To an Online Acquaintance On the Loss of a Difficult Parent

Dear ______,

Have you ever noticed that there are quotes that stick all over the internet like burs? No one seems to know where they come from or who put them up in the first place or why they go on and on like that song by Celine Dion (and that tells you my age if you didn't already know.) Some of these quotes are attributed, or not, or misattributed, but almost always posted without reference to the work from which they were supposedly taken. I don't mean the obvious stuff that Oscar Wilde said or might have said, or Dorothy Parker, the stuff so familiar or famous it doesn't really need a more specific source -- because who is going to check the page number in The Critic as Artist, etc.? I'm talking about all the stuff that might or might not be Sylvia Plath, or that maybe Anne Tyler wrote somewhere maybe, or that Cicero said in a letter or didn't. Some of these things look good, these feasible quotations. I see them and think, "I could use that." But then who wants to use something that might be a great quote from a great writer's great book -- or not? What if it's just copy from a greeting card that somebody thought would sound better coming from Mark Twain? How embarrassing if I then quote the fake Twain. (I would be discovered and then people would wonder if I'd actually ever read a book and then I would be exposed as the barely literate fraud my brain is happy to remind me I probably am. You don't really need to know how my brain works, but there it is.) 

Wherever these quotes start, in actual books or out, they all seem to end up online in the same soft, white, cursive font superimposed on a forest scene, or maybe the ocean or the sandy shore, anyway some tranquil shot of nature -- or stars because everybody loves stars! -- but calm; a notably calm cosmos, calm forest, calm seas, calm sand. That would seem to be the unifying theme, whatever the actual sentiment expressed in the quotation; the point would seem to be -- calm the fuck down -- you will be okay. Breath. Contemplate the infinite. Read just a smidge. Must say I rather resent the insistence that we would all be better off if we just sat down and took a deep breath. I like a good sit as much or more than the next person and since I finally quite smoking I can now occasionally draw a deep breath, but doesn't solve every problem now does it, sitting and breathing? If it did I'd be slim and rich and wouldn't need glasses on top of my glasses and I wouldn't worry about being rebuked and exposed and unloved and dying in a dumpster.

And here I am trying to think of comforting things to say. Apologies. Not as easy as it seems, which is why I want other people's better words. That is very much how I've survived to me present age, by calling on other people's good words. Books, yes? But also just sentences. Sometimes one just wants a sentence or two, no?

Have you seen these floating, seemingly indestructible internet quotes? They're the digital equivalent of sampler-pillows or those calligraphic barn-shingles white women with highlights hang in their kitchens. Big fan of the quotation myself. Better said by better writers seems a legitimate rule of thumb when writing or speaking aloud. Since I was a teenager I've kept commonplace books to record choice bits from my reading. And now there are actual cornucopia of quotation organized by theme and keyword and writer all over the web. I do wish that most of these sites were better vetted, but they exist and they very much didn't when I was young. I still own reference books, and books of quotation in particular, but how wonderful is it that someone has done all this glorious data entry? Still, I am just old-fashioned enough to want to know at least the book if not the page from which the quote was plucked. You're a real writer so I assume this sort of thing bothers you even more than it does me, if in fact you've paid it any mind. I should think writers would prefer that their work be remembered with them; the work as they wrote it, in the context they created, to whatever purpose it was written. Would have thought that was the goal. I suppose there are some writers who probably wouldn't much mind being immortalized as just so much disembodied internet wisdom, so long at least as their names were spelt correctly and they got paid. (What else could a Tony Robbins or now a Dr. Brene Brown hope for after one has bought that second house in France or one's fourth Ski-Doo or whatever one orders online between Hilton seminars? Is there a statue anywhere to the memory of Dale Carnegie? Must look that up. ((Sweet Jesus, there is.))) 

Most of the writers I've known tended to be quite proprietary about their work, and rightly so as it is not just their art but their job. (Though nowadays I know very few writers who live exclusively by the pen. Most teach. I assume you do too?)

I was put in mind of this business of internet-attribution when I saw a quote online supposedly from the poet Anne Sexton. I've tried to track it down and may have come close. It could be from her journals, or a letter, but that's as near as I've come. All told, over two or three days I'd have to say I wasted the better part of an hour on this -- not a huge measure of time, but still -- in part though because I was sure I had a physical copy of her journals but then that may not even be a thing and I might have been thinking of a book called A Self Portrait in Letters which I don't have anymore anyway if I ever did. And that is the way memory works or doesn't altogether, isn't it? Mine anyway. Yours may be better.

Just to have it, the sentence which may or may not be a quote is, "It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was." It's good, right? Possibly even applicable to your own circumstances. Might be a useful thought for you right now with the loss of your parent. It seems to me that this quote could be Anne Sexton, as it seems to suit the voice I remember, but that could be wishing making the thing so. Whatever the merit of the thought, the problem of attribution rather spoils whatever usefulness it might have in general because not knowing if it is "real."

By which I mean that it takes away the weight of the poet having said it -- if she didn't. Not an entirely happy source for familial wisdom at the best of times was our Anne, but for the power of memory and art to both preserve and distort our personal histories, who better really? I assume you're acquainted with the poet, possibly, probably better than I, so I won't explain other than to suggest that the very label of a "confessional poet" brings an expectation of both great burdens and self-assertion, doesn't it? How I remember them anyway, all those gloomier granddaughters and sons of Whitman.

Typically I came across the Sexton "quote" when I went hunting for something entirely other. My specific intent was to offer an appropriate quote by way of consolation on your announcement of your father's death. I can't now think for what it was I went looking when I was distracted by the possibly fictitious Sexton quote. I'm going to guess that I was probably hunting for some consolation offered by Dr. Johnson on the loss of a parent. Don't know. Doctor Johnson is rather my go-to. Mightn't have been applicable even if I'd found whatever it was. Turns out, there is considerably more in Johnson et al on the death of a child than a parent. Odd, that. Common as the death of a child sadly once was and may still be some places, most people outlive their parents, right? One would think there'd be all sorts of literary consolation online for that. I of course can't know all the particulars of your loss, and I wouldn't think to ask you for more detail than that provided in your original post. Suffice it to say that having described your relationship as difficult and the news of his death as something less than a shock, most of the usual things may not have been quite right. So I thought at the time. Still. Not my place to suggest how you were meant to feel and or mark the event, of course. Not as if you were soliciting comment come to that. I just wanted something to say better than anything I could think to say, you know? 

