Year-End Letter 2017
El Castillo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Year-end Letter December 2017
David & Ken: Together January 23, 1985 – May 5, 2017
Achilles absent was Achilles still….. The Iliad
She never undertook to know
What death with love should have to doe;
Nor has she e’er yet understood
Why to show love, she should shed blood Richard Crashaw (English poet, 1613 – 1649)
Dear Friend,
I thought last year’s letter was a tough one to write – little did I know! How does one write about a year in which such catastrophic personal loss has taken place, set against the backdrop of a country and a world in deep crisis?
I have done a lot of thinking, needless to say, on what to put down on paper. I will share some of my thoughts and feelings about the experience of losing David and the first steps to move on – not because I think it is terribly important to share my personal journey for its own sake, but because most of us have or will go through, or cause, similar loss, and my hope is that my own evolution may be of some value to another friend.
I will spend less of this letter writing about what I did in the course of the year and my reflections on the world scene. One thing I have decided to do is to include, after the letter itself, some extended quotes from books I have read this year that touched me deeply. I am finding that one of the most consoling activities I have done is to return to great literature. The best authors over the centuries are “great” because they have the ability to plumb the depths of the human condition and human thought and human feeling. To discover, through them, that I while I am suffering I am not alone, has been a help in making it through the days. The passages I have included are there if you wish to dip into them.
LIFE WITHOUT DAVID
May 5, 2017, was a watershed for me, the consequences and influences of which are very slowly emerging and will take years at best to fully make sense of (if ever). It was inevitable – and I knew this all along – that the more intense the love and friendship between two people, the greater would be the price paid when one is lost to the other. To me it is the classic Faustian bargain – to have a great relationship, by far the most significant one of one’s life, you sign up to suffer terribly when it comes to an end.
While countless thoughts relating to David pass through my mind daily, here are a few of the most salient that come to the fore in one form or another. This hardly exhausts how it feels or the myriad ideas that haunt me, but captures some key elements. I don’t defend them, they are not entirely rational, but we are feeling, confused creatures and this is how it often feels.
· The best of my life is behind me – what else is there to look forward to? Nothing much – continuing on, alone, seems pretty pointless;
· Life goes on but all the flavor is missing – like food without salt;
· There is a sense of floating in space, unmoored, with the awful sensation of just drifting away, nothing to ground one;
· I realize how very fortunate I am, with my material needs largely met, with a circle of friends near and far, often going back many decades, and yet without David, it is as if 95% of what made life fully satisfying has vanished;
· To be associated with David gave me a profound sense of worth, indirectly, as his exceptionalism made me feel exceptional in being a part of his life;
· He protected me emotionally, connected me to “reality” and the “real world” – his love felt unconditional, despite seeing me objectively and speaking truth about myself to me;
· He kept me honest – we all make excuses for our behavior, but having had someone who conveyed, with love, constructive honesty was a gift beyond measure;
· Living a long life no longer holds much interest; it would be fine to die any time – once upon a time, in the ancient past (a year ago?) living a long life with my mind in good shape seemed a pretty exciting thing – no more;
· With David I accumulated the cultural food and fat to store up for the long winter ahead that I now face alone – this is what I have to live off of, to burn off in the time remaining – I miss the incredibly rich nourishment – intellectual, cultural – that he heaped upon me, just by being in his presence;
· Everything in the apartment – furniture, kitchen items, books, tchotkes, reflects a life and a world I created with David; while the stability of the look and feel of the place is comforting, more often I find it creates painful associations as it touches on and evokes so many happy, but now in the past, memories;
· Related to the above, I find that many material objects no longer have much importance to me – jewelry, heirloom furniture, nice rugs, etc., etc. – the pleasure I took in them in a shared existence with David has evaporated.
