The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

Postscript: A good punch line is a good punch line regardless if delivered by a man or a woman. You sound like an old fool with comments like that one.

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. For us it was the latter.

You are a remarkable woman. Solid as a mountain. Intelligent. I loved your intelligence first, that smart brightness in your eyes, the look you had when I met you—like you were ready, whatever was coming, you were ready.

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, but I do want to tell you a story about me.

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

I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be. Things nobody ever warned me about. I wish someone would have thought to say to me, earlier on, ‘Sybil, over and over again serpents will emerge from the bottom of the sea and grab you by the feet.’ Of course I didn’t say anything of the sort to my own children, and I probably never would.

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.