Irene

“And we love as we mourn, with wildly variegated, equally sincere emotions. In addition to everything lofty and lusty, love is also being hurt when your wife is brusque with you or annoyed when you realize that your husband has walked past the cat vomit all day without cleaning it up; it is alternately intervening and forbearing when your beloved bites her nails, and listening patiently as your partner vents at length about his boss when you really just want to get back to reading your book. There is no enduring love on the planet, nor ever has been, that isn’t characterized by these crisscrossing moods. “Whoever supposes,” Montaigne once wrote, “to see me look sometimes coldly, sometimes lovingly, on my wife, that either look is feigned, is a fool.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

“All of this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet. And it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground. Still, the cave is a cave.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

“Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

“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… Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, 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.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir