Expressing the Inexpressible
“Diatomas I” by Angela Wei
1.
Opening the box, I get a strong whiff of one of my favorite smells: old books. Or, more precisely, old paper, because there are no books inside the box but rather neat stacks of letters my father had saved for over sixty years. Most of them are love letters between him and my mother from when they were dating and engaged, a time they spent mostly apart as my father was a Marine stationed in California, while my mother taught high school English in Pennsylvania. I read a bit of one letter from him to her, full of “darling” and “dearest” and “how I miss you.” I feel like a peeping tom, so I put the letter back and don’t look at any others. Besides, I’m after something else. The box also contains the sympathy letters my parents received upon the death of their three-year-old daughter, their only child at the time. She died during surgery to correct scoliosis. The operation went as planned in terms of straightening her spine, but she never woke up from the anesthesia. It was March 8, 1961. Eighteen months later, my sister, Cynthia, was born. Three years after that, my brother, Ted. Then I came along, and my parents named me after their first, lost child.
I recently wrote about the first Kristin, as she’s known in our family. What I thought might be an essay developed into a book on the experience of being named after a deceased sibling and the complicated legacies of even the briefest of lives. While writing the book, I gathered together the few remaining items from that long-ago time: the first Kristin’s teddy bear, my parents’ photographs of her, and a paten with her name engraved on the back, given to my parents when she died. But I couldn’t find the sympathy letters.
My brother told me he found them in a shoebox while packing up our father’s office after he passed away. I finally saw them a few months later while visiting Ted for a trip to Cedar Grove Cemetery, at the University of Notre Dame, for the interment of our dad’s ashes. The night before I was due to fly home, I stayed up late in my brother’s basement perusing some of the letters—quickly, just to get a sense of them. I don’t sleep well as a rule and didn’t want to become overwrought and toss and turn the night before I traveled. I’m glad I glanced at them, though, because one was from my father’s father, who died when Cynthia was just a toddler. Some of the lore we had heard about him over the years was less than flattering. His letter to my parents humanized him for me. Another precious find was a telegram my mother’s Aunt Connie sent the minute she heard the news. I was glad I could show these particular items to my brother the next morning.
For my flight home, I put the fragile bundle of letters in a Ziplock bag and carried them in my purse. When I got home, I went through everything more carefully, gingerly removing the tissue-thin cards and letters from their envelopes. I tried to grasp the enormity of what I was seeing: the outpouring of sympathy to my parents in the days and weeks following their catastrophe.
2.
Western Union Telegram, March 9, 1961, 7:45 a.m.:
I AM STUNNED AND DEEPLY SADDENED BY THE TRAGIC NEWS
MY HEART GOES OUT TO BOTH OF YOU IS THERE ANYTHING
I CAN POSSIBLY DO LOVE = CONNIE
Aunt Connie died when I was just nine or ten years old, but I remember her vividly. Her telegram, in bold capital letters, its words strung together as if breathlessly spoken, conveys the shock that everyone must have felt on learning what had happened.
There are other letters from my mother’s relatives: her younger brother, Paul, just 22 at the time; her aunts, Agnes and Mary, who were like mothers to her; her maternal grandmother, her writing barely legible. There are several cards from my father’s relatives in Wisconsin. Everyone tries to offer comfort but knows it’s no use. “This is the hardest note I have ever written,” Agnes says in her letter. “I only wish I could really express my thoughts in words—but that seems impossible.” “There are so many, many things I want to say to you, but the words don’t come to me at all,” another letter proclaims.
My parents were living in California at the time but knew it was only temporary, so they had their daughter buried in my father’s family plot in Chilton, Wisconsin. They shipped her body there, and a few days later, my grandfather, who handled the arrangements, wrote to them:
Monday, March 13, 1961
Dear Donny & Nancy
Just a note to tell you we just got back from the cemetery. Kristin was interred this morning at 9:30. Due to some emergency the parish priest from New Holstein officiated.
Jim & Pat are here and we all saw Kristin prior to burial time. She certainly had grown and looked just like she was sleeping.
Many people from this community have asked us to extend their sympathy to you both.
Love
Dad
I try to envision the scene at the funeral home and cemetery, but I hold back. I cannot manage it. Of course, I have the luxury of blotting it out of my mind.