Some conclusions that I have come to at this point:
· This one I always knew: even before our love came trustworthiness – we both had absolute, total, unshakeable trust that the other was honest – emotionally, financially, in every conceivable way; without such total trustworthiness nothing else - absolutely nothing else - counts in a relationship;
· We are, indeed, all of us, ultimately alone in this world, but for me, when David was present, I could ignore that stark truth most of the time; he gave me a sense of safety, and perhaps even more importantly, connection, in a scary world;
· Despite such a loss, I am beginning to see the first glimmers of living my life without him – I can get out of bed in the morning, I can see a time when how the apartment appeared the day he died can be undone, and other signs that life goes on. Right now it is very tough to go away on a trip and return to an empty apartment. In time I have to hope I will get past this point, but there will always be so many reminders and associations letting me know how much is missing;
· One slogs on, taking one day at a time, and overjoyed with immense gratitude for a few moments of unalloyed happiness when you are able to forget briefly how much has vanished.
THIS LAST YEAR WITH DAVID
The obvious focus of 2017 until May 5, was living with David and being his primary caregiver. Although we completely knew what was coming, I am grateful that David remained the David I always knew and admired right up until the end. How much harder to witness the mind and personality of someone you are crazy about disappear slowly though they still are alive. Strangely, even looking back on those days, the fact of death is so overwhelming that you do not face it in each day of care giving – you simply live for that one day and project no further out. So when death comes, it is beyond comprehension. Everything in the apartment still echoes David, everything has associations with him, and it is immeasurably difficult to accept the truth of his permanent “goneness.”
We had a number of people come to us, to pay an unspoken “last visit” to see David. These were very special.
We also made a few trips – a friend’s 80th birthday celebration in Tucson, to Los Angeles and the desert, and finally, just before David died, to New York because we wanted to celebrate my turning 75. It was astounding the inner will he summoned up to make this possible.
As anyone knows who has experienced the death of someone for whom they have legal and financial responsibilities, once David died, my days have been filled with taking care of many affairs, and at this point I am pretty far along, though assembling all the necessary documents for preparing taxes is something I am dreading!
David would have turned 80 on June 11, and I had already planned a big celebration at Santa Fe’s best independent bookstore, which became (and continues to be) the sole sales agent for the beautiful volume of David’s selected poetry, Trueing the Universe: Selected Poems 1990 – 2016, that I had made as a gift to him (fortunately it was completed and the copies shipped to us 2 months before his death). So I went ahead and turned the event into a tribute to David and a celebration of the person he was. I wanted to do it in a way that would have measured up to his high standards. I wanted it to reflect the person he was – elegant, classy, dignified, generous, witty, and somewhat unknowable – and I believe it came off in a way that he would have approved of.
I managed to keep busy over the summer – guide for the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival (Colorado), a outdoors service trip with the National Smokejumpers Association (where I continue to serve as the camp cook), and planning for my big (8 week) trip East to visit many friends in a journey of re-connection.
Friends far and near have been caring and solicitous of me, and it makes me realize how much harder it would be to go through this without the presence of others. Life at El Castillo was a godsend in reminding me that the community of people we came to know was here for me in my most dire time of need.
While I discuss further on some noteworthy books I have read this year, I want to mention, relative to David, one in particular at this juncture. I was given, as a gift, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir by Joyce Carol Oates. Oates is a prolific author of mainly fiction, and some non-fiction, but has not been a favorite of mine. However, almost 10 years ago, her husband, at 77, developed pneumonia, for no obvious reason, and within one week, and entirely unexpectedly, was carried off by massive secondary infection. A Widow’s Story is almost a diary of what she went through in the early months after losing her husband and life companion of 47 years together. It is excruciatingly detailed, but for that very reason a remarkably validating experience for me. To a degree almost unimaginable, she has almost identical thoughts and experiences and reactions as I have had – from meditating, philosophically, about suicide, to dreading returning home from a trip to an empty house, to how the material objects that marked their joint life became nothing more than objects, devoid of an inner spirit that inhabited them when her husband’s living presence gave them meaning. She takes 18 months to remove his voice mail greeting from their phone. Perhaps most uncanny for me, their favorite restaurant in New York was the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park, where David and I went twice after we knew his time was limited, and where I went this past fall to have a meal in remembrance of him and to drink a toast to our wonderful times together. In the final year it became our favorite restaurant in New York Her authorial voice and command of language puts into words what I cannot but while the book has no healing function for me, it lets me know that what I am experiencing is entirely sensible in the face of the senseless. I could not have read this book shortly after David’s death – I would say this interval of 7 months is the minimum time to even begin to understand what Oates is saying. But in a strange way, it is tremendously reassuring.
