Our Lives Are an Endless Series of 'And'
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What are the challenges of holding multiple emotions at once?
I don't know how to hold all the feelings, even all the thoughts I should have in a day right now. The emergency is here and the kids need help with their homework. I have friends who have fallen terribly ill and others who have just seen their test results come back clear. I spend days covering efforts to rip healthcare from people and torch the global economy. And then I'm supposed to go to a birthday party. I look down at my phone at smoldering ruins in Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan, and then I look up into a spring day. I know on some level this is always true, that we are just more or less alive to it at different times. But I guess I'm feeling more alive to it right now, more overwhelmed by it right now, more curious about how to keep myself open to it right now. And then I ran into this unusually beautiful book that's all about this experience. It's called Lost and Found. It's by Katherine Schultz, a writer at The New Yorker. And it's structured around a loss, that of her father.
around a finding, that of finding and falling in love with her partner. And then it's this really moving meditation on the way it's all connected. The way that we, quote, live with both at once, with many things at once, everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything. It seemed worth a conversation. Katherine Schultz, welcome to the show.
How does loss and grief shape our understanding of life?
I'm delighted to be here. Thanks so much.
I want to start by having you tell me a bit about your father. Where did he come from?
What a wonderful question to begin with, because it has these kind of two valences, the practical matter of where he came from and the kind of mystifying question of where any human being and all their wonderful specificity comes from. In the case of my father, both answers are a little complicated. His mother had fled the shtetl in Poland when it was clear that the shadow of the Second World War was kind of creeping ever further across Poland. She came from a family of 12. They had the resources to get one of them to safety, and they chose their youngest daughter, who was my grandmother, and indeed her parents. And most of her siblings subsequently perished in Auschwitz. So she gets herself to Tel Aviv. My father is born.
And then at a very young age, he was sent away from his mother. He was sent to live on a kibbutz and spent a few years alone there. His father vanishes or dies. We don't know. My grandmother remarries. And after the war, their family in a truly unusual trajectory when half of global Jewry in its terrible decimated and refugee status is trying to get to the Holy Land. My father and his family flee Tel Aviv and go of all places in the world to Germany. So my father left Tel Aviv at about seven, spent from seven to 12 in Germany, and then finally the family obtained refugee visas and wound up in Detroit, which is where he then spent his teenage years.
You have a beautiful passage about your father being on the boat, coming to America, and trying to conceive of how much turmoil and loss he had already experienced. Tell me a bit about how much dislocation he'd seen before the age of 12.
Just shocking amounts, really. I mean, my father was born in 1941, so all around him, what should have been whole vast branches of family trees are just being hewn off viciously, and whole communities are being leveled and destroyed. So there was this kind of background dislocation attendant upon every Jew born in that But then quite specifically, you know, he was born essentially a stranger in a strange land. In 1948, when my father's family left Israel, or I should say left Palestine, it was still Palestine, it was effectively a war zone. And indeed, an uncle who was traveling with him in the caravan to Haifa to leave at the port there was shot and killed in the car with my father in the car in the backseat when it happened.
What does Kathryn Schulz say about her father's life experiences?
There was a kind of omnipresent violence and insecurity that characterized his young life that is just shocking for me to contemplate, in part because he then dedicated his adult life to providing for his children the stability he did not have growing up.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What are the challenges of holding multiple emotions at once?
0:29–2:02
2
How does loss and grief shape our understanding of life?
2:02–4:58
3
What does Kathryn Schulz say about her father's life experiences?
4:58–18:29
4
How do we balance attention between personal joys and global tragedies?
18:29–33:34
5
What insights can grief provide about the beauty of life?
33:34–41:30
6
How do our experiences shape our attention to life's fragility?
41:30–53:56
7
What wisdom can we gain from recognizing our mortality?
53:56–1:04:01
8
How can moments of awe sustain our souls?
1:04:01–1:06:10