Some of the sympathy letters are on regular stationary. Some are on letterhead. Some are store-bought cards adorned with an angel, cross, or flower. Apart from family members, I only recognize a few names, friends of my mother from her hometown and from college. There are letters from several nuns and a couple of charitable organizations. I appreciate the sentiment written by a woman named Kay, presumably a neighbor of theirs in California: “Be sure that, though we may be new friends, we feel very close and do truly share your sorrow.”
There’s a letter from an administrator at the lyrical-sounding Boston Floating Hospital. Curious, I look it up and learn that it was a hospital ship founded in 1894. “In those days,” I read, “little was known about the care of sick children, but many thought that fresh air—especially ocean air—was beneficial. The Reverend Rufus B. Tobey was concerned about the plight of ill, impoverished children, and proposed taking them and their mothers for a day’s outing on Boston Harbor. Not only would they get the fresh ocean air, but they would have an opportunity to be seen (at no charge) by volunteer doctors and nurses.” I find this fascinating and am now a big fan of Reverend Tobey.
One of the most moving letters is from a priest:
Dear Nancy and Don,
Leslie told me about your little girl and I write now with a very heavy heart not knowing what to say, except that I am sorry, and that you shall be remembered in my poor prayers. I know you are in no mood for a sermon nor am I—this world is full of sorrow. Your daughter knows that other world now, and we can only hope one day to be with her, where there will be no more sorrow or death or tears or separation.
Sincerely in Christ,
Fr. Tom Heath
St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana
I find some of the letters shocking. I know people mean well, and I know first-hand the challenge of finding something to say to grieving parents. Nevertheless, some of the sentiments expressed seem spectacularly devoid of tact:
God love you both, and we know He does to give you such a “beautiful sorrow.”
All I can say is that God’s will is always for the best and if that little blythe spirit would have had to wear braces, casts and Heaven knows what else, then we can say in all sincerity “Thy will be done. Amen.”
These will be trying times for you both, but God knows best. Perhaps she would have been a cripple.
What a shock—even to us!! But as my Dad always used to say “Don’t forget, God only loans us our children.”
What a comfort it must be to you to know that you have made heaven possible for this precious child.
Apparently he and his Blessed Mother wanted Christen close to them.
A recurring notion in the letters is that Kristin’s death was God’s will, that she is in heaven, that she is a “Holy Innocent,” that they can now pray to “Saint Kristin.” My parents were devout Catholics, yet I can’t help suspecting that some of these words must have rung hollow or hurt them. Maybe acceptance and equanimity were not all they needed. Maybe they would have appreciated a letter raging against what had happened, howling in agony at their loss. Berating a god who would allow such a thing to occur.
Perhaps I was being too critical.
3.
I wondered whether there was any guidance at the time for writing sympathy letters. Bruce Feiler wondered the same thing and unearthed various suggestions pertaining to “The Art of Condolence.” According to the 1960 edition of Emily Post, “A letter of condolence may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical—never mind. Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value.” Today, Emily Post online says, “don’t dwell on the details or the manner of death. Nor should you suggest that the loss is a blessing in disguise” (“Perhaps she might have been a cripple”). The site offers advice on consoling someone who has lost a parent but offers nothing on what to say to parents who have lost a child. Perhaps that’s all right. Feiler speaks with a rabbi, who tells him, “Admitting you’re at a loss for words is far more caring and helpful than writing pithy statements like, ‘he’s in a better place’ or ‘your child was so perfect, God wanted her to sit beside him.’” It’s as if he were reading the letters to my parents over their shoulders.
Contemporary condolence etiquette reflects aspects of the nineteenth century, a period when mourning and grieving “properly” became a badge of middle-class honor. Karen Halttunen traces mourning rituals from seventeenth-century Puritans, terrified of death, through the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, who viewed it as “a sweet deliverance from life, a promise of salvation for virtually all.” In nineteenth-century tombstone design and funerary art, engravings, pictures, and statues of weeping mourners became as prominent as remembrances of the dead. Cemeteries also underwent refashioning, transformed from forbidding weed-strewn locales to “beautifully landscaped gardens to encourage mourners to visit the graves of their lost loved ones,” Halttunen explains. Whereas the Puritans frowned upon intense or prolonged grief “as a rebellion against the will of God,” she writes, the “vast literature of mourning” that sprang up after 1830—“death poetry, funeral sermons, consolatory essays and letters, and mourning manuals”—assured mourners that it was desirable to grieve openly “as a form of sentimental social bonding.” Reflecting on the dearly departed would prompt people to be kinder to each other, such literature averred. I detect holdovers from all of this in the sympathy letters my parents received, which acknowledge their pain, encourage them to take heart, and establish themselves as a community of mourners.
