(b. 1978– )
U.S. pop culture historian and author
Saul Austerlitz
My friend was irreplaceable, and her death left a jagged hole I will spend the rest of my life tiptoeing around the edges of. Writing about her loss—to her husband, now a widower, and her mother—was an opportunity to play geographer, and draw a map of the contours of our shared sorrow.
“The Lost Art of the Condolence Letter,” New York Times, February 10, 2014.
I do not know if the condolence letters I wrote helped the people I wrote to. I suspect they didn’t. The task was simply too large. But I felt momentarily better after finishing each condolence letter, not because I had any conviction of having provided genuine consolation, but because by setting down words on paper, I had preserved something ephemeral, endangered. Emotions were pinned to the page like rare butterflies, no longer flapping around indiscriminately, glimpsed only as they fluttered off, but preserved for future study.
“The Lost Art of the Condolence Letter,” New York Times, February 10, 2014.