When Things Go Missing from The New Yorker

 

"When Things Go Missing," written by Kathryn Schulz in 2017 for The New Yorker, is a piece I've gone back to read over and over in the past five years since it was published. Schulz reflects on her own losses; her father passing away in September of 2016 after being ill for a period of time, losing another family member to terminal cancer just 3 weeks later, her hometown baseball team losing the World Series, and Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 Presidential election. 

When this piece was pushed out into the world, it felt like it was written just for me. I had just experienced two huge losses in December 2016, the murder-suicide of two family friends. The year before, in September 2015 my nana passed away from liver cancer and two months later in November, my uncle passed away from a sudden heart attack. Experiencing these losses as a freshman and sophomore in high school, respectively, I had no idea how to handle death or loss at all, that is never something you're taught so you have to figure it out on your own. Schulz writes, "Now, obliged to carry onward through time, I realized I didn't know how." 

In the transitional phase I found myself in, still grieving but simultaneously trying to mourn so I could go back to functioning at school, home, and work, I quickly realized I had no idea how and I felt very much alone.  Schulz' piece made me feel a little bit less alone when navigating finally mourning all of my losses from the years prior, and I still find myself going back to it when I begin to let those feelings bubble up again. "Loss is a kind of external conscience," Schulz wrote, "urging us to make better use of our finite days."