4.
Explorations of condolence often look to Emily Dickinson, whose sympathy letters stand as exemplars of compassion, understanding, and grace. Jane Donahue Eberwein cites Dickinson’s letter to a friend on the birth of a stillborn baby as “a model of tactful control.” Dickinson also understood mourners’ need for sustained comfort and support, often writing a number of letters to the bereaved over time. She appreciated “the value of brevity,” Eberwein writes, citing a letter in which Dickinson alludes to her own grief over the loss of her father: “One who only said ‘I am sorry’ helped me the most when father ceased; it was too soon for language.”
Most critics agree that Emily’s letter to her sister-in-law, Susan, on the death of her eight-year-old son, Gilbert, stands as a masterpiece of a sympathy letter and poem in and of itself. It was “the most awe-filled and wondrous letter-poem of her life,” Eberwein states. It begins:
Dear Sue,
The Vision of Immortal Life has been fulfilled –
How simply at the last the Fathom comes! The Passenger and not the
Sea, we find surprises us –
Gilbert rejoiced in Secrets –
His Life was panting with them – With what menace of Light he cried
“Dont tell, Aunt Emily”! Now my ascended Playmate must instruct me.
Show us, prattling Preceptor, but the way to thee!
“Brilliant in its expression of Gilbert’s vibrant essence,” writes Eberwein, Dickinson’s letter/poem contains “images of venturesome boyhood” rather than ruminations on the child stilled, in an endless sleep. “She memorializes the boy in terms of energy, play, light, and even noise—still intensely alive,” Eberwein says. In a similar vein, Feiler learns that “savvy condolences often share a warm or uplifting memory of the deceased.” Several letters to my parents do just that. “One of the greatest delights and wonderful memories I have were those months last summer when she was here,” Agnes wrote. “She made us all happy and that visit can never be taken away.”
Others also offer remembrances. A nun from California, Sister Angela, wrote, “I do not know when a child endeared herself so much to me as your beautiful little Kristin. There was something other-worldly about her that one could never forget. . . . I shall always remember her playing the organ with me in the little convent chapel and saying her prayers for mother and daddy before the ‘house of the little Jesus.’” “Kristin was a happy little girl,” wrote a woman named Joan, “with quaint little ways and her time with you should leave only the fondest and happiest memories.” Like Dickinson, these writers neither attempt to explain why children must die nor make reference to God’s will. Rather than encourage parents to patiently await a reunion with their child in the afterlife, Dickinson’s poems defy the spirit of the age and “suggest that a reunion beyond the grave is only a fiction,” writes Elizabeth Petrino. Did my parents believe in an afterlife in which they would be with the first Kristin again? As Catholics, they presumably did. I never asked.
Like Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke “remained skeptical about easy consolation,” as Ulrich Baer explains in his introduction to a collected volume of Rilke’s sympathy letters, for “consolation can become a superficial and almost heartless admonition to get over the loss, to move on, and ultimately forget.” Instead, Rilke suggests that we embrace our sorrow as part of life’s multiplicity. “I want to encourage you in your pain,” he writes to a friend whose brother died by suicide, “so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life.” To the sister of a German poet killed in World War I, he writes, “What is here and now is after all, what has been given and is expected of us, and we must attempt to transform everything that happens to us into a new familiarity and friendliness with it.” To a friend on the death of her father, he urges, “Get to the bottom of this intensity and have faith in what is most horrible, instead of fighting it off—it reveals itself for those who can trust it in spite of its overwhelming and dire appearance, as a kind of initiation.” I wonder whether sentiments such as these, striking a different chord from the standard note of condolence, might have comforted my parents.
