I
had already read and written up what I felt
was likely the book of the year, The
Dawn of Everything (see March). It was
excellent, but I was tired of information
and history and so I turned to something quite
different from the 2022 best book
list – Lost & Found:
Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and
Happiness, by
Kathryn Schulz. It was different
and I read it. Sadly, I didn’t
really enjoy it very much. The contents said
it was about first losing people,
then finding people and finally something
more. The reviews didn’t give much
more information. Part I, Lost concerned
the death of the author’s admired
father. Part II, Found was about
running into someone she loved and Part
III And, describes the evolution of
the relationship to a wedding and having
a child. It is all good writing with
appropriately spaced learned quotes by
poets, authors and other known writers.
I
found it strange to read. I wanted non-fiction
and it was classified as such. I
kept thinking it was more of a novel, but it
wasn’t. Yet it didn’t feel like an
autobiography either. It must be an
autobiography-plus. It was a well set out
straightforward
story outline with explorations of themes
throughout.
The
flow
of a section seemed to take off at key words
into a stream of
consciousness moving into areas of thought,
touring around them, then moving onto
other related areas through a link, touring
around them and so on. For example,
right at the beginning the author notes that
she dislikes euphemisms like “passing”.
Dying is so final and … off we go in
euphemisms and the like. With respect to the
new-found partner there were differences from
her. The author was Jewish/ atheistic;
the partner was a practicing Lutheran
Christian. Somehow the differences seemed
part of the bond and off we go to explore that
theme.
Yes,
there
was information and yes the spritely pace made
it seem interesting but it
felt like collections of well written thoughts
around insignificant matters. There
was little serious injection of deep new
insights. I guess that’s what I was looking
for when I moved from my usual upsetting hard
facts about the environment or
dying species, but it didn’t satisfy.
Part
I
Lost, goes into her love and admiration
for her father, his role as
father, and his lack of sense of time or
direction. It muses on her home and
both her parents plus her grief and discovery
of the importance of “loss”. However,
it led into thoughts about losing and finding
things and losing and finding people.
There are people like her father who lose
things and people like her mother who
notice where things are and can find them.
As
Polish
Jews the families of her grandparents were
decimated in Auschwitz. These
were huge losses. Her grandmother survived by
being sent by the family as a
teenager to Palestine. She was married to an
older man, a plumber. That’s where
the author’s father was born. After the war,
conditions turned violent in Tel
Aviv and the family set off for the only
readily available country – Germany. Her
father’s brother was killed in the front seat
of the car as they drove away
from Tel Aviv. In Germany they lived in a
small town in the Black Forest, where
they stayed for four years, as her
grandfather’s questionable activities risked
the police catching them. Visas for the US
arrived. Her father had lost two
cities and a continent and his native creole
of Yiddish and Polish. Yet he was
able to find a lot in the US. He found a
friend in Detroit. He escaped family
life in the library and finished public school
at the top of his class.
He
didn’t
like engineering at the University of
Michigan. He tried again at
liberal arts. The third time he ended up
finishing law school – after having had
a lucky military draft to Korea and a lucky
find of his wife.
At
this
point the author reflects on the impacts big
losses and small ones have on
us. She ends turning to the lost things – the
lesser lost things. Where do lost
things go - including their being on the other
side of the moon, as Mary Poppins
said - and the musing goes on to the valley of
the lost things. The author’s grieving
is described, and the seeing of familiar
furniture or views with a visible
absence of the person.
Her
father’s
death was coming – there were a range of
illnesses, high blood
pressure and high cholesterol. He damaged a
shoulder in a fall in a hotel lobby
and a foot from a missed step on a patio. His
breathing was laboured. But he
kept his mind. However, the last few years
brough crises in which diagnosis was
lacking and drugs were tried. The family had
to get him pulled off all
non-critical drugs to keep that mind alert.
Perhaps the most serious loss that
the family saw was that her father remained
unaware of his situation and so,
untroubled. Sometimes the experiencing of more
life into old age means the experiencing
of less of it too, at that point. Her father
was losing things – he no longer
practiced law, traveled, drove, walked. Yes,
one can be glad pain ends, but death
does not deserve much gratitude. In the end,
there was one more hospitalization.