Here are the final words of the memoir:
Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters:
on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
TRAVEL
This year was not one for travel, what with the focus on David. We did, amazingly, a few relatively brief trips right up to “the end.” In early March we drove to Tucson to celebrate a good friend’s 80th birthday. At the beginning of April David and I made a 5-day trip to Los Angeles (to see, amongst other museums, the new Broad) and on to the Anza-Borrego Desert, a favorite place, which was experiencing a “superbloom” wildflower spring. Most incredible of all, David wanted to do a trip to New York to celebrate my 75th birthday, and we went in late April. While David was quite weak by then, we did a stunning number of things together, even though I decided to cut the trip short a few days. One week later, he was gone! I think of that New York trip with amazement that we did it, but at the same time with unbearable, wistful pain when I realize what courage David must have summoned up to make it happen, and with the further realization that it was the last time I would ever experience the cultural richness of New York with him.
My big “trip” in 2017, was an 8-week “Odyssey” to see friends and family up and down the East Coast from North Carolina to Massachusetts. It was a complex journey, whose purpose I could not see clearly before going on it, and yet somehow, it seemed important to do. I came back having had an extraordinary range of experiences and making many observations, which I have written up for my own contemplation.
I did continue the tradition of semi-annual 8-10 day camping trips with the friend I have been doing this with for quite a number of years. Shortly after David died, we stuck to our original plan for a late May trip and went up to the Western plains, which has a stunning number of wild places to visit. And in November, we explored some of the very best of Texas state parks, along with Padre Island National Seashore on the Gulf Coast and Guadalupe Mountains National Park in far West Texas.
In the spirit of spontaneity, at rather the last moment, I decided to work out a plan with Denver friends to see the total eclipse of the sun, and for all the driving time versus eclipse-watching minutes, it was nevertheless completely worth it – an experience unlike any I have ever had. We were right on the centerline of the “zone of totality” in western Nebraska, in the midst of the rolling, expansive short-grass prairie – a few moments never to be forgotten.
I also decided, somewhat spontaneously, to take the train out to Los Angeles after Thanksgiving for the big Pacific Standard Time art event focusing on Latin America. This is going on for 5 months and virtually every museum in the LA area (and beyond, from San Diego to Santa Barbara) is participating. I decided it would be fun to check it out and see how I did on my own.
I have made a decision to finesse what travel in the future will become for me without David by trying out group trips in 2018, and putting off for a year what “independent travel” means going forward. David and my trips were such a special part of our relationship it is hard to contemplate travel without him, so I am giving myself a year “off.” I am trying out a Road Scholar trip in January (Vietnam), the Coast-to-Coast walk in north England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea in May or June (it is a famous 190-mile walk), and possibly a Sierra Club birding trip to Israel next November during the height of bird migration (plus a chance to visit Israeli friends and get to Petra and a few other sites in Jordan). If I resume independent travel as I hope I will, I think in the first few years it will have to be to places I never explored with David. As much as I want to return to Italy – especially Rome – I have to give it a few years. Italy, more than any other place, was a magical destination for us as it combined everything we most enjoyed together– art, history, fashion and style, food, wine, and perhaps most of all, the enthusiasm and spirit with which Italians live and enjoy life.
My hope is that by 2019 I will be far enough along to have some ideas of what future travel will be like – adventure trips, bicycling tours (which I have considered doing but never quite pulled off, and more walking trips, and as mentioned, independent travel to places not previously explored.
READING
This was a year of particularly rich readings, significantly aided by my 8-week trip East, which gave me many hours (often in the early morning) to read books that required total concentration.