In 1934, William Faulkner wrote to his close friend, James Warsaw “Sonny” Bell Jr. and his wife on the death of their infant daughter, their first child. Faulkner and his wife had suffered a similar loss several years before, when their first child, a daughter named Alabama, lived for just nine days. Doreen Fowler and Campbell McCool trace the “threatened loss of a son or daughter” as a theme in Faulkner’s fiction both before and after his daughter died, along with the “subject of suffering and being made better by suffering.” They deem his letter to the Bells a “profound and moving attempt to describe the purposive and ennobling quality of grief.” Faulkner assures his friend that his pain will eventually lessen to the extent that in time, “the child will not be dead at all. It will be a living part of living experience . . . and because of it after a while you can say to yourself, ‘Because I have suffered, I know that I have been alive. It is suffering which has raised me above the articulated lumps of colored mud which teem the earth.’”
Rather than imagine a period of separation for mourners until achieving reunion with their loved ones in an afterlife, Faulkner proposes that the deceased retain a presence in the here and now—not via the “excessive and prolonged grieving that the [nineteenth-century] sentimental tradition relished to keep the child perpetually present,” as Petrino explains, but in the manner Rilke suggests when he writes to a friend, “Haven’t you felt your father’s influence and compassion a thousand times from the universe where all, truly all, Sidie, is beyond loss? Don’t believe that something that belongs to our pure realities could drop away and simply cease.” When my siblings and I were growing up, our parents talked to us openly—but not excessively—about the first Kristin. Giving me her name was also a means of keeping her memory alive. Another means was keeping a few of her things.
For Rilke, experiencing the life-affirming nature of grief also entailed facing the lost loved one’s possessions. “You have to touch with your hands his things,” he says to his friend who lost her brother, “which through their manifold relations and affinity are after all also yours. . . . his life has now passed onto yours.” Rilke’s words resonate with the conclusion of Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room, as Jacob’s mother and friend Bonamy sort through Jacob’s belongings after his death in the First World War. “‘Jacob! Jacob!’ cried Bonamy, standing by the window. The leaves sank down again. ‘Such confusion everywhere!’ exclaimed Betty Flanders, bursting open the bedroom door. Bonamy turned away from the window. ‘What am I to do with these, Mr. Bonamy?’” And the novel’s final line: “She held out a pair of Jacob’s old shoes.”
Reading these lines, I look at the wooden box in my study that contains the first Kristin’s sympathy letters. On top of the box sits her Steiff teddy bear, worn and fragile but intact overall. I also have several photographs of her scattered about the room. I used to struggle with whether to keep these items on display, putting them away and then taking them out again several times over the years. Sometimes, I look at them and feel a wave of grief and worry that I’m engaging in Victorianesque wallowing. “Figurines, miniature portraits, locks of hair, and other keepsakes served to keep the child’s image almost physically preserved,” writes Petrino, to the extent that Emily Dickinson considered “the Victorian mourner . . . more dead than alive.”
In her poem that begins, “I cried at Pity—not at Pain—,” Dickinson writes of a child recently deceased yet cognizant, prohibited from restful oblivion in her tomb by the presence of a mourner.
I wish I knew that Woman’s name—
So when she comes this way,
To hold my life, and hold my ears
For fear I hear her say
She’s ‘sorry I am dead[’]—again
Just when the Grave and I—
Have sobbed ourselves almost to sleep,
Our only lullaby—.
“Dickinson suggests,” writes Petrino, “that the child, alienated from its mother’s care, suffers by the excessive pity that keeps it perpetually alive, when it would gratefully resign itself to the eternal sleep of the grave.” In writing my book, was I disrupting the first Kristin’s decades-long sleep, like the mourner in Dickinson’s poem preventing the child’s cessation of pain? In contemplating these matters, I have come to believe that pictures of the first Kristin and the stuffed animal she once played with deserve the light of day. Seeing them every day makes me feel closer to her, this sister I never met. I take comfort in the Rilkean sense of the promise intrinsic in objects left behind.
5.
