Lost & Found: A Memoir

Lost & Found is a memoir in three parts. "Lost," "Found," and "And" each explore one of these concepts through the intertwined stories of Kathryn Schulz's grief over the death of her father and her love for a woman she identifies only as C.

Part I opens with Schulz reflecting on the language of loss. Shortly after her father's death, she found herself telling a customer service representative, "I lost my father," and was struck by the phrase's aptness. She traces the etymology of "to lose," discovering its root in sorrow: an Old English word meaning "to perish." She began cataloguing everything she had ever lost, recognizing loss as an enormous category encompassing the trivial and the catastrophic alike.

Schulz introduces her father, Isaac Schulz, through his defining traits: a booming voice, fluency in six languages, formidable intellect, and chronic absentmindedness. A lawyer by training, Isaac possessed a prodigious memory yet rarely knew where he had parked his car. His wife, Margot, a French teacher, nearly always located whatever he had misplaced. Schulz connects Isaac's equanimity about lost objects to Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art," which suggests minor losses might prepare us for major ones.

From Isaac's absentmindedness, Schulz turns to the devastating losses of his childhood. His mother grew up on a shtetl, a small Jewish settlement outside Łódź, Poland, and was sent to safety in Tel Aviv, where she married and had Isaac. As a toddler, Isaac was sent to a kibbutz, a communal settlement, to be raised among strangers. His biological father died while he was there; his mother remarried, a fact Isaac learned only on his wedding night. Every member of his grandmother's family remaining in Poland was sent to Auschwitz; her parents and 9 of 10 siblings perished. When the family emigrated in 1948, the journey was perilous: Isaac's uncle was shot and killed in the car, and seven-year-old Isaac watched from the back seat. After four years in Germany, the family sailed to America in 1952. In Detroit, Isaac graduated as class valedictorian, was twice expelled from the University of Michigan, served in Korea, and upon his return married Margot, went to law school, and settled in Cleveland.

Schulz chronicles Isaac's long decline in old age. Over nearly a decade, he endured kidney disease, congestive heart failure, and numerous other ailments. Most alarming was a period of apparent cognitive decline. Schulz's sister, a cognitive scientist, eventually traced the deterioration to the side effects of Isaac's many medications. Once doctors discontinued the non-essential drugs, his mental faculties returned almost overnight, but his other losses compounded: He could no longer practice law, travel, or drive.

Isaac's final hospitalization came when he was admitted for atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm. His heart stabilized, but his condition worsened until he stopped speaking entirely. The family spent two weeks in the ICU without a diagnosis. Finally, two doctors who were Isaac's personal friends told the family they would let him go. The family decided to discontinue treatment. The night before his transfer to hospice, they gathered to express their gratitude. Isaac, mute but alert, looked from face to face, his eyes shining with tears. He died early one morning.

A cascade of further losses followed. Another family member died; Schulz's hometown Cleveland team lost the World Series; Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election. Schulz could not separate these events from her grief for her father. She lost all motivation and began going outside hoping to feel Isaac's presence, as she had with other deceased loved ones. Her searches never succeeded. She describes his absence as total, borrowing C. S. Lewis's words from A Grief Observed: "the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero."

Part II opens with the story of C.'s father, an 11-year-old boy named Billy, who, walking home one summer evening, saw something hurtling from the sky. The next day he returned and found a meteorite, smooth and heavy, starkly out of place in the soil. Schulz uses this discovery to introduce two forms of finding: recovery, which restores something previously lost, and discovery, which gives us something entirely new. She states plainly what made her father's death bearable: the year before he died, she fell in love.

Schulz explores how finding works, examining Meno's paradox, the ancient philosophical puzzle that you cannot find what you do not know, yet need not search for what you already do. She then reveals Billy's story: He was a foundling, adopted by a poor but loving couple. He buried both adoptive parents before turning 25, married a woman named Sandy, and together they built a log cabin by hand.

Schulz describes meeting C. in her Hudson Valley town. C. had driven from Maryland; a mutual friend had introduced them by email. Over a long conversation at a café, Schulz felt drawn to C.'s intelligence and seriousness. That evening, C. emailed suggesting dinner. Two things happened almost simultaneously: Schulz realized C. dated women, and she knew she would say yes. Their second date lasted 19 days. Watching C. work at a picnic table through her front window one morning, Schulz called her sister and said she had met the woman she was going to marry.

Their differences were striking. C. grew up on Maryland's rural Eastern Shore, where her parents did not attend college. She attended Harvard on scholarship and Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Schulz is Jewish and atheist; C. is a devout Lutheran who studied theology. Yet their minds orient toward the same existential questions. When Schulz took C. to meet Isaac, he greeted them warmly. When he insisted C. call him by his first name, she replied, "Okay, Sir Isaac," and he laughed with delight. Schulz recognized similarities between C. and her father: Both had steered themselves from one world into another by force of intellect. When C. asked how Schulz's parents had met, the old story snapped into focus: Isaac's best friend Lee Larson had been dating Margot before introducing her to Isaac. Schulz realized she had recognized love because she had seen it from her earliest days.

Part II concludes by revealing that Billy is C.'s father, Bill. On her first visit to C.'s childhood home, Schulz saw the meteorite resting on the hearth by the woodstove, connecting the finding story to the love story.

Part III, "And," narrows from the geological history of the Chesapeake Bay to the point of land where Schulz and C. married one May afternoon. Schulz explores the word "and," arguing that conjunction lies close to the origins of both thought and morality. She narrates proposing to C. with her father's wedding ring on an evening C. returned from Ash Wednesday services. The wedding took place on a spot C.'s father had found on the bay. Just before the ceremony, every guest's phone blared a tornado warning, though the sky was cloudless. Schulz writes that her father's absence was "faint and strangely beautiful, there only because it is always there." A storm struck during the reception, and at midnight the couple realized they had forgotten to sign the marriage license; their officiant, roused from bed, signed them into marriage as lightning cracked behind them.

Schulz reflects on the inseparability of joy and grief, identifying a feeling close to the Portuguese saudade or the Japanese mono no aware: a mingling of gratitude, longing, and anticipatory grief provoked by recognizing how lovely and fleeting life is. The memoir closes on the anniversary of Isaac's death, when C. took Schulz to a local arboretum. Schulz felt at peace and realized that what best serves us in the face of loss is attention. She reveals that she and C. are expecting a baby and acknowledges that everything she has is temporary. But she takes the side of amazement: "Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend," she writes. "We are here to keep watch, not to keep."