The author and her partner arrived to find
what seemed a false alarm. But deterioration
began over the next two days and then he
ceased to speak. A prolonged stage
with some consciousness but on life support
began. Doctor friends of his visited.
They advised the family to let him go. And the
family moved him from intensive
care to a gentler hospice room with thoughtful
words with family as it was
done. They sat with him, held his hand and the
author found this comforting – “bearably
sad – a tranquil contemplative, lapping kind
of sorrow”. Then, “very early one
morning he was not”.
There
follows
a sizeable account of the author’s grief, of
how grief can be managed,
of how it affects one’s pattern of life and
abilities and about other thoughts
of grief.
Part II Found,
tells of a small country boy
heading home late one evening and seeing a
meteorite coming down. He finds it
the next day. And the author tells us how
wonderful finding an object feels and
how many types of findings all give us the
feeling of finding. Then
the author tells us that she fell in
love the year before her father died – and
love is about finding people, as
grief is about loss. This made the death of
her father bearable. Found takes
us into the context of her life leading up to
that encounter. This part is
about the experience of dating, about the
experience of loving and being loved
and introducing one’s new love to parents etc.
But first the author writes
about things that can be found, our sense of
luck. Indeed, meteorites were
considered to have a sacred connection in
ancient times and they were put in
temples. They are now known to come mainly
from the asteroid belt – “a kind of vast
circumstellar junkyard, filled with the
shattered remains of protoplanets …”.
There are two ways
of finding, she says: by
searching or by luck, and they are not
mutually exclusive. There is a story of a hike
with a friend who left sunglasses
on rocks on an ocean beach. After a storm and
a change of tide, the pair
returned and the friend found her sunglasses –
feeling like the gods had handed
them back. The book tells of folklore about
how to find things and progresses
to the theory of optimal search and how that
applied to Malaysia Airlines
Flight 370. Searches feature in endearing
popular stories – Jason and the
Argonauts searching for the Golden Fleece, or
people searching for the Holy Grail.
And a moral emerges – take care what you spend
your time looking for or you may
lose more than you find.
Then a part on how
we find a name we have forgotten.
How are we supposed
to find love, the author asks.
It’s not a lost object. The search area is
unbounded. This is like Meno’s
paradox: how do you know you’ve found it if
you’ve never had it before? Some
believe it is important to search. Others
treat it as a meteorite and that it
is likely to appear when we are happy living
life on our own terms. However,
the author realized at 30 something that the
quiet things she enjoyed doing –
reading, long trail runs – were unlikely to
lead to what she wanted in the long
term – partner, children, a home full of
people she loved. So she actively
looked: recruiting friends and testing online
dating. But friends would have
already introduced her if they knew any
appropriate matches, and she found online
dating to be a mix of comedy, futility and
awkwardness.
She met “C” on Main
Street. C had driven 250 miles
from her home in Maryland for a week in
Vermont, followed by a wedding in upstate
New York. The author’s town made a convenient
stop. She had been introduced to
C by a mutual friend via email and they had
exchanged polite notes – including the
suggestion of a lunch while C was planning
this road trip. The author suggested
a place in her town – a town away from New
York City that she had moved to
about ten years previously. She waited outside
the restaurant – then looking
up, saw C was walking towards her. It was not
“I knew right away”. C was serious-minded
and intelligent, creating a heightened
attention. Somehow, she seemed both forthright
and reserved. They chatted for 2 ½ hrs on the
outdoor patio. The author invited
her back to see her “little carriage house”.
Then wished her safe travels. C wrote
a note saying she’d love to take the author to
dinner next time they were anywhere
near the same city. She realized C
dated women and also that she would say yes.
That “first date” happened a week
later when C was on her way back from her
friend’s wedding. There followed the
steady account of dinner, movie, walking,
clear night sky, magnetic pull to
touch, kissed, awoke next day shy, happy
amazed … She left by noon …
There is reflection
on how people know they have
found “the” person: Dante and Beatice; her
mother asking her father to marry
her on their second date; Plato; her own
previous doubts, and now a sense of yes.