That's the thing about condolence, form very much follows function, tradition, convention. So let me say again here that I am sorry for your loss, complicated as that may be and predictable as that response obviously is. Still a loss, whatever the particulars. Maybe that's the point -- if I'm going to get to one. That would seem to me to be the one safe thing to assume given the circumstances. From what you wrote you know that the loss isn't all to do with the man's death, and yet the finality of that would seem to require acknowledgement. That's where the stock phrases of grief and remembrance serve us best, in reducing everything to basics. Mark, a man has died. I offer his son my hand.

There's more good in that than in most things we say without thinking. 

Why say more? Why indeed, other than the custom of talking to those in mourning as one would the ill? The thought with either presumably being that we might offer what? Company? A bit of distraction from the pain? Some comfort? "I should be sorry to think that what engrosses the attention of my friend, should have no part of mine," says Johnson. The impulse is good. I don't really know you for instance though we are friends on social media, and yet I want to offer some consolation for your loss. I lost my own father a few years ago. Still feels not so far from me. I don't equate the two, your loss and mine, anymore than I could or would want to compare our respective fathers. I think my father's death made me something other than I was before. Perhaps the death of a parent always does? That's more an assumption than an assertion. Feels true.

So other than the custom, the habit of it, why console the stranger? What solace for those with whom we are little more than acquainted? Perhaps this question can distract you for a bit. No harm in that now. 

Johnson describes himself after the death of his wife as, "broken off from mankind." Seems an obvious thing to say and the usual thing to be in the circumstance, at least once he's said it for me (power of quotation, mister.) But death doesn't just separate us from the person who has died, does it? That may already have happened one way and another well before that person died. I have lost friends after I lost touch, alas. Happens. Relatives I knew and never felt I knew really or well also die. Where I'm from one sends flowers if one isn't to attend the services. Far enough from my immediate family and I will still send a card. One that happens more and more as I age is the death of the parents of my friends. This seems, at least when it reaches me to most often be addressed online. This has the advantage of being more immediate and more diffuse, particularly as geography is eliminated as a barrier to condolence. Don't always know quite what to do in this wider and yet strangely more intimate world, but this seems right, doesn't it? Feels strange though just adding an emoji on a post when the post is about death, doesn't it? May depend on how one was raised I suppose. For instance, we sit with the body. Not everyone does, as I was at some point shocked to learn. Your family, your traditions may be different. Makes it harder to judge the right thing at this new distance/familiarity. One may obviously still be "broken off from mankind" by a death, but are we not all connected in ways now that Johnson never foresaw? Tap a few keys and "post" and the world floods in with all the consolation -- and banality -- that is implied in public mourning in a virtual space. I know that I took it all in gratefully. Doesn't mean you should or need to, just my experience.

When my father died, I must tell you I found the banalities just as welcome as the more thoughtful responses. How expressed doesn't necessarily indicate how things were felt, or received. (I'm a redneck. Even being gay and literate can only do but so much to overcome generations of emotional embarrassment. Rage. We are allowed rage. Otherwise taciturnity is still one of our very few self-assessed virtues. That and misdirected class resentments, Jell-O salads, and country music would seem to be our only real contributions to the cultural resources of the Republic. Sorry about that.) I was glad to hear from those old friends who may have known my father, but I was likewise glad of all the people who never met the man, or me come to that, at least in person, who also expressed their sympathy for my loss. Odd, isn't it? Couldn't hear it enough somehow. Not something I knew until then, about myself I mean.

I spoke at my father's funeral. Got through that. People were unwaveringly kind. Posting about his death online was different though. To some extent I might have done so without thinking. Never would have predicted this, but I do spend a surprisingly large part of my life online. To do with work and selling books, much of it, but by no means all. It's meant for instance staying in touch with my high school boyfriend. Kept up with former coworkers. I've even gotten to know, at least a little better, writers I admire like yourself. That last has been particularly unexpected. I do meet authors at the bookstore where I work. I've even had opportunities to interact with particular literary heroes of mine. I should never have thought to call most of them "friends" but then that became a legitimate designation on social media and who am I to not be flattered by the idea of that? Was I a friend to Howard Cruse? I am now friends with Hilma Wolitzer?! Indeed, I like to think I genuinely am. Would not have made sense, in a way, to not say something to my friends when my Dad died. Likewise wouldn't seem right for people not to have taken note. As I said, more did than I'd ever have thought and it meant something to me at the time -- and more since.

That's the surprise. Whatever I remember of my father is my business, as Anne Sexton may or may not have suggested already. Good and bad, the man I knew is who I couldn't forget even if I wanted to. Weirdly, I find I can now put things out of mind in a way I haven't since I was a child. At sixty, I am now nearly as easy to distract as I was at six. One of the great virtues of having the habit and presence of books. Not the same thing as just reading. Nearly everyone nowadays reads, even if it's just text messages on a phone. Books as physical objects on the other hand have the same solidity as food, flesh, persons, pets. My hand can find a book nearly everywhere I am likely to be (some might call this hoarding.) I find that books can be put in the way of so much: the past, time, hurt, hopes, longing. Books give me somewhere to stand against what Churchill dubbed, "the black dog." Gives me a place to stand still. As a child books took me up and out into the world; down the Mississippi, out to the moon, back in time to the court of Louis XIII. Now I find I can rest on them, sometimes hide in them. Books take me not out of myself but rather to places of greater safety, clearer thought, rest. The act of reading -- not the consequence -- is however isolating. I am usually content so. But in grief? Smack dab in it? I don't remember if I ever finished the book I was reading when my father died, Stendhal's The Red and the Black-- which was fine as I'd read it before. The point though was that rather than books at that moment I needed some sense of other people -- living, breathing, actual people 'round me, if only virtually. Ironic that.

You may not have found this to be so, but I wanted the sight and sound of sympathy around me, but perhaps not always actual people, if that makes sense. I wanted community, but also control of my environment and to not wear shoes, and not to talk, as I remember. Having people say kind things online felt right to me and just enough. The more folks the better, which is not something I ever say otherwise. I went up and down those comments. I checked in. I liked everything. Because I needn't look unless and until I wanted to and as I didn't really want to do anything else, I think I looked more than I might have done. No one thought me rude for walking away, everyone seemed glad to hear from me. 

