I just came across this sentence:

Everyone has lost his country, his home, his equilibrium.

I've seen such structure used numerous times but I'm not sure how this works. What effect does it have on the sentence to remove and before the final item of the list? What rule of grammar makes this sentence grammatically correct? In terms of grammar, how do the two sentences below differ?

He sat there thinking about the past, the future.

He sat there thinking about the past and the future.

My guess was that instead of creating a list, such sentences added bracketing phrases/clauses. I'm not sure if that's the case, though, since the information added sometimes appears to be unrelated to what has come before and essential to the sentence. For instance, thoughts about the future are more important than thoughts about the past in the sentence above.