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The first-person narrator of Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow and Samantha Hughes, the main character in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country, encounter life-changing peripeteias long before they reach adulthood. They both focus on young men whom they never knew through direct experience. These men are fallen soldiers and at the age of 19 their deaths are not only violent, but premature and tragic. Upon reaching a resolve to know more about their own lives Timm's narrator and Samantha Hughes explore the lives of these figures who would have otherwise played a significant role in their lives. The protagonists of these novels investigate Karl-Heinz Timm and Dwayne Hughes through time from the panoptic view of the present. Uwe Timm examines the familial memories and the relics of his significantly older brother killed on the eastern front in October of 1943. Mason depicts an adolescent, born in October 1966 now almost majority age who never knew her father because he was killed in Vietnam one month before her birth. Both protagonists refer to themselves as an "afterthought" (Timm 4; Mason 184). In their own eyes they are low in the family hierarchy. The latency of their willingness to face the past and ask questions leads to processing their familial losses indirectly through the memories and stories of others. We encounter a paradox in an expression such as the presence of loss, or the presence of an absence, but this paradox affords both narratives the tenor of eulogies situated in everyday living. This essay examines the junctures of daily living and loss in order to reveal the uneasy resonance that manifests itself between the permanence of loss and the durability of practices of everyday life. Timm and Mason make loss visible in the preparation of food, in distractions of reading and watching TV, having parties, in innocuous self-destructive moments of rebellion, earning money, going shopping, and ultimately recognizing the geography of loss whether it is located in the Ukraine or entails visiting the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.