In my life, all roads lead to Virginia Woolf, and in reflecting on the history and nature of the sympathy letter, I turn to her once more. Opening her volumes of letters, I sought her correspondence upon the deaths of close friends and her nephew, Julian Bell. When her dear friend Lytton Strachey died on January 21, 1932, Woolf wrote first to his live-in companion, the painter Dora Carrington: “Darling Carrington, We are all thanking you for what you gave Lytton. Please Carrington, think of this, and let us bless you for it. This is our great comfort now—the happiness you gave him—and he told me so.” To Lytton’s sister Philippa, she writes, “Darling Pippa, I sit thinking of Lytton and Thoby and how Lytton came to me when Thoby died and I feel more than ever your sister now, darling Pippa, if you will let me. You know how we loved him.” She writes similarly to his sister Pernel—brief letters in gentle, soothing language. Mentioning her beloved brother Thoby, who died of typhus in 1906 at age 26, she conveys her solidarity with them in their pain. On January 31, she writes to Carrington again, a longer letter this time about the growing chasm in her life created by Lytton’s absence. She assures Carrington again how happy she had made Lytton. A few days later, Carrington wrote back: “There are only a few letters that have been any use. Yours most of all, because you understand.”
Woolf’s sister Vanessa’s elder son, Julian, was killed in Spain on July 18, 1937. Akin to her letters to Lytton’s sisters, Woolf’s letters upon his death are succinct, informing people of the event as opposed to extending sympathy. “Dearest Creature,” she writes to Vita Sackville-West, “I wired you because Julian was killed yesterday in Spain. Nessa likes to have me and so I’m round there most of the time. It is very terrible. You will understand.” Her letters informing Ethel Smyth, T. S. Eliot, and S. S. Koteliansky are similarly brief. Responding to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Woolf writes, “Dearest Margaret, Thank you for your letter. I know you understand. It is so terrible to see what the suffering is; but she is wonderful. I told her you had written. We always think of Theodore [Margaret’s deceased brother] and Thoby together, and now there is Julian, too.” Somewhat unexpectedly to me, Woolf adopts a religious tone in conjuring an image of these three beloved men together in an afterworld.
Woolf wrote to John Maynard Keynes telling him how much Vanessa cherished his letter to her. Held at King’s College Cambridge, Keynes’s letter is reprinted in Frances Spalding’s biography of Vanessa Bell. “Some consolation was provided by the letters of condolence” Vanessa received, Spalding writes. “But it was Maynard who sent almost the only words that Vanessa wanted to keep.” They read: “My dearest Nessa, A line of sympathy and love from us both on the loss of your dear and beautiful boy with his pure and honourable feelings. It was fated that he should make his protest, as he was entitled to do, with his life, and one can say nothing.” The sentiments exchanged among Woolf and her circle display brevity, sincerity, and discernment as capable of assuaging a mourner’s grief.
6.
In keeping with Woolf’s voluminous literary output during her lifetime, her death garnered a torrent of writing as well. Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf gathers together the letters sent to Leonard and Vanessa upon Woolf’s death by suicide on March 28, 1941. Letters poured in from family members, friends, business associates, community groups, fellow writers, and fans of Woolf from all over the world. As Afterwords editor Sibyl Oldfield states, “The cumulative result is a body of twentieth-century English letter writing that marks a significant moment in Britain’s social and cultural history and is unparalleled in its poignancy and eloquence.” Most people wrote soon after the April 3, 1941, notice in The Times reporting Virginia missing and presumed dead. Responding at once to news of a death, when possible, proves key. “Rilke wrote most of [his sympathy letters] almost instantaneously after receiving the terrible news of someone’s death,” writes Baer. “[T]he fact that he had thrown himself into confronting the death of the beloved person head-on in his letter, rather than relying on conventional formulas of sympathy, meant a great deal to those to whom he wrote.” The first Kristin died on March 8. Most of the letters to my parents are postmarked March 12, 13, 15. Given that most people received the news via a letter from my parents, many of them clearly made a point of writing as soon as they could.
Once again, I try to picture the scenario: my parents seated at a table in their desolate house, writing their news over and over again. I wonder if it was mainly my mother who wrote, or my father, or whether they took turns. Was it torture? Was it cathartic? A bit of both? Today, a single post on social media alerts everyone we know to our news in a matter of seconds. I posted on Facebook when my parents died recently, within nine months of each other. Hundreds of people “liked” the posts or, more often, clicked the heart emoji. Many wrote comments, which I occasionally scroll through. I think about the protocol and ramifications of twenty-first-century e-mourning—fodder for another essay, perhaps.
