Table of Contents
Introduction xi
01 Sorrow must be Sorrow
George Eliot to Lady Lytton 2
02 Grief is Non-Negotiable
Nick Cave to Cynthia 6
03 A Great Desert Lies Ahead of Me
Edith Wharton to John Hugh Smith 10
04 I Have Felt this Loss with All My Heart
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Anna-Margaretha Textor 13
05 Your True Self has No Life, No Death
Sheldon and Seungsahn Haengwon 18
06 It's So Curious
Colette to Marguerite Moreno 24
07 A Man is Not Completely Born Until He be Dead
Benjamin Franklin to Elizabeth Hubbart 27
08 What a World
Ken Kesey to his friends 30
09 I Loved her So Much
Audre Lorde to Martha Dunham 38
10 Make it Your Ambition to Take Heart
Rainer Maria Rilke to Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín 42
11 I Will be There in the Trees
Kathleen Keyes to the Irish Times 46
12 You Must Let Me Cry My Cry for Him
Robert Frost to Helen Thomas 50
13 How Could You Go Ahead of Me?
A widow to Eung-Tae Lee 53
14 It was Supposed to be Me
An unknown soldier believed to have been Basil Rathbone to Edgar Rathbone 56
15 The Mists of Grief
Helen Keller to Takeo and Keo Iwahashi 60
16 What is it that You Mourn in a Friend's Death?
Marsilio Ficino to Bernardo Bembo 64
17 The Heavy Hand of Death
Kahlil Gibran to Mary Haskell 67
18 How Are You Feeling?
Jessica Mitford to Eva and Bill Maas 71
19 No One You Love is Ever Dead
Ernest Hemingway to Gerald and Sara Murphy 74
20 Let Me Beg of You Not to Indulge in Useless Grief
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Mary Stuart, Countess of Bute 77
21 The Everlasting Nest
'Abdu'l-Bahá to bereaved parents 80
22 How it Seizes Upon One
Virginia Woolf to Dora Carrington 83
23 You Will Not Have My Hatred
Antoine Leiris to his wife's killers 86
24 For She was Mortal Born
Servius Sulpicius Rufus and Marcus Tullius Cicero 89
25 Like a Tree in Full Bearing Struck at the Root
Charlotte Brontë to W. S. Williams 98
26 The Springtime Sun Brings Forth New Life
Albert Einstein to Queen Elisabeth of Belgium 102
27 We Feel Doubly Bereft
Ethel Bedsow to Jacqueline Kennedy 106
28 The Business of Life Summons us Away from Useless Grief
Samuel Johnson to James Elphinston 110
29 Sorrow Comes to All
Abraham Lincoln to Fanny McCullough 113
30 The Great Wall
Thomas Wolfe and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to Maxwell E. Perkins 116
31 Now Her Soul is Free
Ram Dass to Steve and Anita Isser 120
Permission Credits 125
Acknowledgements 129