The author recounts the details of that second
visit to her house with C and
how she kept smiling and that she had met a
person she wanted to share her life
with. “In general, any longing in love … is
always the longing for more.” The
second date lasted 19 days – because she
invited C to stay. The author recounts
how they watched and learned about each other,
visited a contemporary art
museum and more. They were days filled with
discoveries – about the other. “Love,
like grief, has the properties of a fluid: it
flows everywhere, fills any
container, saturates everything.” Like the
author, C is a writer and they spent
some time doing their writing at different
writing places – and showing each other
what they were working on. The author was
amazed that this had happened to her
and that her happiness had expanded. She told
her sister she had met the woman
she was going to marry.
There is some
recounting of common likes and
differences. The author is Jewish/Atheist,
whereas C is Lutheran and pretty
serious so that it seemed to the author like a
cosmic joke.
The author is eager
to have C meet her parents – even
though she of course did not know that her
father would die within 18 months.
There are thoughts about the high school
pictures and the cute superficial
accumulations
of family history in a family home. There is a
flat tire on the Pennsylvania
turnpike providing opportunity for more
discussion of love and the other. Apprehension
grows. There is the account of C’s
different home background – the Eastern Shore
of Maryland, a bit of the South
in the North. C’s family is poor. She won a
scholarship to Harvard but had to
work to pay for the rest. She went on a Rhodes
scholarship to Oxford and
managed to tour Europe as well! The
author’s parents have trimmed the bushes and
are eager to meet C. She discovers
her dad and C hit it off and that C does not
find him intimidating as others
have. The author loved hearing C talking with
her parents and her “sir” and “ma’am.”
Both C and the author’s dad thought for
themselves. And there were likenesses. She
goes on to note that, with respect to finding,
we know we have found love when
we come across it because it is familiar from
our earliest days, not from
before our lifetimes as Plato thought. Her
parents tell C how they met and the
author now projects that beginning onto her
new found love.
The winter after
the meeting with the parents, the
author and C are back again. This time it was
to join with her sister to help
her parents move from her childhood home as
her father’s health began to decline.
They needed physical help for the actual
moving to a condo – and it took days.
She was pleasantly surprised to be happy –
with parents still there to laugh
alongside the rest of her family. Despite her
father’s early resistance, he
made an easy transition to their new home and
sat in his preferred chair a book
on his lap and a glass of scotch on a familiar
table next to him.
Meanwhile the
author and C were juggling their
homes. C bought an Eastern Shore Maryland
house that had belonged to family friends
and whose mortgage was too good to refuse. C
began a book on the Deep South so
they rented a house near the Georgia line. On
days off they drove in search of
adventure and the car filled with things
needed for the home! They found this
fun and were lucky both could do their jobs
from anywhere. Fifteen months into
this nomadic life they went back to Ohio
because the author’s father was in hospital
for atrial fibrillation. They slept on the
fold-out sofa in her parents’ condo.
Scarcely six months after moving into the
condo – this. When the time came to
decide what to do, her mother told them that
she wanted what she also did not
want to do at all: to let her husband go.
After less than a week in hospice
care, he was gone. After the arrangements and
memorial service were over, the
bags in the car, and the long last hug of her
mother, the author was driven
back to Maryland – to find a flea infestation.
A google then a 24-hour big box
store’s pet aisle later, they had flea
shampoo. Two hours more, the floors were
treated and the terrible cats were angry and
clean, fresh sheets were on the
bed and the two were in it.
That night, the
author decided against more than one
home, but she kept that decision to herself.
Early In the new year they went to
Hudson Valley to pack up a home. The last
night amid packed boxes, they had
take-out food, watched a movie on a laptop and
fell asleep on a mattress on the
floor. By next afternoon the moving truck was
gone and after some 12 years, the
author bid farewell to the carriage house.
There is a reflection on Eros and
Anteros and the contention that
requited love is sustaining, generous,
exhilarating
and fulfilling but, like Anteros, largely
overlooked in our culture. Most
stories end with Eros – boy meets girl. People
in love – what the author calls
requited love - just want it to go on and
continue enjoying the other and their
new situation.
The author tells
the story of visiting C’s childhood
home – onto roads that would become familiar
when she moved in with C, and into
“Tidewater Maryland” where the farmland is
inches away from becoming marshland.