7.
As my parents’ family and friends recalled their memories of the first Kristin, many who wrote to Leonard Woolf mention special moments with Virginia. They also share their favorite things about her: her genius and her books, of course, but also her wit and compassion. Many people mention having relished her letters, lamenting that they will receive no more. “One will miss her letters so much,” writes Violet Dickinson, a lifelong friend, “tho’ my writing she said was that of a drunken spider.” Several express regret for having postponed or declined an invitation to lunch or a weekend at Monks House. Together, the letters create a biography of Woolf, albeit comprised of superlatives, as Oldfield notes, and they presciently anticipate the generations to come who will cherish her writing. The letters help plant the seeds of her legacy.
At the same time, many who wrote to Leonard expressed their struggle to find the right words, as did almost everyone who wrote to my parents. “I don’t want to trouble you with words now,” writes Elizabeth Bowen. “[T]oo desperately well I know how helpless, helpless words are,” writes Lady Sibyl Colefax. “Letters must be a curse,” Violet Dickinson says. And, “I have no words of grief. Your letter stunned me,” Vita proclaims. I envision all of these people attempting to say the unsayable, yet many expressed to Leonard their compulsion to write. “[B]oth friends and strangers wrote to Leonard Woolf because they could not but write,” Oldfield explains, “sometimes offering a private memory of her, sometimes a poem or review in her praise, sometimes a shattering life-experience of their own that seemed analogous to his and thus a testimony of fellow feeling.” Such is the depth of sentiment aroused by Virginia’s life and death.
8.
Despite similarities among the letters, Oldfield claims that “By their very nature condolence letters cannot constitute a genre.” Such a letter “has to be so intensely subjective,” she writes, “written uniquely by A, addressed solely to B, and focused on the one and only C, [so] that by definition each such letter must be profoundly different from one another.” Yet, she acknowledges, condolence letters are undoubtedly “written to a formula” and must include certain criteria, such as “affirmation of the dead” and “sympathy with the survivor.” Even “the most terrible, most difficult letters of all,” such as those to the survivors of someone who has died by suicide—or, I would add, to parents of a child who has died—“there are still universal ingredients: something positive has to be said about the dead while reassuring the survivor that he or she had done all that was humanly possible to keep the lost one alive.” Numerous letters to Leonard Woolf include such sentiments.
Leonard’s closest friends attest to his devotion to Virginia. “Our beautiful beautiful Virginia,” writes E. S. Case. “What it is to have known her—and you who saved her for us all in those old days of illness,” she says. “You made her life for her,” writes Violet Dickinson, “and shielded her from worry and gave her such happiness.” In addition, several people assert Virginia’s right to have chosen to take her life. Ethel Smyth deems the suicide brave and noble. “I shall always love to think of the biggest spirit I have ever met taking that road at the last,” she writes. “[S]he did what she wished,” writes Margaret Llewelyn Davies, “And it was you who gave her her greatest happiness in life, and enabled her to enjoy all the pleasure she got from the appreciation of her writing, and the love of her friends.”
Several people sent telegrams to Leonard. Woolf’s last doctor, Victoria Ocampo, says, “I can’t find words. Loved and admired Virginia.” Pippa Strachey’s telegram reads, “My love and deep unhappiness are with you.” Desmond MacCarthy sent a telegram on the night of April 3: “Saw the awful news in evening paper. Can hardly realise your suffering or the loss to us all.” The brevity, sense of urgency, and third-party mediation of telegrams render them particularly poignant to me, for the senders had to voice their message quickly and aloud, driving home even more forcefully, perhaps, the horrible truth of the death.
Vita Sackville-West, May Sarton, and Joan Adeney Rendel wrote poems in honor of Virginia, as did at least one person who wrote to my parents. Signed “Mignon and Jack Quinlan,” this letter is literally difficult to read. The cramped, miniscule writing begins inside, under the card’s printed message, and continues on the back, with passages crossed-out, words written between lines, and arrows looping every which way as the writer’s stream of consciousness flows on. Turning the letter this way and that, I transcribe it as well as I can. Part of it reads:
Out of my attendant feelings about Christin, your deep faith, and enough drafts to insure a wholly affirmative memorial poem to her, which would at once sum up—in a less maudlin way, my intense empathy for you and my affection for Christin, limited as our relationship had, per force, been. The poem was, in a sense, “inspired” by shock & grief, but that spirit of affirmation I wanted to express for a condolence, has, in the writing, affected my own philosophy so that there is no vestige of hypocrisy or artifice within the context of these thoughts of the Blessed Mother Mary altho’ I remain, intellectually, an agnostic, per se.