I haven't looked at any of that in years. I shouldn't think I ever will again. Knowing however that it is there, that I was given that sympathy when I asked has made me feel better ever since, about people generally and or about the world, frankly. I can't say that I will ever reconcile with everything my father was, or with my hometown, my past. (Do people do that? Is that an option?) I've heard so many people, overt Christians mostly, who make a point if not a show of forgiveness, often in circumstances far worse than any I experienced: people forgiving the murderers of their loved ones, forgiving bombers, and war criminals, belligerents, the obviously unforgiveable. I don't pretend to understand that process or the point of it. I see no evidence that carrying resentments or hurt or hate harms the people it ought. Maybe it only negatively effects people for whom it is largely alien anyway, who have had so little experience of antagonism, violence, and the arbitrary as to have built up no immunity, or so much as to to have learned long since to lay down what can't be carried. I am not such a one. Meanwhile we have seen too many hateful bastards go contentedly down to die in the sincere conviction of heaven that we would, I think, have to be fools to imagine a universe anything but indifferent to the fate of humans. But don't let let me presume too much. You may feel differently. Perhaps my somewhat jaundiced view of universal justice is why a uniform expression of sympathy on the loss of my father meant all the more to me. As you probably experienced yourself online, people were genuinely kind, I found. I wish you something like and the comfort of that hereafter, whoever the man who occasioned it. 

One other thought before I stop shuffling along here, uninvited if only remotely or metaphorically beside you. The usual complaint is that death has cut off the last possibility of dialogue, but that's nonsense, isn't it? Since his death I have engaged more sincerely with my idea of my father than I might ever have managed were he still alive. I know that. My father was a friendly fellow but typically shy of certain conversations. The opportunity truthfully has been made less complicated by the now finite nature of the information available to me. The man was who he was and what I know of him now I know. Actually I was pretty lucky in my father -- not always perhaps, but in the end. Your experience being different, I have tried to avoid making too much of that here. Can't really avoid mentioning it now if just to say it is unimportant to my point. In my life, as I would hope in yours, I am lucky to know love and to have known it even when its absence was all I could feel at the time. I have a better standard by which to judge now, having found someone good with whom to share my life, as my father did, come to that. Even if I had never found my husband, I like to think having found my friends and my community and my family of choice I am in a better place -- to use a phrase usually I find insufferable in talking of the dead. (Nowhere is not a place by definition, no?) Life has shown me love in greater variety than I ever anticipated as a child, as a son. Nothing I did, I don't think, but ask. 

Also?  Perhaps only old men can forgive their old men, if we want or need to. Doesn't mean you need to of course. I only say I did whether I intended to, or needed to, myself. Perhaps pardon is a better word here, less bedraggled by religion and popular psychology. Like forgiveness it is something asked for and given, but with I think less expectation of admiration for the exercise of it. Think of what we pardon most days -- wind. What could be less invested with moral pretention?! So here's another of those floating quotes I mentioned at the start. I've seen it attributed online to both Shakespeare and St. Francis and I've no idea if it's either or neither: 

"It is in pardoning that we are pardoned."

Pretty, i'n't it? Again it may be perfect nonsense, and not at all to the point in your case. It appeals to me really because it suggests so little effort, yes? Forgiveness seems to me a very weighty business full of theology and all sorts of oily blessings. Beg pardon sounds more me -- common as dirt but fundamentally decent. That's at the flat and steady how I hope I am. That's the process I've undertaken with my father's memory and much of it funny when not embarrassing or rude and even when it is. Pardon. All there is to be hoped I suspect other than or as a consequence of love. The thing to be asked if we haven't understood. Pardon? 

What I ask of you now if I've gone on too long and said too little. May he rest in peace, your father. If I offend, I ask also pardon of his shade, and I remain at whatever distance

Your friend, 

B

The Beloved Old Goat

 

"They that enter into the world are too often treated with unreasonable rigour by those that were once as ignorant and heady as themselves; and distinction is not always made between the faults which require speedy and violent eradication, and those that will gradually drop away in the progression of life. Vicious solicitations of appetite, if not checked, will grow more importunate; and mean arts of profit or ambition will gather strength in the mind, if they are not early suppressed. But mistaken notions of superiority, desires of useless show, pride of little accomplishments, and all the train of vanity, will be brushed away by the wing of Time."

-- Samuel 4Johnson: Idler #25 (October 7, 1758)

She was kind to me, to us, even when she probably shouldn't have been, certainly when kindness was more than we deserved. She was the mother of my friend and as such just one more I might have meant to charm. I was good with mothers when I was young, fathers not so much, my own or others'.  Mothers liked me, always did. Most of them loved me sooner or later. Some of them I came to love back, but not all. One or two never liked me much despite my best efforts. Disappointing but understandable really as I was having sex with their sons. They must have suspected this even if they didn't know. I was obviously an influence at the very least, and not always for good. Her daughter was my best friend, never a lover, so that is why it probably mattered more. She was kind to me, the mother of my best friend then, to all of us, and so I have loved her ever since.

Forgive me for not using their names. It was only a day ago, at 2:12 in the morning that my friend's mother died. And yes, she died of what you'd assume given the times, and you're right to think that she needn't have if people weren't so selfish and stupid but we are. We do not listen and some of us think we know better when we don't and so people keep dying. It's horrible and infuriating and the woman who's died would not have disagreed I think but she isn't here to say so and it isn't my place to speak for her even now she's dead. It isn't my place to announce her death either.

Please forgive me then for writing in this awkward way-- without names -- about my friend's mother. Those who knew her will recognize her in this, I hope, but I speak here only for myself.

 When I was young I believed that the mothers of my friends liked me because I wanted them to, and more, because I needed them. It wasn't that I didn't or don't have a mother of my own, and a good one too, in whom I am lucky. Wasn't why. From a very early age I preferred the company of women, saw more of them and admired them more than men. Men were fascinating, but more as a matter of reverence or study. Men confused me. Still do, often as not, and I've been one and lived with another now for a very long time. Women were more interesting, had better conversation, better manners, and paid me more attention. I liked that. Women did more of the things in which I was interested and they ran most of the things in which I came to be involved; whether it was church or theater or politics, education, books, gossip, art -- it was women who could help me. It was women I could make laugh without malice. All the women I knew when I was a child, the women who weren't related to me, and who weren't my teachers, were either the friends of my parents or grandparents or the mothers and grandmothers of my friends. Children are selfish creatures and are meant to be I should think. I certainly was. If I needed something as a child, I learned quickly if not from birth that it was better to ask a woman, they may even have taught us that now I think of it. Lost? Ask a policeman -- or a lady -- for help. So I did, and they do, still.

