Lost & Found

This book reads as both a love story and also an existential lecture on the need to appreciate life. The writing is so rich and empowering that as a reader I found myself connecting far beyond the text to my own past and my own future. A truly wonderful reading experience!

I initially bought the book due to its amazing reviews. I am confused as it was rated as one of the worst books from my book club and one of the first books I couldn’t even get past the first chapter. It’s awfully boring, unremarkable not relatable.

Memoirs get an auto five stars from me, I'm not here to rate anyone's life and especially not anyone's grief.I am not the targeted audience for this book. Having buried my baby sister at the age of thirty, it's difficult to read about someone's grief who has their father until their seventies. The part where she felt jealous of friends whose fathers lived until their nineties was difficult to swallow.My experience of grief in the last 16 months has been messy, unpredictable and life has stripped by back to its dirtiest, rawest form. This prose here is full of flowers, blissfully idyllic, meandering down country lanes filled with butterflies which made it unrelatable.Unfortunately the only take away for me was how the alphabet once included &.Your mileage is going to vary here relating to your own grief experience.

Like Kathryn and Casey, I found a beautiful, deeply connected love with my spouse, Carol. She was the center of my life for 47 years, and we couldn't have asked for a more perfect union. Neither of us could imagine being the one left when one of us died. That role fell to me in 2017. I felt like Carol and I continued the story that Kathryn and Casey began.It was so familiar to read about how Kathryn grappled with the fear of losing Casey and the ways she worked on not allowing it to pull her from life's present pleasures. Last month, I finished a manuscript about my journey through grief. I describe how I went from standing at the edge of a black abyss that was drawing me in to confronting the challenges of my altered world. I began to see not only what I lost but all I gained from living in the presence of the one I loved so dearly. The love we shared gave me the foundation on which I could gradually learn to stand.Kathryn may never see this review, but I'm here to tell her and others like her that going through this transition takes a ton of courage, but gratitude for what we had and continue to have together makes it possible to grow around the sadness and find new meaning in life.Lost and Found is a beautifully written book about love and loss and the ways we're all a jumbled mass of feelings related to both as we forge our way through the years. May we all have a rich, happy life together before we need to face any separation, and may we all know that love never ends. Never.

I really enjoyed this book, but the twist at the end was strange. I'm not sure if it would have been better carrying on the story in the way that readers expected. It was a great book anyway.