I find this letter bewildering but also endearing, a candid attempt to confront the situation in which my parents suddenly found themselves. Many people, of course, turn to poetry—the reading or the writing of it—amid life’s most challenging and desperate moments. In her condolence letter to Leonard Woolf, Dr. Portia Holman writes of seeking music. “The last movement of the G-minor symphony is what I want to say,” she writes, “but only she herself has ever put the equivalent of that in words.”
9.
Another caveat comes into play when writing a sympathy letter. “One of the absolute rules of letter-writing decorum,” Eberwein finds, “held that one must never combine letters of condolence with those of congratulation.” One woman who wrote to my parents congratulates my father on his fellowship. A letter signed “Mary and Will” veers off after an opening salvo of sympathy into five hand-written pages of family news. I can only surmise that Mary had no idea what to say but forged ahead anyway. A few of the letters ask my parents to visit, to call, to write and say how they’re doing. I imagine they would not have had the heart, but as my mother was fanatical about good manners, I presume she must have tried.
While most people who wrote to Leonard begged him not to bother with a reply, he sent a hand-written response to every letter he received. His diligence lends insights into his publication of Virginia’s writing in the decades after her death. Some have criticized him, deeming him calculating, manipulative, withholding as much as forthcoming. I never thought much about it, but after reading the hundreds of condolence letters he received, I view him less as a publisher or businessman and more of a steward fulfilling a deeply-felt personal responsibility, particularly in light of Rilke’s words on the obligations bequeathed to those who mourn. In a letter to a friend on the death of her aunt, he writes, “But as to the influence of the death of someone near on those he leaves behind, it has long seemed to me that this ought to be no other than a higher responsibility. Does the person who passes away not leave all the things he had begun in hundreds of ways to be continued by those who outlive him, if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all?” I wonder if in raising their subsequent children, my parents felt a debt of obligation to the first Kristin. I would understand if so, for I now have a sense of my own debt incurred. Several years before he died, my father entrusted me with carrying on his writing of a family history when he was gone. His boxes of files for this project reside in my brother’s basement. What initially felt like a bit of a burden is, I now realize, a part of him—and a gift.
Reading sympathy letters en masse makes for a moving and overwhelming experience, particularly when holding the letters to my parents—tangible relics of their darkest hour. I suppose I will take them out and read them from time to time: artifacts not only of their lost little girl but also of all those who plunged into murky waters when they sat down to find words in response to the tragedy. Surely most if not all of them are deceased by now, but for me, they live on in the gestures of sympathy they extended to my parents. I am grateful to each of them for reaching out when it must have been terribly daunting to do so. As these letters made their way across town and from coast to coast, I like to imagine them guiding my parents out of despair and into the light again.
Bibliography
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Dickinson, Emily. Letter to Susan Dickinson. Archive.emilydickinson.org.
Eberwein, Jane Donahue. “Messages of Condolence: ‘more Peace than Pang.’” Reading Emily Dickinson’s Letters. Ed. Jane Donahue Eberwein and Cindy MacKenzie. University of Massachusetts Press, 2009, pp. 100-125.
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Feiler, Bruce. “The Art of Condolence.” New York Times 1 October 2016.
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about the author
Kristin Czarnecki is an English professor at Georgetown College and author of The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming (Main Street Rag). She has published essays in edited volumes and in journals including Woolf Studies Annual, Journal of Modern Literature, Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and College Literature.
about the artist
Angela Wei is a senior editor for The Grotonian, a literature and art magazine, and the creative director of Circle Voice, a student newspaper. An alumna of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, Angela is a student writer at Groton School in Massachusetts. She has won various regional awards for her visual art, and her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Typishly, The Nasiona, Five South, and Cathexis Northwest Press. Angela enjoys baking, reading, and playing guitar, bass and piano. She lives in California.