.
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Nothing about that is strange or surprising; it is the fundamental, unalterable nature of things. The astonishment is all in the being here. It is the turtle in the pond, the thought in the mind, the falling star, the stranger on Main Street… To all of this, loss, which seems only to take away, adds its own kind of necessary contribution. No matter what goes missing, the object you need or the person you love, the lessons are always the same. 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.