Sticking to my scheme to read one novel (in order) of Proust’s 7-novel set, In Search of Lost Time, I read the 2nd, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. I was fortunate to purchase a copy of the original English translation by Scott Moncrieff (still considered the best), but annotated and slightly revised to reflect closer fidelity to Proust’s sexual allusions. It is a beautiful translation and the richness of Proust’s writing style hit me full force with this novel. I could only read 40 pages per day, not only because the writing style is so complex but also because it is so utterly rich. To have read more in a single sitting would have been like consuming an entire loaf of pâté all at once, instead of a slice or two. Unfortunately, William Carter, who did the annotated translation, with footnotes, has not gotten to the next volume yet, which I will tackle next year.
The Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf was something I had wanted to get to for years, and finally took on. Heaney, a Nobel Prize winner himself, created a magnificently powerful and chillingly beautiful verse translation (his translation faces the corresponding page of the poem in the original Old English). I was deeply moved by this poem whose underlying focus is the fragility of human life and the ever present hovering of death.
Another major undertaking was reading Wordsworth’s epic poem The Prelude, which traces his growth and formation as a young man who decides to commit to writing poetry as his way of facing the world. I acquired a new edition with high quality reproductions of English 18th and 19th century painting corresponding to the scenes Wordsworth’s poem portrays. Not only was the poem an exceptional experience but it inspired me to visit and walk in the spectacular Lake District of England, where Wordsworth grew up.
This was, not surprisingly, a year of reading several books on sickness and death. I read Susan Sontag’s two extended essays, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, which both distill many important aspects of how we relate to illness in ourselves and those near to us. Another classic I read was Tolstoy’s short novel, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, about a man who lived following false gods (that is, has not lived by the values that are truly important) and who is dying. Everyone around him denies to him that he is dying but he knows he is. Given that it was written in the 1890’s, it captures some very current attitudes towards death that have only become widespread in recent years. Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus and its fictional companion, The Stranger, both of which I read, though focused on the absurdity of life and the argument for suicide, in fact, are deeply relevant to death and loss and reflections on the meaning of human life. Still waiting for me on the proverbial “nightstand” is The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (I read this years ago, but I suspect it is definitely worth a re-read at this point in my grieving).
THE NATIONAL AND WORLD SCENE
As if 2017 was not bad enough as the year in which David left my life, on the wider field, we have the national and world situations. I won’t belabor the obvious – one cannot pass even a few minutes in group conversation with discussion not turning to the President, the Congress, and remarkable events throughout the country. I read extensively about all this, as most of us do (though after the November 2016 election, I discontinued all listening to radio news programs – I had never watched TV news), and I often feel that “this cannot be truly happening.” How deeply threatening and serious our current situation is for the long-term future of the country is hard to say. I only know that it seems, from all the history I know, that we have never gone through anything similar. I cannot assess, at this point, the damage and consequences in the long run, though I fear the worst. It reminds me that we are a country and a society like any other – there is no immutable law that guarantees we will survive. All preceding societies have died, collapsed, or declined, and our situation should give us all the humility to accept that history applies to us.
In the meantime, for many of us, it is difficult and immensely painful to witness to seeing the destruction of humane and intelligent values, to see immense greed, vulgarity, meanness, stupidity, and corruption, riding high in the saddle with no certainty that we can find our way back to an intelligent and humane society.
One hopeful element in the structure of our governmental system is that it is multi-polar and not centralized as in some countries (e.g., France). This means that as the Federal Government fails us, there are other centers of power that are filling the void and moving ahead (some state governments, many cities, regional networks). This is one of the real strengths of the U.S. Conversely, I am cannot help thinking that despite our brilliant Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, we managed to have slavery, Jim Crow, and Indian genocide for centuries. One can have the most enlightened laws and systems in writing, and if the human commitment to those ideals is absent, they, in themselves, have little force. Once a people takes those ideals seriously, only then do they have force.