Mothers liked me because I was helpful just as I'd been taught to be and polite. I was clean and well spoken and my people, if not well off, were nice. This may matter more in a small town where everyone pretends to know everyone else, or at least everyone else's business. It may still. I was not altogether unsupervised or wild. Working mothers like my own didn't much like it when we ate up all their food before they got home, but other than that they didn't mind us much so long as we weren't too noisy and later they hoped we weren't getting drunk or too high. When I met really middle class people in their very nice homes with very nice furniture on which one did not sit and with more forks than were needed on their very nice dining tables, I did not embarrass myself too much or presume too much on their civility. I didn't goggle when the mothers of my new middle class friends drank cocktails at lunch or when middle class fathers got drunk over dinner and flirted with the girlfriends of their sons. I admit I found them all quite fascinating, like characters in a book, which my middle class friends found mystifying I'm sure. (They, I remember were generally astonished at how much my mother tried to feed them at a sitting, that my father gave me money without being asked when we went out, and that no one in my family seemed very interested in where my friends intended to go to college or what my friends intended to do for a living when they grew up.)

My best friend's mother was different from all of these other women, or so at least she seemed to me at the time. She was a single mother, a divorcee at a time when that word was still exotic in the place where I grew up. She was a beautiful woman, always in some ways younger than her years, with stylishly short hair and simple make-up, a trim figure and tasteful business clothes. She supported herself and her only child without help from her ex-husband who I never met and wouldn't want to and her home was modest but modern and chic. All of the women I admired were smart and most of them were kind but she was tested in ways that most of them weren't, and not just by her daughter's strange little friends, and she seemed to me even when we'd made her most angry, entirely admirable. I don't know that we ever made a joke at her expense, any of us ever. Imagine that.

It would be years before any of us ever called her by her first name or anything other than "_____'s Mom" even to her face which quickly became something of a permanent endearment even after her daughter's friends were all grown. (The last time I had a meal with her I had to make myself use her Christian name, even then, all these years later.) Her daughter would occasionally and jokingly address her as, "old goat," as in, "hey, you old goat, we're home," but the joke was only funny because it was so obviously ridiculous. The very last person to be described as such, even when she did in fact grow old. She always laughed at this -- I think -- and we certainly did. She was frankly too glamorous to me, and too sophisticated in my eyes to take anything we said to shock her entirely seriously. (Perhaps she should have, as some of the things we told on ourselves were true.) When we were grown and kept only in imperfect touch, my friend and I used "The Old Goat" as a kind of shorthand for asking or telling after this woman we both loved.

I did love her, and always will. She was genuinely funny, in her own sometimes acerbic way and more often than not in her willingness to play along in almost any silly thing we played at; childish noises, mock fights, outlandish stories told on each other. Constant companions in high school and into college and even now on the very rare occasions when we communicate, my friend and I are still very silly with each other. Grimmest tragedy, which we've both known, she more than I, failures and disappointments, romances gone awry, deaths, addictions, loss, we've never not been able to talk about these things eventually and we still always come back at some point to the awkward goofs we were as adolescents. We find it strangely reassuring. My friend has always been a bit butch, even when she did her hair properly or wouldn't go to school. I've always been rather... theatrical. We always made each other laugh. Her mother must have found us quite alarming. We gave her cause. Still, at least in retrospect she was always willing to laugh along with us, despite our appalling behavior separately and together and with our weird need to be boorish with each other and joy in embarrassing ourselves, in public and private. We behave like fools, my friend and I, because each recognized in the other something of the same foolishness and to make it all if not better, then bearable; anecdote as antidote. Let's tell that terrible story again! At least "_____'s Mom" will laugh. It's always worked for us, if not always for her, poor woman.

 I sought tolerance and found it from more than I'd been led to expect. Got a little older and I sometimes succeeded in bullying or shaming into silence some of the people I could not convince or charm. But my friend's mother was different in so many ways from most of the women I then knew, and in this most particularly. When she loved someone, as I believe she loved me, it was unconditional and considered and sincere. I was not unloved otherwise, but I at least had the sense to recognize what love looked like as it was given to me and I hope I was grateful.

Of all the women I've ever wanted to make laugh, none was a better audience than "_____'s Mom" from the day I first met her to this. She was a smoker back in the day when that could still be elegant and between the two of us, however bad we'd been or however late I'd shamelessly waited to be driven home, etc., the common goal was to make that woman laugh until she couldn't breath. She would laugh until she cried and swatted us away. She would laugh until she told me I had to leave -- and when would I see her again? She laughed at herself and her own bad choices and she laughed even when I know we broke her heart. Later I suspect she laughed less. A second marriage. Jobs at which she was better than she needed to be. Widowhood. Loneliness. Illness and frailty, disappointment and pride, worry and wandering, and yet she laughed when I saw her, even when we cried for cause and not from laughing. 

I've always thought that phrase, "indomitable spirit" absurd, and not just because it is usually deployed by persons looking to benefit by standing next to rather than in the shoes of the person thus described. It's a verbal decoration, like pinning a medal over a wound and then moving on down the ward. "Aren't you brave. Where next?" Besides, it simply isn't true. There is no spirit which mayn't flag, no one who might not be beaten if by nothing less than time and death. I know nothing of eternity, but something now of this life, if less than I ever thought would be possible at my present age. What I know now is that spirits can be broken and can mend. That is our salvation and our hope. I have seen it. My friend and her beloved mother are among those who have shown me the possibility of this even in their darkest days, together and separately they have come back from places I would be too terrified to even visit. I do not say that either was "indomitable." Buffeted and bruised, certainly, dominated, even broken, but always they've come back and together we have somehow always still laughed.

My best friend's mother was kind to me when I was unhelpful and lied, when I was took advantage of her generosity and abused her hospitality, when the whole unhappy gang of her only daughter's only queer misbegotten friends broke her lamps and spoiled her rugs, disappointed her and failed to protect her child. She was kind to me when I had no right to further kindness, when I was really no friend to her daughter just as when I was. I learned very early that I might ask of her anything in her power to help me and that is a rare thing to know of someone else's mother. She was kind to me because she was kind. She liked me because I liked her. She loved me, present and absent, when I deserved it and when I didn't not because of who I was then or might be now but because, like her, I loved my friend. She was an admirable person, a good mother, a good friend. 

