I keep thinking about my grandmother’s house, snooping through my mother’s old notebooks and drawing books. For pages she had written over and over again, in variously stylized fonts, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” I am not throwing that back at you, G, I am just struck by the irony of it, that you would have, could have (in a box, with a fox) loved and been loved so profoundly, and had that ripped away from you. Whereas I, and people like my mother, stumble through life with those phrases tautly poised about us in scripted artifice, stylized posturing, yet never love, never really being loved. Is there a God after all? Sometimes I doubt it, sometimes I feel that absence like a deep cold ache in my bones.
I thought about you this morning--I went out on the deck for my second cup of coffee and smoked one of my coveted, emergency cigarettes. Yes, I have decided to take up smoking to quit drinking. Smokers seem like accomplishers, whereas drinkers just slowly melt into a pathetic puddle of inaction. Maybe we can have one together sometime, and poke at this soft-bodied creature called longing. I will say, emphatically, that I do not cringe from your Eric-ology. But then I spend most of my time contemplating the dead. I look forward to your exploring to whatever extent--photos, memories, fragments of any sort that you might need to sew this shroud, or this ball gown to dance in.
W.H. Sebald wrote, “And so they are always returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”