Early on some articles commenting on what we are experiencing particularly struck me as being insightful. There have been many many other noteworthy ones, so I just list a few, if you have not already seen them:
How to listen to Donald Trump Every Day for Years – John McWhorter
The America We Lost When Trump Won – Kevin Baker
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/opinion/sunday/the-america-we-lost-when-trump-won.html
How to Build an Autocracy – David Frum
Very scary but plausible and highly articulate analysis of the very real possibility that Trump will in fact succeed in destroying much of our democracy as we have always known it. Frum was originally a close advisor to President George W. Bush, but then “got religion” and shifted somewhat to the left.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/
And with that, I close, for now. Hardly an upbeat, cheerful end-of-year letter, but increasingly, as I find myself saying to myself, “It is what it is.”
Yours in the New Year,
Ken
BOOK PASSAGES OF GREAT POWER
From BEOWULF (The Seamus Heaney translation)
Meditations on the fragility of life, on the loss of someone beloved, and the ever-presence of death
The whole world
conforms to his will, he is kept from the worst
until an element of overweening
enters him and takes hold
while the soul’s guard, its sentry, drowses,
grown too distracted. A killer stalks him,
an archer who draws a deadly bow.
And then the man is hit in the heart,
the arrow flies beneath his defences,
the devious promptings of the demon start.
His old possessions seem paltry to him now.
He covets and resents; dishonours custom
and bestows no gold; and because of good things
that the Heavenly Powers gave him in the past
he ignores the shape of things to come.
Then finally the end arrives
when the body he was lent collapses and falls
prey to its death; ancestral possessions
and the goods he hoarded are inherited by another
who lets them go with a liberal hand.
He begins to keen
and weep for his boy, watching the raven
gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help.
The wisdom of age is worthless to him.
Morning after morning, he wakes to remember
that his child is gone; he has no interest
in living on until another heir
is born in the hall, now that his first-born
has entered death’s dominion forever.
He gazes sorrowfully at his son’s dwelling,
the banquet hall bereft of all delight.,
the windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping,
the warriors under ground; what was is no more.
No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard.
Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed
and sings a lament; everything seems too large,
the steadings and the fields.
From LILA by MARILYNNE ROBINSON (part of her Gilead series of novels)
This passage contains a view of God’s presence in the world that a non-believer such as myself can relate to. A pastor is explaining to his wife, who had been a waif with a very rough early life, the sermon he is preparing and what he is trying to explain to his congregation (and principally to himself). He goes in and out of reading from the sermon and explaining its meaning to his wife (and himself) and I believe is the core “message” of the novel.
He cleared this throat. “So. ‘Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.” My meaning here is that you really can’t account for what happens by what has happened in the past, as you understand it anyway, which may be very different from the past itself. If there is such a thing. ‘The only true knowledge of God is born of obedience,’ that’s Calvin, ‘and obedience has to be constantly attentive to the demands that are made of it, to a circumstance that is always new and particular to its moment.’ Yes. ‘Then the reasons that things happen are still hidden, but they are hidden in the mystery of God.’ I can’t read my own writing. No matter. ‘Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth, when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed.’ So then it is part of the providence of God, as I see it, that blessing or happiness can have very different meanings from one time or another. ‘’This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.’ Because I don’t mean to suggest that experience is random or accidental, you see. ‘When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it. Therefore we have no way to reconcile its elements, because they are what we are given out of no necessity at all except God’s grace in sustaining us as creatures we can recognize as ourselves.’ That’s always seemed remarkable to me, that we can do that. That we can’t help but do it. ‘So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.’ “
From IN THE SHADOW OF YOUNG GIRLS IN FLOWER, by MARCEL PROUST (2nd novel of IN SEARCH FOR LOST TIME)
This is a beautiful passage about how we experience life. The “narrator” (the key personage in all the novels) is commenting on his hearing of a particular composer’s Sonata. He is considering his first impression of the Sonata to what comes out upon repeated hearings, and this becomes a reflection on how we look up our lives. It is also a powerful reflection of how we experience artistic expression (music, painting, etc.) [It reflects the complex, prolix, but exquisitely lush style that one comes to cherish once Proust gets under one’s skin.]