I cannot even offer my condolences in person. I do not know if or how there might be a funeral. I cannot send flowers even with a card addressed, "In Memory of The Beloved Old Goat," in the hopes of making my friend laugh.

Her death shocks and horrifies me and as a nation we should be ashamed to let such people, and so many people die. I am so furious just now, and so sad. 

I trust she would understand and forgive me even for going on and on about myself, even now. I like to think that if she were here, my friend and I might make her laugh. I'm glad the person she loved best in the world was with her. I sent my love. I send it here again, to that silly, extraordinary woman I count my friend still, and to her surviving family likewise always kind to me, and to the memory of "_____'s Mom," my friend likewise, and me so much the better for it. I'll remember. I've learned. Thank you for the lesson among so many.

Daily Dose

From The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, edited by Herschel Maurice Margoliouth

MOURNING

You, that decipher out the Fate
Of humane Off-springs from the Skies,
What mean these Infants which of late
Spring from the Starrs of Chlora's Eyes?

Her Eyes confus'd, and doubled ore,
With Tears suspended ere they flow;
Seem bending upwards, to restore
To Heaven, whence it came, their Woe.

When, molding of the watry Sphears,
Slow drops unty themselves away;
As if she, with those precious Tears,
Would strow the ground where Strephon lay.

Yet some affirm, pretending Art,
Her Eyes have so her Bosome drown'd,
Only to soften near her Heart
A place to fix another Wound.

And, while vain Pomp does her restrain
Within her solitary Bowr,
She courts her self in am'rous Rain;
Her self both Danae and the Showr.

Nay others, bolder, hence esteem
Joy now so much her Master grown,
That whatsoever does but seem
Like Grief, is from her Windows thrown.

Nor that she payes, while she survives,
To her dead Love this Tribute due;
But casts abroad these Donatives,
At the installing of a new.

How wide they dream! The Indian Slaves
That sink for Pearl through Seas profound,
Would find her Tears yet deeper Waves
And not of one the bottom sound.

I yet my silent Judgment keep,
Disputing not what they believe:
But sure as oft as Women weep,
It is to be suppos'd they grieve

Daily Dose

From The Collected Poems, by Stanley Kunitz

IS IT TOO LATE

"My dear, is it too late for peace, too late
For men to gather at the wells to drink
The sweet water; too late for fellowship
and laughter at the forge; too late for us
To say, 'Let us be good to one another'?"

From the poem,  Night Letter

Note from a white man

We're not that old, "white people." That malignant thought only really enters the world with it's corollary, the racialization of slavery. Oh, there were pale, pink people before then; whole tribes and nations of us as long ago as the Romans. We've been around, but we didn't get around much before, say, the Vikings, and they weren't much for larger commonalities of identity. It wasn't until a justification was required for the ownership and exploitation of whole "new" continents in the 17th century that we cleverly came up with the systemization of pigment.

I say "we," grudgingly. By any estimation, I'm as blue-eyed and pink skinned as they come. I was a strawberry-blond before the hair went and the beard went white. I was born in the United States of American, so I was raised in  racism and hope of a better day, so... I'm a white man.

One wants to say it's nonsense. Having reached middle-age, I can only wish it were. I have lived long enough to see the tatterdemalion standard of "white supremacy" not only raised again from mire, but spread out across the wide world to places undreamed of by the Klan and the White Citizens Counsels of my earliest childhood. That the discredited fantasies of reactionary American racism should now be heard openly again in the uncivil discourse of our politics -- to say nothing of the White House itself -- is horrifying enough. That this poisonous lie should be quoted, and a sitting American President admired for his espousal of it by a small minded mass murderer on the other side of the world, makes me ashamed again of my history and ours.

In the past two years I've read more than one racist rant on the social media pages of people I know just well enough to know they are my people. They are from the places I'm from, from circumstances I recognize as all too familiar; otherwise decent people who work hard, who love their families and care for their neighbors, worship their God on Sundays and pay their taxes on time. Not all of them are even as old as I am. Some are the children of the people I knew growing up.  Some are so young they might be my grandchildren. I've read words I hadn't thought to ever hear again -- in public at least. Poor people, most of 'em, blaming even poorer people for exploiting the system that actually oppresses them all. These are white people who can count on one hand the people of color they know, just as I could in my youth, white people who are comfortable again using epithets I was embarrassed by in my grandparents' generation. These are people who may never have so much as met a Jewish person, or knowingly thanked a Muslim for so much as a menu, and these same white people now blame Jews and Muslims, immigrants and people with longer pedigrees in this country than their own for "ruining" this country. It is as if we had forgotten what it was to be ashamed.

It is as if a monster from the dark under my childhood bed should now walk straight into the light of this day and laugh that I should ever have imagined him gone.

But that's because I am a white man. Being a white man allows that forgetfulness. Others can not afford that inattention. That's what privilege is, for any of us who might wonder at that word and think it inapplicable to the poor, or the otherwise decent, to ourselves, our friends and neighbors. Privilege is the luxury of shock. It costs us nothing but thoughts and prayers.

I was raised with the ideal that I was the equal of any man. Embarrassed now by the unquestioned inequality in that statement. I remember being shocked when I first encountered "white supremacy" as an ideology to think that anyone could be thought to be inferior to a white supremacist. I am abashed to think I ever thought such ideas mere relics of our past.

Violence and hatred are as much my inheritance as white man as the kindness and charity I was actually taught by the good people who raised me. To reject racism is a duty, not a choice. To mourn the innocent is where we start, not all that they are owed. I can only work to not make being a white man any part of the definition of who I yet hope to be.

I will not say the names of these murderers. I will not dignify their brutality and their ignorance by affording them the courtesy. But neither will I allow myself to forget for a moment that they are as much a part of me as the people I love and admire.

In his poem White Houses, the great African American poet Claude McKay says:

But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.

I must take his example, and bear my own anger, and my part in his. 

The Muslim prayer for the dead, the Ṣalāt al-Janāzah, as I understand it, is performed to seek pardon for the deceased and all dead Muslims. Last night I watched the faithful, all over the world, offer this prayer. I watched people all over the world, of every faith and without any, mourn for the innocents murdered in Christchurch, New Zealand. I also saw the President of the United States of America, yet again, fail to condemn "white nationalism." This was the same President praised in the killer's manifesto as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

As a white man and an American, I seek the pardon of  those present and absent, the young and the old, men and women, who suffer the consequences of such blind arrogance, our hubris, and our hate.
I can only hope, with the poet, to "possess the courage and the grace" to be better than we, than I, have been.

