The Correspondent: A Novel by Virginia Evans - 9

Ms. Joan Didion

30 E. 71st St. #5A

New York, NY 10021

November 14, 2012

Dear Joan,

Thank you for your letter, which did arrive as you’d intended on the 7th of November. It was very good of you to remember that. You asked how long ago Gilbert had passed away, and this past July it was thirty-nine years. He would have turned nine the November 7 following. Do you know, I had to sit down and do the math again, and that made me feel bad. I feel it’s something I should know immediately and it’s a bit like disrespect that I don’t. Another way of punishing myself for the rest of time.

In response to your second, more complex question, I’ve sat and thought for nearly a week. How does it all feel to me now?

I suppose there is this one part of it, which is, Gilbert has never left me, and the circumstances of his death have never for one day diminished, and as I age it feels so strange that the majority of people with whom I come in contact don’t have the slightest inkling that he ever lived. I had him for so much less time than I’ve lived without him, and yet his presence is enormous, though I keep it to myself. It is as if I’ve swallowed a hot air balloon but try not to let on.

There is an articulation of life one hears again and again. People will say, ‘oh, this is only a season.’ You know what I am referring to, don’t you? I mean how if someone is in difficulty they’ll say ‘it’s only a season.’ Or if someone is having a new baby and in the sleepless nights, an older woman will comfort with this idea that the expanse of time is a season—a winter, I suppose? (rather, a hurricane season!)—and the season will change eventually to something sunnier. I take issue with this. There are, by definition, four seasons that repeat in measured pattern year after year. As there is no such rhythm in the human life, I have to think that when it comes to seasons we all get one round. 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. One turn of the seasons per person, unless it’s cut short, like it was for Gill, and like it was for Quintana Roo. I suppose, on this schedule, we’d say your John had made it to fall. My mother died in her summer.

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. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years. I had one of those stopovers when the children were young, just before Gilbert died, and Daan and I were happy, even though I didn’t know it was happiness at the time because it felt like busyness and exhaustion and financial stress and self-doubt. But Gilbert’s death was a swift ejection back out to the loneliest bitter stretch of road, and that is the bone crunching grief. I’m not saying I’ve not come in from the wind a few more times in my life; I have. And of course I have my other children, and they have been a joy and comfort. I’d like to say they were enough, but it wasn’t enough, and that is another avenue of grief, but anyway my point is I tire of people speaking of seasons as if you can count on three months of winter turning out three months of summer on repeat. It’s not so. 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.

I understand perhaps you are asking how the grief wears over time partly from a place of kindness and partly, on the other hand, from a place of self-preservation, and understandably so, wondering what you should expect in your own situation of hell. Perhaps reading this you would like to think you will fare better than I have fared—and perhaps you will. In any case, I wish I could say after all this time it’s easier, but it’s not easier. I do have longer stretches, though, when Gilbert doesn’t come to mind, and that is a relief, I suppose. This time of year, though, with the trees fully bare and the leaves collecting in drifts, the sky rather endlessly gray, the expanse of now through to the end of the holidays is abhorrent to me. I hold my breath and wait for January. I barely decorate. A few lights in the windows is all I can muster.

Do let me know how you are getting on, with your own life and work, and how you are feeling, your own musings, anything—when you have time. I’ll look forward to your next letter—

With very warm regards I write,

Sybil