The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

was serious and rather grave.

Watchful, wary. I was ...

keep in correspondence, as well as my church and two wonderful friends in town, Trudy and Millie. I could never be lonely.

am repulsed. As if one family’s horror is some kind of spectacle the rest of us have right to observe.

Have you no soul within your cold chest?

my home just outside Annapolis,

Daan

diagnosed with colon cancer that’s already spread up into his intestine and stomach.

He sounded like the same old Daan, calm and optimistic. He said Lina is very upset

He told Fiona and Bruce yesterday,

I tried explaining the news to Lars.

seeing a younger version of his brother

But a child of fourteen months, what could possess a person to do that? These are thoughts I’ve had, but not in an urgent sense, just a little bruise I’d press on every once in a while.)

was humiliated! Imagining the discussions going on behind my back, them talking about it beforehand.

I was gunning for retirement for my whole career, and then I did it, and at the end, damn it, I find myself bored!

For years Liz Donnelly has dropped your name to me. We’re the same age, you and I, I think. I’m 76. There, now we’re better acquainted.

Ms. Joan Didion

My ex-husband (his name is Daan, he’s Belgian) is dying with cancer. We divorced nearly thirty

strange loophole, and that is my best friend Rosalie is married to Daan’s brother,

We had a good marriage. Daan is a gentle, intelligent man.

When Gill died I went very far inside myself, and I suppose Daan was doing the same thing,

though it was Daan who continued to raise the remaining children, while I rather disappeared from the family for some time.

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.

When my father died we’d received a substantial payout from his estate

He said he was going to move back to Belgium. I didn’t argue. He never liked America anyway. We drank the wine. We had sex, and it was the first time since Gill had died that I wanted to. That was the end of that. A while later he left and Fiona went with him and finished out high school there. I still loved him, I suppose. I just couldn’t bear him.

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

Would love to see Bruce + schedule dinner with Trudy&Millie,

Guy and I heard a case years back in which a respected physician who retired at the age of sixty-two had, within two years, wrapped himself up in a scheme related to prostitution in Cleveland, been busted and lost all of his money.

GREAT!!!

my