And to never forget again.

Daily Dose

From Delights & Shadows: Poems, by Ted Kooser

MOURNERS

After the funeral, the mourners gather
under the rustling churchyard maples
and talk softly, like clusters of leaves.
White shirt cuffs and collars flash in the shade:
highlights on deep green water.
They came this afternoon to say goodbye,
but now they keep saying hello and hello,
peering into each other’s faces,
slow to let go of each other’s hands.

Daily Dose

From Snow Hunters, by Paul Yoon

IN THE CORNER

"In the corner stood the umbrella that was given to him a long time ago.  He tilted it away from the wall until it found the window light, and he held it there, reminding himself to mend the tear in the blue canopy."

From Chapter 8

Daily Dose

From Selected Poems, 1968 - 2014, by Paul Muldoon

GATHERING MUSHROOMS

As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
the taste of dill, or tarragon-
he could barely tell one from the other-

filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother.
Why should he be stricken
with grief, not for his mother and father,

but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter
In Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon-
he could barely tell one from the other-

and why should he now savour
the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin,
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?

*

He looked about. He remembered her palaver
on how both earth and sky would darken-
'You could barely tell one from the other'-

while the Monarch butterflies passed over
in their milkweed-hunger: 'A wing-beat, some reckon,
may trigger off the mother and father

of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher
with the force of a hurricane.'
Then: 'Milkweed and Monarch 'invented' each other.'

*

He looked about. Cow's-parsley in a samovar.
He'd mistaken his mother's name, 'Regan, ' for Anger';
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
he could barely tell one from the other.

Daily Dose

From The Poems of Richard Lovelace

TO HIS DEARE BROTHER COLONEL F. L. IMMODERATELY MOURNING MY BROTHER'S UNTIMELY DEATH AT CARMATHEN

I.
If teares could wash the ill away,
A pearle for each wet bead I'd pay;
But as dew'd corne the fuller growes,
So water'd eyes but swell our woes.

II.
One drop another cals, which still
(Griefe adding fuell) doth distill;
Too fruitfull of her selfe is anguish,
We need no cherishing to languish.

III.
Coward fate degen'rate man
Like little children uses, when
He whips us first, untill we weepe,
Then, 'cause we still a weeping keepe.

IV.
Then from thy firme selfe never swerve;
Teares fat the griefe that they should sterve;
Iron decrees of destinie
Are ner'e wipe't out with a wet eye.

V.
But this way you may gaine the field,
Oppose but sorrow, and 'twill yield;
One gallant thorough-made resolve
Doth starry influence dissolve.

Daily Dose

From The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott

WHAT VOICE

"What voice was like thine, that could sing of to-morrow,
Till forgot in the strain was the grief of to-day!
But when friends drop around us in life's weary waning,
The grief, Queen of Numbers, thou canst not assuage"

From Farewell to the Muse (1822)

At the Grave of My Brother

Why "Soldier, Rest"

Maybe it's as simple as this: I've been reading Sir Walter Scott.  I read The Lady of the Lake straight through a few weeks back.  Then I read this poem -- from that longer work -- again three days ago, in an anthology.  It is a song, really, the poem I read aloud and posted here last night.  Scott wrote many such, and collected many more in his three volumes of border ballads.  He loved nothing better.  He did nothing better.  I've only just heard it sung, Soldier, Rest! in a lovely recording I found online.

However then it's come to mind, I have it now and it's made me think, not of Scott, or his ballads, or of war and soldiers, but of rest, and of a good man only just gone, too soon, to his.

It may not suit the occasion, or better say, there may be other, better poems that might.  He wasn't a soldier, the man who's died.  His was a gentle soul.  The violence he knew was, so far as I know, all or nearly all interior, his struggles with and within his mind and illness.  Maybe that's why the poem reminds me of him nonetheless.  He fought.  Reading his obituary, I am touched and proud to see how much he won.

Mental illness was not what killed him, at only sixty.  Cancer killed him.  Cigarettes killed him, it may be argued I suppose.  His pleasures were few enough and simple, I should think that it would be hard now to argue even against this one.  I wasn't privy to his last struggle.  I hadn't seen him for a decade, or thereabouts.

I knew him because I loved his brother, Peter, as he did.  Because I knew Peter, I knew Mike.  One couldn't know my friend Peter and not know his family.  Hell, one could not sit by Peter on a long bus ride and not in the end know something of his family!  I like to think I knew Peter as well as anyone not related by blood, certainly better sometimes than the man knew himself.  He knew me the same way.  I doubt, however that Peter remembered my brother's name from one telling to the next.  Family with Peter however was often nearly all he had and if one wanted to know him, well, he brought them with him.  More, they welcomed me, all of 'em, as was and is their nature, as it was his.  I loved them, and do.  Peter's gone, as are his parents, his brother Tom, and now Mike.

Mike was a special case.  When his older brother's illness came, Peter was still a boy, with all of a boy's understanding and a little brother's natural resentment of the attention it drew away from him.  Boys can be selfish, parents distracted with worry, families complicated even before they are tested.  Mental illness is unlike if it is anything at all.  My family has had some similar experience of it.  I've seen the devastation it can bring in it's wake, to both the sufferer and those who suffer with and 'round him or her.  I don't equate my experience with theirs.  Tolstoy's famous line, "... each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is true.  By the time I knew Peter, his brother's illness was managed, the family survived more or less intact.  By the time I knew them they were not, I should emphasize, unhappy, at least no more nor less than any other.

And when I was with them, more often than not they were more joyful than not.  A loud, dramatic, big and boisterous family, by any standard, a fact only emphasized when first encountered at the dinner table, and at the Holidays!  They were, I admit, a shock to someone more used as I was to shy affection and quietly smoldering resentments.  The noise of them!  I loved it.

Mike was very much of them, always, though his illness put him, as only such an illness can, somewhat apart, always.  Schizophrenia separates those who have it from not only other people but in many ways separates the ill from themselves; from their lives before the illness, and from the trust we all have, most of the time, in ourselves.  I saw Mike struggle, even when he was well, to trust himself, to read the reactions of others right, to trust that he was in fact well.  I saw my friend Peter, his brother, struggle to trust his own reactions, testing his patience, struggle sometimes to trust his love for his brother and let that be enough.

