A review by legsbian
Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz

emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

I first read When Things Go Missing back in 2017, when it was first published. It's been bookmarked, quoted, recommended, and simply sat with many times since. I had no idea this companion had been published until a few days ago, while browsing a local bookstore waiting for a movie to start.

Overall, I thought it was an excellent extension of the original essay. The first half, all about grief, was excellent. I think I have too many lesbians obsessed with their partners in my life to fully appreciate the second half as much, but it was sweet and meaningful.

Here's some of my favorite lines/passages:
 

“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.” 19

 

“loss has the power to instantly resize us against our surroundings; we are never smaller and the world never larger than when something important goes missing.” 20

 

“Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries;” 50

 

“It was my father, predictably, who gave me the word for the one thing I was doing. In his lifetime, he had possessed an astonishing vocabulary, one so nuanced and capacious that even when it failed him, it succeeded. Once, after I somehow came across the word "circumjoviating" and had to look it up — it means "orbiting around Jupiter" — I challenged him to define it. He thought for perhaps five seconds, then guessed, logically and sublimely: "avoiding God." I have used it that way ever since then — for what other word so concisely describes the experience of ducking one's deity or conscience or responsibilities?” 54

 

“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. […] 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.” 66

 

“This type of circular mourning, the grieving of grief it-self, 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 cold 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.” 67

 

“And just like that, mid-poem, mid-grief, my understanding of loss revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I had been missing about my father—talking with him, laughing with him, sharing my thoughts and feelings in order to hear his own in response—was life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. But the most important thing that had vanished when he died, I realized in that instant, is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All of my memories can't add up to a single moment of what it was like to be him, and all of my loss pales beside his own.  Like Whitman's, my father's love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; he must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind-not just the people he adored, but all of it, sea to shining sea.” 71

  

“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.” 74

 

“This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.” 75