The artist’s bookcases were full of poets, like the bookcases of anyone trying to find out how everyone else copes. Ted read Bodil Malmsten: “There is no death, only a lot of dead.” Then he read Joan Didion, about her first memory of coming home from the hospital after her husband died: “I remember putting his cell phone in the charger on his desk.” Then he read Bodil Malmsten again: “That is what death is, that you are never answering again.” Then he read Maya Angelou, “When Great Trees Fall”: Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
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