mourning
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.
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.
Poor old Black Dog. I miss him. In the early morning when I work, he’s not there on the kudu skin beside the typewriter; and in the afternoon when I swim, he’s not hunting lizards beside the pool; and in the evenings when I sit in my chair to read, his chin isn’t resting on my foot. I miss Black Dog as much as I miss any friend I ever lost.
Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir, by A. E. Hotchner (New York: Da Capo Press, 2005), 243.
I want to tell you that Rose was an extraordinary dog, bossy and demanding of attention, comforting in her very presence. Famously, she first appeared in the pages of Vogue fifteen years ago. I told the story of her puppyhood and our first meeting in a popular article that was later reprinted and anthologized. She sat on my shoulder in book-jacket photographs. When she was very dirty after a run, I would tell her to go get in the bathtub, and she would. She once scampered onto the headrest of my parked car, made a vertical leap through the open sunroof, and ran across the parking lot, into the grocery store, and up and down every aisle until she found me. She was loyal and brave and as smart as a treeful of owls. By explaining her talents and legions of virtues, though, I would not be making my point, which is that the death of my dog hit me harder than the deaths of many people I have known, and this can’t be explained away by saying how good she was. She was. But what I was feeling was something else entirely.
“The Sense of an Ending,” Vogue, Sept 2012.
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.
Carlo died—
Would you instruct me now?
The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 449.
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.
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.