Finding C meant finding new rural beauty like
winter wheat or hundreds of snow
geese taking flight. She also grew close to
C’s parents, sisters and extended
family, went to church with them at Easter and
put presents under their tree at
Christmas. Going to the hometown made finding
C seem more remarkable and finding
a place she had not known of, that felt so
remote yet was 90 mins from
Washington DC, was remarkable too. Exploring
C’s family
home she was shown a meteorite that her
father had seen come down, and then found when
a boy.
Part III,
And. The
author
gives a geological account of the
two-mile-wide meteorite that arrived from
the north at 50,000 mph in the late Eocene and
smashed into the Atlantic just
west of the present Cape Charles. There was a
massive explosion. Ash, burning
rocks and glass rose some 300,000 ft up into
the air, strewing meteoric glass
across 4,000,000 square miles. There was a
tsunami. Over millions of years, the
US eastern coastline rose out of sea and
dried. Huge mammals appeared and white-tailed
deer, and a new primate took to its feet in
Africa. Earth cooled more. The
polar sea froze and ice spread. Some humans
walked across it. And then things
started to warm. When the ice melted and the
sea rose it flooded the land now
known as the Chesapeake Bay impact crater –
the meteor gave the location and
the ocean filled it. It took millennia of
fluctuating ocean levels and silt
deposits before the peninsula assumed its
current “comma” shape with islands
dotting the bay. “On sunny days diamonds of
light from waves slosh in and out
of the shade from the willows and walnut trees
lining the shore, forming a wide
dappled edge … where, one beautiful May
afternoon, C and I got married.”
The author turns to
telling us about “&” which
was the last letter of our evolving alphabet.
It evolved from a cursive form of
the Latin “et” meaning “and”. As Latin spread,
so did &. As Luther and
Dante pushed societies into the vernacular,
& remained but was pronounced
as the word for “and” in the vernacular. It
migrated from the alphabet at some
point. Yet it is a useful word – or
punctuation. It links almost anything and
unlike other conjunctions like but, yet, for,
so, if, so, since, & does not
add any relationship between the things being
linked. Small children can use it
… and then … and then. The feeling of and
is just that a relationship
has been created between two parts. No
relationship need be there; and creates
one
as it did between cabbages and kings
for Lewis Carroll. And
nothing is experienced in isolation,
experiences come in bundles so that life
is a perpetual and machine and
life-like. And doesn’t care what
it serves up linked. We do not live in a world
of either/or. For the most part
we live in both at once.
The author asked C
to marry her on Ash Wednesday. The
timing was an accident and had been hovering
in her mind for around two years. The
author says they talked about the future in
terms that revealed we planned to
share it. Practically, it came up when her
father was dying. C took her for a walk
and said if she wanted, they could get the
paperwork and get married in his
hospital room. The author shook her head.
Later she told her mother and
wondered if in the family legacy any
grandmother had left a ring. But her
mother suggested giving her father’s wedding
ring. The author could see that
working as a necklace, but worried her mother
might feel attached. But no, her
mother was sure that would be what her father
wanted. So it was put on a
necklace. The author takes us on a philosophy
tour about and and connectedness.
It is possible to accept a creator God plus,
except for basic laws of nature,
accept what appears connected is thrown
together by chance. On the other hand
it is possible to not believe in God and yet
fell 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.
Indeed humans tend to create
connections – like seeing a bear and a cross
in the night sky. David Hume
believed that ideas came from conjunction,
from linking one known component of
the world with another. In any event, the more
we believe we are connected, the
more likely we are to hold ourselves at least
partly responsible for the
well-being of others. The emotional and
intellectual powers of linking come together
in the world of romance where school children
with a crush write “SH + JB” repeatedly
in their notebooks. Is + a simplified &?
Perhaps this is a kind of willing
a bond into being – and wonderfully, this
sometimes works. The author and C could
no longer imagine themselves without the and
between them.
Without the
knowledge of the author and C who stood
well-dressed
at the very point of the peninsula, all the
cell phones blared out a tornado
warning. Had they heard, like most guests,
they would not have believed it, for
the sun was shining with the lightest of
breezes. The wedding was to be the
common kind of and: a beautiful place,
the people you love, delicious
things to eat and drink, with money spent
wisely to reflect your values. C’s
family had been helpful. Her father suggested
the place at the tip of the peninsula.
A caterer C had worked for during high school
freed up his only questionable date.
