lost and wanted - what it means to grieve

Nell Freudenberger at Politics and Prose

This evening I had the privilege of introducing Nell Freudenberger at Politics and Prose to discuss her new novel Lost and Wanted.   I've been looking forward to this novel since reading her second book The Newlyweds in 2012.  In The Newlyweds she asked us to look at the perceptions of self in the marriage between an American engineer and his Bangladeshi wife, who meet on an internet dating app.

In preparing to introduce this evening's event, I went back to look at a review I'd written of The Newlyweds for Washington Independent Review of Books and  saw that I'd quoted an interesting passage.

"You thought you were a permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together - until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did."  Freudenberger returns to this same idea in Lost and Wanted  - but she expands upon it in new  ways.

The narrator in Lost and Wanted is a physics professor at MIT who is mourning the death of her Harvard roommate Charlie.   Helen is known for her work on five dimensional spacetime, but when she receives a text message from Charlie after Charlie's death, she looks back on the friendship and revisits memories that alter with perspective.

As the novel progresses, we see Charlie through the eyes of other people: grieving parents, her husband and her daughter.  It's a novel about parenting, surrogacy, career choices and what it means to grieve, and it's as intellectually rich as it is emotionally resonant.

At tonight's event the audience asked some fascinating questions.  One guy talked about his brother -only one and a half years separated from him in age, who had grown up in the same household, and yet who now was lost to him, in that they were on completely different wave lengths. Were this man not his brother, the speaker maintained, they would not have a thing in common.

Yet at the same time, he remarked that he also had friends he hasn't seen for decades.  But when he does finally see them, they instantly strike up the same rapport they enjoyed so many years before.

What does all this mean?

Dolen Perkins Valdez, author and member of the Pen/Faulkner Foundation Board of Directors, was in  conversation with Nell this evening and she raised a point about five dimensional spacetime.  Astrophysicists have been able to pick up the echos of a collision of two black holes,  she said,  ripples from 1000 years ago.  Their echoes persist, just as the echoes of grief can persist.  We think we are over grief,  but it resurfaces again and again.

This is what I'd like to know:  Why do we connect with particular people, feel we can start off again where we left off, no matter the passage of time, while even those with whom we may have daily experiences in common, can sometimes head off on a divergent mental path and become lost to us forever.

What is this question of connection and reconnection;  of parallel lives; of lives that fold over upon themselves; of threads which connect our consciousness to some, which string us together and break us apart.  And when we think of those who have died, or those who seem to be lost to us, can they feel the ripples of emotion?

These are some of the things we talked about tonight.

#lostandwanted #freudenberger