The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

That amazement one feels at this stage of life—a sort of astonishment that is also confusion, which leads to a sort of worry, or a sort of fear, I guess. How did we get here? How can it be?

We are born and grow through childhood in spring. We live those glorious, lively, interesting years of our twenties, thirties, forties in summer. We settle into ourselves in autumn, that cool but not yet cold time, rich and aromatic. And in winter we age (brutally) and die.

But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside.

I didn’t know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self-doubt.

The stretches on the high, windblown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, and aren’t we always trying to get back to the happier times?

that stays word for word in memory is the bit about being born at dawn under a pink sunrise. Isn’t that lovely? Makes me miss a thing I never really had. Now I don’t think about it, at least not like I

Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed.

You get the one life. It’s awfully unfair, isn’t it?

Terrible accidents happen all the time to many, many people. The grief that must fill the world is incomprehensible. Our small dose felt as large as the sun, didn’t it?

Now that I’m dying it seems much simpler than it ever did before. Living, I mean. There is no parallel universe. There is no “what could have been if only.” In some ways this has brought me a great deal of peace. In other ways it is bitter. How cruel life is only this long. Now that I see clearly, I’d like more time.

I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal.

My life has felt enormous, but what do I have to show for it?

I hate when they call me Screamer. Any time they come near me I try to imagine I am climbing inside myself. It’s hard to explain. The way I think of it is like I’m turning inside out sort of. I usually go quiet, but what’s really crazy about it is that it feels like, inside, I actually am screaming.

You are very stubborn, and that is a wonderful quality except when it’s not.

He said he wants to take me shooting (imagine) and to his golf club for “the best crab cakes I’ve ever had”—in TEXAS—and I told him that was downright offensive.

I despise the notion of Texas with every atom in my being,

You know I do believe in an intelligent God with plans and a firm grasp on what is happening down here—and

I wonder, was I always lonely? I’m not sure I’ve ever felt at home in the world, but I’m not sure that’s unique. I’m not sure. I’m really not sure what I sat down here to say, but it’s like the whole neat thing has had a good shake and, for the first time in a long time, I have no idea what’s around the corner.

It’s just that now, this thing that has been woken, I can’t seem to lull it back to sleep.

He taught me that, too. To say what people want to hear, not necessarily the truth, because most people tell you they want to hear the truth, but they do not, and if you tell the truth it will come back to bite you like a snake finding its own tail to swallow. I remember how he would say this to my brother and me and I didn’t like the way it sounded because my mother taught the opposite, that if we do not say the truth we have nothing. We are nothing.

You are a wonderful, interesting woman, full of love and kindness, but you are so damn stubborn and determined you know exactly what is right in every situation.

(This is the trouble with being only five foot one inch, and it has always been the trouble, but you know I am tall on the inside.)

I will go into the year as you said: boldly, unapologetically, head up and not taking bullshit from anyone with a penis.

My instinct is to fight, and initially I found myself rather compiling a case, disputing your accusations, thinking of all the proof I have that you’re wrong. And yet I waited. I continued to sit with it. Surprising even myself, I’ve let the tide go out with my self-defense,

I thought I would need someone to find me bearable, but he thought I was wonderful! And I thought him even better. He never made me feel strange. He gave me a family—I’d outwitted the fate I’d assumed for myself.

I know you think of me as your mother only, but please remember, inside I am also just a girl.

You said it feels like giving up, but it is not. You are not aspiring to a dream; you are trying to survive. You are trying to outwit the challenges that have tried their damnedest to topple you. I wanted to say that to you, first and foremost.

I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be.

It was agonizing because it felt so true to the experiences of my own life, and I suppose, back then, I was reading fiction in search of assurances that there was still reason for hope.

I am an old woman and my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane.

There is a quote from one of my friend Joan Didion’s essays. It’s from the last essay in The White Album. The quote is: “What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” and then it goes on, and then, “Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time.” This feels like the truest thing I have ever read. I guess there’s no bottom to a person, but I feel you have left fewer stones unturned than anyone else who’s ever passed through, and it’s taken me some time to recognize how knowing you has been like coming in from the cold, lonely road to find a warm fire and a table laid, so thank you for that, Theodore.

we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.

But cancer rather makes dying a more ravaging sort of experience you have to endure—I’d much prefer to be surprised,