Lost & Found

Chapter 1

I have always disliked euphemisms for dying. Passed away, gone home, no longer with us, departed : although language like this is well-intentioned, it has never brought me any solace. In the name of tact, it turns away from death s shocking bluntness; in the name of comfort, it chooses the safe and familiar over the beautiful or evocative. To me, all this feels evasive, like a verbal averting of the eyes. But death is so impossible to avoid that is the basic, bedrock fact of it that trying to talk around it seems misguided. As the poet Robert Lowell wrote, Why not say what happened?

Yet there is one exception to this preference of mine. I lost my father : he had barely been dead ten days when I first heard myself use that expression. I was home again by then, after the long unmoored weeks by his side in the hospital, after the death, after the memorial service, thrust back into a life that looked exactly as it had before I left, orderly and daylit, its mundane obligations rendered exhausting by grief. My phone was lodged between my shoulder and my chin. While my father had been in a cardiac unit and then an intensive care unit and then in hospice care, dying, I had received a series of automated messages from the magazine where I work, informing me that I would be locked out of my email if I did not change my password. These arrived with clockwork regularity, reminding me that my access would expire in ten days, in nine days, in eight days, in seven days. It is remarkable how the ordinary and the existential are always stuck together, like the pages in a book so timeworn that the print has transferred from one to the other. I did not fix the password problem. I did lose the access and, with it, any means to solve the problem on my own. And so, after my father died, I found myself on the phone with a customer service representative, explaining, although it was absolutely unnecessary to do so, why I had neglected to address the issue in a

Kathryn Schulz

In an ocean of churning cynicism and despair, this is a winning bet. The New York Times

Sublime, compassionate . . . brilliant. Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Lost & Found exemplifies the best of what memoir can do. Oprah Daily

An extraordinary gift of a book, a tender, searching meditation on love and loss and what it means to be human. I wept at it, laughed with it, was entirely fascinated by it. I emerged feeling as if the world around me had been made anew. Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk and Vesper Flights

An unfolding astonishment to read. Alison Bechdel, author of The Secret to Human Strength and Fun Home

Kathryn Schulz has created a masterpiece of metaphysical insight, at once richly lyrical and piercingly specific. Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree

Our lives do indeed deserve and reward the kind of honest, gentle, brilliant scrutiny Schulz brings to bear on her own life. The book is profound and beautiful. Marilynne Robinson, author of Housekeeping and Gilead

Lost & Found is the most daring of books: a memoir by a happy person. Deeply felt and exquisitely written, it s an absorbing exploration of love and loss not to mention meteorites, Dante, and bears. The prodigiously talented Kathryn Schulz has written about her life in a way that will change yours. Andy Borowitz, of The Borowitz Report

Lost & Found is a deeply moving, richly illuminating exploration of loss and bliss. Schulz is never anything but the very best company, speaking nuanced truths from and about the deepest reaches of the heart. Leslie Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn

Kathryn Schulz has a singular way of turning a familiar idea around and around until it becomes cosmic, geological, wondrous. In Lost & Found she turns a memoir of love and death into an exploration of the way chance becomes