People who have been forced to doubt themselves as profoundly as only such an illness can, will, I suspect always thereafter be at some disadvantage in company.  I saw members of my own family, including a smart, even witty woman, well educated and professionally accomplished before her illness,  withdraw further and further into an agonizing uncertainty that eventually exhausted her.  I watched her with embarrassment as she faltered in commonplace situations, heard her lose the thread of simple things, and give up.  As with many people so circumstanced, we none of us knew how to help her.  I was a boy when all that happened, what could I do?  I still blush to think how little I might have done and didn't.  Eventually, my aunt lost the struggle to regain herself.

Mike did not.  Even the last time I saw him, years ago now, he was as he had almost always been when I was in his company, valiant.  It is a martial word, and now I think, apt.  It is no accident after-all perhaps that Scott's poem should so remind me of Mike.  If his first resort was to his faith and to those familiar and familial expressions that can sound to the better armed conversationalist regimented and rehearsed, the affection expressed was no less sincere for that.  It took a remarkable discipline I realize now to make that effort, to maintain, express and to emphasize love above any doubt and despite the very real disappointments even a more expansive life than Mike's might find, day to day.

I never knew him, in all the years I knew him, once I knew him, not to say he loved me, and mean it.  He loved me because I loved his brother.  That was enough.  That was brave, even noble.

It is no reflection on the character of those who can not do as he did that sometimes even love fails them.  I loved Peter, and I failed him, as in the end he sometimes disappointed me.  Peter was sick for a long time.  We were often separated and for a long time.  His illness changed him in ways neither of us could have anticipated.  It changed me too.  Illness only takes from us, and from some it simply takes too much.  I see no gifts in suffering.  It is human to want sometimes more than we can have or keep, but all we lose is lost.

Peter's family never failed him.  Sometimes he was disappointed in them, and they in him, but they never failed him.  Nothing good came of Peter's death.  Nothing.  Even in his dying though there were chances to see his better nature and the better natures of those around him.  His family loved him and I loved him.  People loved him who hardly knew him, believe me!  (He was a wonder that way.)  His brother Mike loved him as in the end I must admit I did too, without the luxury of conditions.  For Mike, with all his struggles, this one thing seemed easy.  Took me a long and intimate friendship to learn that lesson with Peter.  Peter I think, I hope, learned it sooner and from better examples, like his brother, Mike.

Scott's poem is an inducement, almost a lullaby, sung to a soldier to convince him he deserves to stop where he is and find peace.  I learn only now, reading Mike's obituary just how much, in the last ten years he earned his peace.  I knew he worked, and worked hard at being a man who contributed to the family and community that cared for him.  I had no idea how hard he had worked, and how much he had achieved in making that community a better place for people who had struggled as he did with mental illness.  When he died, he was a respected and recognized contributor to that most important fight for access to care, to dignity and self-suficiency for a population too often ignored and neglected by the rest of us.  His family must be proud, and well they should be.

Was he not a soldier, then, in his way?  And was not his way valiant, then, for all it was of peace?  Has he not earned his own at last?

Oh, how I wish him, and his family, peace.  I send my love, in memory of my good friend, Peter, and his good brother

MICHAEL OWEN ENRIGHT

(Donations may be made in Mike's memory to People's Oakland, 3433 Bates Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213)

Soldier, Rest!

Daily Dose

From Selected Poems, by T. S. Eliot

IN THIS

"In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech..."

From The Hollow Men, IV

In Memoriam

A few years ago I spoke at a friend's memorial service.  She was a coworker, a remarkable little woman, full of dark humor and fellow-feeling, a friend.  She was a spitfire named Jennifer Kuhn, and we all loved her.  I miss her still.  She had asked me to speak at her memorial and so I did, as did many others.  (She would have been glad, I like to think, to have seen such a crowd.)

After her memorial, our boss, the CEO of the company, a young man, then in rude good health, joking or not, asked me the same thing. "You have to promise to do that for me," he said, "if I die I want you to do the eulogy."  Other people said similar things to me that day.  Having lived in San Francisco in the Eighties, I have some experience of speaking at funerals.  It isn't something about which to brag, but people are kind, and one wants to say something after, I know.  I may have said it to someone myself.

When Bryan Pearce said it to me, I'm pretty sure it was a joke, or if it was sincere, I don't expect he would have remembered saying it, or thought much of saying it after.  As I've said, our boss was still a young man, and when he died recently, after an impossibly difficult illness that lasted nearly a year to the day from his original cancer diagnosis, it was not only a blow to us all, and a shock, but also frankly difficult to accept.  Death leaves a kind of chaos in it's wake, always.

I've just been to Bryan's memorial service.  He was an important figure in our industry.  His service was well attended.  A number of people spoke; colleagues with whom he worked closely, personal friends, and most movingly his wife and daughters.

I'm glad I went.  I did not know the man as they did, obviously.  I had some sense of who he was beyond our roles as employer and employee, though that had more to do with his friendly and generous nature than with any presumption on my part.  Bryan would have everyone a friend.

It is perhaps presumptuous of me now to say anything more in his memory.  I've already written something here to mark his passing.  Still, today I remember the promise I made him years ago and joking or not, I've kept it.

It wasn't my place to say anything at his service.  So I'll just say it here, that these few words might have some small comfort to those of us who miss him.  I can't think what else to do.

A poet* said, "I remember from your life," and that's right, it seems to me, that's just how it happens.  When someone dies, but even before that happens, we can never have the whole life of another person.  When someone dies, that is what we lose.  Some of us will have had more of him than others; those that knew him best, that loved him and were loved by him, they will have the most, and that's right, that that should be so.  The people he loved best, the woman he loved, the children they made, they will remember him best, they will have memories we won't.  They will need more.  They've lost more.

Those of us who worked most closely with him, those with whom he worked every day and for years, they will remember differently, but still, they will remember too.  They will remember what he did, all he tried to do, and why, and why it matters, still.  

The rest of us will remember from his life just as much as is ours; what we learned from his example, what he gave and taught us, what we owe him, the man he was when he was with us, all too briefly.

Even in the aggregate, our memories from his life, can not be what it means to be alive, to have him still here, with us, and that is why his loss is felt so, and will be.   That is what we mourn, what we can not have again.