C’s mother provided stamps for the
invitations; her younger sister, flowers; and
older sister, drinks. An old family friend and
baker made the wedding cake.
There was a small worry that some of C’s loved
aunts and uncles might not be
comfortable with same-sex couples. However,
the extended family members all
came – there was everything to celebrate. The
author learned that a wedding is
useful for getting families together. Love is
not a private &. It is
a genealogical & that signifies a
confluence of families and their
generations. In some ways the wedding may have
seemed traditional to some of the
dappled bunch gathered – walking the aisle,
exchanging rings etc. The author
would change nothing – including the two final
movements.
After the ceremony,
the toasts, dessert, and nightfall,
the guests sat in groups or danced. There came
a wallop of thunder that the
author thought was a falling walnut tree – and
yes a stampede for shelter. Then
C remembered the marriage license had not been
completed. The officiant, a
friend from the UK, was catching up on jet
lag. She was roused and happily
completed the marriage license so that it was
(just) dated on the day of the
wedding!
Next there are
thoughts about the mixtures of feelings
of pain or annoyance or contentment. The grab
bag of reactions is the real
thing. Love is the totality of ways you feel
while in love; grief is the
totality of ways you feel while grieving. The
author’s memorial for her father
was one of the greatest parties ever attended
– the service somber, loving and
elegiac. She loved the people who loved her
father – especially then, with laughter,
stories and simple kindness. As she looks at a
wedding picture of her and her mother,
she suddenly feels the pang at the blank side
of her where it looks like her
father has been edited out. She writes: “Life
goes by contraries: it is by
turns crushing and restorative, busy and
boring, awful and absurd, comic and
uplifting.”
The author
describes the routine of their lives in
the house they share, their work and their
surroundings. C’s father once told
the author that as an average person he had
led a remarkable life. He married
the love of his life and raised three
wonderful children while working as a farmer,
grocery store clerk, a custodian and a
caretaker. Yet he had met four
presidents – one who gave a speech on the
Eastern Shore, two who employed his
eldest daughter, one who spoke at C’s college
graduation and he had found a falling
star. The author understood. She feels her
days are exceptional even when they
are ordinary – spectacular wonders are not
needed to fill us with
amazement.
We live remarkable lives
because life itself is remarkable. Lately she
has found the everyday
remarkableness almost overwhelming – the
emotion has no name in English but it
exists in portuguese and Japanese. It is the
feeling of registering our existential
condition: how lovely life is. And how
fragile, and how fleeting.
She muses why we
all aren’t overcome more often by
the mingled sense of gratitude and grief –
perhaps enhanced for her by the
closeness of the finding of C and the losing
of her father. Yet finding brings
the awareness of losing. Now your bliss has
appeared; now at any moment it may
vanish. “It is not whether you will lose loved
ones; there is only the how and
the when.” Perhaps we will be among the
fortunate; loved ones will die peacefully
in old age surrounded by their children and
grandchildren. What a cruelty that
love which wants to tend and protect should
ultimately be so powerless to do
so. We can only relegate to fate the most
important thing in our lives -- the
well-being of those we hold dearest. She
sometimes worries that someday C will
leave her alone in an unbanishable darkness.
Which of them will die first they
wonder. She cannot forget the heartbreaking
line from a great uncle widowed
after 62 years: How fortunate I have been –
and yet I wanted it to last longer.
Finding love is the first problem. Then the
enduring problem is how to live
with the fact that we will lose it.
This particular
anniversary of her father’s death
comes hard. She does not lament that there is
no memorial headstone, no ashes –
his body was donated to medical science. And
so much had happened: celebrating
marriages of other couples and helping one
divorcee dispose of the belongings from
her failed marriage. Then the author’s mother
needed a heart valve replacement.
Life goes on after one falls in love.
Eventually some new development will
command your attention – another of the ideas
implicit in &. Yes,
life goes on, but we do not. We stop. The
universe is large, we are
insignificant, and it’s easy to fell small and
powerless. It’s easy too to feel
amazed and fortunate to be here. What serves
best when we face inexorable loss
is not grief or acquiescence but our
attention. Our works in art or honorable
deeds or acts of kindness link us to future
generations – and so does having
children. The author feels this because she
and C are expecting a baby. She
remembers how her father had arrived in
America. 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. “We are here to keep
watch, not to keep.”