Summary

The first part of the memoir “Lost” begins with the narrator proclaiming that she dislikes euphemisms for death, as they feel, to her, evasive. However, she cites one exception to this preference in the phrase: “I lost my father” (Schulz 3). Schulz describes the days immediately after her father’s death and memorial service as laughably mundane, pointing to the confusion that she felt during this period. She then turns to contemplation of the meanings inherent in the act of losing and the idea of loss, arriving at the essential nature of loss as that “it encompasses, without distinction, the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone” (6).

There are several explanations for losing an object that Schulz takes interest in, specifically scientific and psychoanalytic ones. She quotes Elizabeth Bishop’s idea, rooted in psychoanalysis, that...