An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [21]
“They shouldn’t be old women,” I told Edward in Bordeaux. “They should be big men, a whole line of them, crying.”
Idon’t know what to say, people wrote, or, Words fail.
What amazed me about all the notes I got — mostly through e-mail, because who knew how to find me? — was how people did know what to say, how words didn’t fail. Even the words words fail comforted me. Before Pudding died, I’d thought condolence notes were simply small bits of old-fashioned etiquette, important but universally acknowledged as inadequate gestures. Now they felt like oxygen, and only now do I fully understand why: to know that other people were sad made Pudding more real. My friend Rob e-mailed me first, a beautiful and straightforward vow to do anything he could to help me. Some people apologized for sending sympathy through the ether; some overnighted notes; it made no difference to me. I read them, and reread them. They made me cry, which helped. They moved me, that is to say, they felt physical, they budged me from the sodden self-disintegrating lump I otherwise was. As I was going mad from grief, the worst of it was that sometimes I believed I was making it all up. Here was some proof that I wasn’t.
One day Ann wrote to say that people, even people who didn’t know me, had asked what they could do for me.
“They could write,” I told her. I considered this a sign of my essential mental health, that I could both think of something that would make me feel better and ask for it.
The English Department head at Skidmore, Linda Simon, was one of the people who’d asked, and soon enough my e-mail box filled up with messages from my future colleagues. I’d met some but not others, and every single message meant the world. One, from a famous writer who taught in the department, was so eloquent that it inspired in me the only moment of true denial I remember from that terrible time: I thought, I’ll save this, and show it to Pudding when he’s older: it’ll really mean something to him.
People speak of losing friends when someone dear to them dies, but we were lucky. I lost only one friend, and possibly she doesn’t even know it yet, and probably I’d lost her long before. Her mother had died when this friend was a teenager, her father died when she was in her thirties. Frankly, I’d been good to her after her father’s death, though by the time Pudding died we were no longer as close as we’d been. One of my best friends called to tell her my bad news and then e-mailed to say that he had done so.
I waited to hear from her. And waited.
It took three months. That would have been all right if she’d said, I didn’t know what to say, or I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to find the words.
“I was hoping to speak to you,” she wrote, “or be able to send a paper letter, but I don’t have a number or address for you, and I simply couldn’t wait any longer.”
It’s hard to explain the rage I felt at reading this, at her attempt to turn her silence into something noble, when all of my other friends had turned themselves inside out to help me months before. The entire note was full of platitudes. “Losing a child is the worst pain one can experience, I think,” she wrote, and I hated her for that I think, as though she wanted to make it seem as though my pain was her original thought, a theory she’d honed in social work school. Even now I realize how petty I’m being, how the only problem was that she’d waited too long to write the note. Her shock and sympathy were no longer fresh, and her language reflected that. But my grief was still fresh, grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving, and the distance between what I felt and what she wrote infuriated me.
She’s written to me