GRIEVER's EXCHANGE // Lost AND Found
Every year for what feels like most of my life (but is really more like 15 years or so) I compiled a holiday shopping guide of some sort or another, for some magazine or newspaper or website or another. Even though I always over-indexed on small, local, and independent goods that were thoughtfully and meaningfully made by real people like you and me, I blame and credit those shopping guides with my mounting ambivalence about the holidays in general, and my extreme, utter distaste for the Holiday Gift-Giving Industrial Complex. But/and, it’s hard not to frame the book featured in this iteration of GRIEVER’s EXCHANGE as the ~perfect last minute~ option for everyone on your list or at least the grievers, or at least the lovers. (Gift with purchase: Those two are one and the same.)
Pretty much everyone who was living in the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2015 remembers, viscerally, when the New Yorker published “The Really Big One.” Subtitle: “An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when.” Yes, it was terrifying but that wasn’t the only thing that rendered it riveting. We couldn’t tear ourselves away because the person behind it delivered the complex scientific facts such that we could fully comprehend them—and at the very same time, somewhat paradoxically, roll right through them. It’s no wonder that person, Kathryn Schulz, now owns a Pulitzer for it.
It’s with that same care and carefulness and precision and absolute flow that Schulz offers in Lost & Found. Released last month (Nov. ‘22), Lost and Found is a memoir and a meditation in three parts; one for each word in the title—including ‘and.’
Schulz jumps right into Part One with that old saw we hear so often in early stages of grief: “I’m sorry for your loss.” After receiving the sentiment (been there, anyone?) following the sudden and jarring death of her father, she’s drawn in by literature and history’s simple but under-examined meanings and metaphors of loss and of losing things, including but not limited to their application after a death. What unfurls—and really it feels like that: like a dance, like a river, like the best conversations—is an intellectual, philosophical, cultural, emotional, and brilliant study.
And alongside it, a story; the story of losing her dad.
Part Two is about finding love—somewhat accidentally when she gets set up without really realizing it’s a set-up with a writer she calls “C.” The story of falling for this familiar and not-familiar woman, and the intertwined study of literature and history’s bigger concepts embedded in finding and being found, are, again, uncannily intelligent and clever and lyrical and personal and universal. Page after page, Schulz tells us things we didn’t know we knew about ourselves, and things we didn’t know we needed to know about the world. These wonderfully brain-y but easy to receive references range from obscure hallucination types afflicting both the grief stricken and those in solitary confinement to a recurring, unfolding motif of Beatrice Portinari and Dante (as in Alighieri) and the romantic landmark created when he found her, falling hard and instantaneously, at the ripe old age of 9.
By the time she ties everything together by slicing, dicing, considering, and cogitating on the simple, mostly unnoticed, practically invisible word ‘and,’ I felt comforted to my bones that these three words are forever linked and fated. Can’t have one without the other, and the other one, too. We are lost and we are found, over and over across the expanse of our lives. And so too are those we love the most. We lose them, and we find them. Romantically, familially, within communities, within friendships, when we’re young, when we’re old. It’s both comforting and discomforting—which is the point, of Schulz’s book and of the grief and death awareness that we’re engaged in right here and right now.