grief
What grief we’d avoid if we knew how to transfer emotional experience across generations, as we do money or scientific knowledge.
Twitter, April 9, 2010.
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
Entry dated July 18, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 162.
It may sound greedy to want more days with a person who lived so long, but the fact that my mother was ninety-two does not diminish—it only magnifies—the enormity of the room whose door has now quietly shut.
Stephen Colbert’s tribute to his mother, Lorna Tuck Colbert, on The Colbert Report, June 19, 2013.
A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll have to get used to existing quite naturally within this solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, fastened to the “presence of absence.”
Entry dated November 28, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 69.
Sorrow almost resents love, it is so inflamed.
January 1878 letter to Mrs. Samuel Bowles, in Emily Dickinson Letters, Emily Fragos ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 198.
I wish one could be sure the suffering had a loving side. The thought to look down some day, and see the crooked steps we came, from a safer place, must be a precious thing…
May 1862 letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, in Emily Dickinson Letters, Emily Fragos ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 194.
We are in many many troubles for the moment, so many that grief loses its dignity and bursts out laughing.
July 9, 1931 letter to Louis Untermeyer from North Bennington, Vermont, in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 209.
My overcoat is so dreary that I know maman would never have tolerated the black or gray scarf I always wear with it, and I keep hearing her voice telling me to wear a little color.
For the first time, then, I decide to wear a colored scarf (Scotch plaid).
Entry dated March 6, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 99.
Exploration of my (apparently vital) need of solitude: and yet I have a (no less vital) need of my friends.
I must therefore: 1) force myself to “call” them from time to time, find the energy to do so, combat my—telephonic (among other kinds)—apathy; 2) ask them to understand that above all they must let me call them. If they less often, less systematically, got in touch with me, that would mean for me that I must get in touch with them.
Entry dated August 3, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 181.
Disappointment of various places and trips. Not really comfortable anywhere. Very soon, this cry: I want to go back! (but where? since she is no longer anywhere, who was once where I could go back). I am seeking my place. Sitio.
Entry dated August 1, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 176.
Everything began all over again immediately: arrival of manuscripts, requests, people’s stories, each person mercilessly pushing ahead his own little demand (for love, for gratitude): no sooner has she departed than the world deafens me with its continuance.
Entry dated June 15, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 146.
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
Entry dated January 22, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 91.