Another poet, a very different poet, said:

Can I see another's woe,

And not be in sorrow too?

Can I see another's grief,

And not seek for kind relief?

That is why we come here today, seeking that "kind relief."  That is what the memories we have from his life, the memories we each have, large and small, together, we offer one another now.  It is what we do.  It is all we can do for one another now, just now.  William Blake, a great poet, wrote the lines I just read.  In that same poem, called "On Another's Sorrow," he also says:

Can I see a falling tear,

And not feel my sorrow's share?

My share is small, but it is mine.  My memories: of Bryan smiling in the morning from across the bookstore's lobby, of Bryan laughing at something I said to make him laugh when perhaps he ought not to have, my memories of his many kindnesses, his enthusiasm, his integrity, his decency, his sense, his example, these are mine.  That is my loss; my kind boss, the boss who danced with me, and laughed, and did good.  That is "my sorrow's share".  

It is, as I've said, a small thing.  I offer it today to those for whom this loss is irreparable.  Not that it can mean so much to them, as it does to me, but that, with all the others gathered here today, we may remember, together, as much as we can, today, so that we may remember today -- our losses, and his gifts -- as long as we live.

He was a good man.  Remember that.  It matters.  It matters more than he knew.  What he did, the good he did, matters.  That he was good, that he was a good man, that matters more.  Remember that even I, who only worked for him, someone who never knew him as you did, someone who by all rights he should not have liked, but weirdly, miraculously, eventually he did, remember that even I knew that.  He was a good man.  There are too few.  

That is what I will remember from him.  He was a good man.  I will miss him.

*Owen Dodson, "Poems for My Brother Kenneth"

Daily Dose

From Sonnets, by William Shakespeare

SONNET 71

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell;
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then you should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse,
When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay;
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

Poor Recompense

"With regard to the sharpest and most melting sorrow, that which arises from the loss of those whom we have loved with tenderness, it may be observed, that friendship between mortals can be contracted on no other terms than that one must some time mourn for the other's death: and this grief will always yield to the survivor one consolation proportionate to his affliction; for the pain, whatever it be, the he himself feels, his friend has escaped."
Johnson: Rambler #17 (May 15, 1750) *

It's not such a strange thing, is it, that even in our grief that those of us that live and work in books should turn to books for comfort?  Where better?  At such times, friends and family know only what we know of our losses, more or less, if that and we can not ask them to say what we can not, not yet, anyway.  Those conversations, however necessary to us, we have just among ourselves.  If the loss is not so much a private grief as a more general misfortune there is all the more reason to turn for the articulation of it to those whose griefs have been memorialized in language which has survived both the loss and the speaker, no?

 "When a friend is carried to his grave, we at once find excuses for every weakness, and palliations of every fault; we recollect a thousand endearments which before glided off our minds without impression, a thousand favors unrepaid, a thousand duties unperformed, and wish, vainly wish for his return, not so much that we may receive, as that we may bestow happiness, and recompense that kindness which before we never understood."
Johnson: Rambler #54 (September 22, 1750)

We count too many losses lately, or so at least it seems tonight.  The truth is of course that death is ever present.  We can not allow for that fact without contemplation of the corollary; that life goes on even in the midst of seemingly irreparable loss.  Again, as Johnson said to Boswell, "If one was to think constantly of death, the business of life would stand still."  We go on.

 "To be always afraid of losing life is, indeed, scarcely to enjoy a life that can deserve the care of preservation. He that once indulges idle fears will never be at rest. Our present state admits only of a kind of negative security; we must conclude ourselves safe when we see no danger, or none inadequate to our powers of opposition. Death, indeed, continually hovers about us, but hovers commonly unseen, unless we sharpen our sight by useless curiosity."
Johnson: Rambler #126 (June 1, 1751)

Johnson addressed the subject regularly, both publicly and privately.  In his essays, in his poetry, his conversation, his letters, his prayers.  We are uniquely fortunate in having so much still to hand of what the great man said, on every occasion and condition of a man's life, from birth to death.  If generally the reader turns to him more often to be entertained by his conversation and charmed by his company, and to be educated as much in morals as in literature, the Doctor is nonetheless, I find, a great guide and solace in his more somber reflections.

 "We, to whom the shortness of life has given frequent occasions of contemplating mortality, can, without emotion, see generations of men pass away, and are at leisure to establish modes of sorrow and adjust the ceremonial of death. We can look upon funeral pomp as a common spectacle, in which we have no concern, and turn away from it to trifles and amusements, without dejection of look or inquietude of heart."
Johnson: Rambler #78 (December 15, 1750)


He knew whereof he spoke.  When his mother died, he hadn't the money to bury her.  (He wrote his one novel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, originally titled, 'The Choice of Life", in a week, to pay for her funeral.)  His beloved wife, Tetty, died without seeing his success and the fame his Dictionary brought him.  Johnson told many friends, including his greatest biographer -- the greatest who ever lived -- James Boswell, that after her death "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a solitary wander in the wild of life, without any direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on the world to which I have little relation."  Every year, for the rest of his life, on her birthday, on their anniversary and the anniversary of her death, he would mark the day with prayers of gratitude and overwhelming sadness. This, briefly, from 1782:

 "This is the day on which in 1752 dear Tetty died. I have now uttered a prayer of repentance and c.; perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me. Thou, God, art merciful, hear my prayers, and enable me to trust in Thee.
We were married almost seventeen years, and have now been parted thirty."

 When I learned of the untimely death of a coworker today, it seemed to me that everything I was already reading lost it's savour.  Without even thinking what I was doing or why, I wandered my shelves looking, although I did not know it, for the consolation of an old friend, and found Samuel Johnson.  I picked up his essays from The Idler, and read:

"The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour was tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and horror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled."
Johnson: Idler #41 (January 27, 1759)

I kept reading well into the night.  When Johnson neared the end of his own life, Boswell tells us, his deepest regret came when he could himself no longer read "during his hours of restlessness.  'I used formerly, (he added,) when sleepless in bed, to read like a Turk.'"

 Among the last prayers he offered at the end, were the words, "Bless my friends, have mercy upon all men."

I offer the simple words here, as a first memorial to my friend, comfort to his family and a most fervent blessing on Johnson's memory and a hope for us all.

*I am grateful for most of these quotes to the rather appallingly named, but extremely good site, The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page.