The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

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.

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? I think that is what it feels like, with Gill. I’ve spent my life trying to get back to having him even though I know I cannot.

Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?

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.

I believe one ought to be precious with communication. Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal. Sometimes, Caroline, the easiest inroad is to begin with a thank you, for a gift or a kindness or a letter, you know, and then take it from there. Answer every question they’ve asked, and ask your own, and you will have created a never-ending circuit of curiosity and learning.

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

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.