When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s Sonata were revealed to me, already borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to elude me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirely: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. In Vinteuil’s Sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those have withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage whose structure, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made it indistinguishable to us and so preserved intact; and this, in front of which we have been passing every day unaware, which had thus held itself in reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty had become invisible and remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But we will also relinquish it last. And we will love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it. The time, moreover, that a person requires – as I required in the matter of this sonata – to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new. So that the man of genius, to spare himself the ignorant contempt of the world, may say to himself that, since one’s contemporaries are incapable of the necessary detachment, works written for posterity should be read by posterity alone, like certain paintings that one cannot appreciate when one stands too close to them. But in reality any such cowardly precaution to avoid false judgments is doomed to failure; they are inevitable. The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It was Beethoven’s quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning, and enlarging a public for Beethoven’s quartets, thus marking, like every great work of art, an advance if not in artistic quality at least in the community of minds, largely composed today of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of appreciating it. What is called posterity is the posterity of the work of art. It is essential that the work…create its own posterity. For if the work were held in reserve, were revealed only to posterity, that audience, for that particular work, would be not posterity but a group of contemporaries who were merely living half a century later in time. And so it is essential that the artist, … if he wants his work to be free to follow its own course, launch it, wherever there is sufficient depth, confidently outbound toward the distant future. And yet this future time, the true perspective in which to behold great works, if not taking it into account is the mistake made by bad judges, taking it into account is sometimes a dangerous precaution of good ones.
Here is another passage on how we get through loss that felt very relevant to me at this period of my life:
With women who do not love us, as with the “dear departed,” the knowledge that there is no hope left does not prevent us from continuing to wait. We live on the alert, attentive to the slightest sound; the mother whose son has gone to sea on some dangerous voyage of discovery imagines him at every moment, and even though the certainty of his having perished has long been established, striding into the room, saved by a miracle and in the best of health. And this waiting, according to the strength of her memory and resistance of her bodily organs, either helps her on her journey through the years, at the end of which she will be able to endure the knowledge that her son is no more, to forget gradually and to survive his loss – or else it kills her
Finally, a reflection on what love between two people, in essence, is:
When we are in love, our love is too big a thing for us to be able altogether to contain it within us. It radiates toward the loved one, finds there a surface that arrests it, forcing it to return to its starting point, and it is this shock of the repercussion of our own affection that we call the other’s feelings, and which charms us more then than on its outward journey because we do not recognize it as having originated in ourselves.
From FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley
We mostly know the story from the horror movies and comics it has given birth to, but in its way, the actual novel is a powerful story of the need for all human beings, as social creatures, to give and receive love and friendship. Below, several short but relevant (to me) passages:
I spoke of my desire of finding a friend, of my thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot, and expressed my conviction that a man could boast of little happiness who did not enjoy this blessing. “I agree with you,” replied the stranger; “we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves – such a friend ought to be – do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures…”
She died calmly, and her countenance expressed affection even in death. I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she whom we saw every day and whose very existence appeared a part of our own can have departed forever – that the brightness of a beloved eye can have been extinguished and the sound of a voice so familiar and dear to the ear can be hushed, never more to be heard. These are the reflections of the first days; but when the lapse of time proves the reality of the evil, then the actual bitterness of grief commences. Yet from whom has not that rude hand rent away some dear connection? And why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt, and must feel?
From A WIDOW’S STORY: A MEMOIR by Joyce Carol Oates
Amongst the countless quotable and resonating (for me) passages I include only two, first one relating to her deceased husband (Ray), and secondly, one relating to herself, written as a poem by a friend to her:
Ray was not unhappy, Ray did not experience his death as you (meaning Joyce Carol Oates, the survivor) are experiencing it, he did not experience the loss you are experiencing, he knew nothing of what was to come and so he did not suffer – Ray was happy in his lifetime – Ray loved his work, his domestic life – Ray loved his garden – he did not suffer the loss of meaning that his survivor feels; he was defined by that meaning, which you provided for him, not for one moment of his life with you was he not-loved, and he knew this; for Ray, his death was no tragedy but a completion.
Though you loved Ray, very much, and could not
imagine living without him, you will begin to
discover that you are doing things that Ray would
not have much been interested in doing, and you are
meeting people you would not have met when Ray
was alive, and all this will change your life for the
better, though you might not think so now.