You have learned a valuable lesson. You should never rely on anyone or anything else to save your files. You should name and save a file within the first 5-15 minutes of work and every 5-15 minutes thereafter, depending on how much work you're willing to
recreate. Whenever your hands pause on the keyboard, press Ctrl+S.
Meanwhile, go to File | Options | Save and make sure that you actually have the check boxes for "Save AutoRecover information" and "Keep the last autosaved version if I close without saving" checked.
It may be some consolation that a four-page essay is not really a very long document, and you will almost certainly be able to recreate it in less time than you spent on the initial writing. And because you've had time to think about it some more, the second
version may well be better than the first.
