(A couple of years ago, an ambitious and talented student writer burst into my office one afternoon in exasperation and despair, plopped down on my couch, and asked me if I ever felt like I might never write again. Not anything—not another poem, email, list, or post. As it happens, I had just been thinking about just such a time.)

Eight and a half years ago, the first ambitious task I undertook after I moved from Washington, D.C., to my North Carolina apartment was to write letters to family and friends who’d been so helpful during my wife Emily’s illness and death. It took me six months. Toward the end of this undertaking, I hired a young woman to look after Langston, my then six-month-old, for two mornings a week. I selected stationary of hummingbirds and dragonflies. I tried my best to write neatly. I sat in the same antique swivel writing chair in which I sit now, a graduation gift from Emily’s parents, and made and checked my list twice, though I’m sure I left people out.

Part of the reason I wrote these letters was because of Emily’s minor but persistent fear that she hadn’t sent thank-you notes to everyone who’d given us wedding gifts. We’d divided the responsibility along family lines, but then we moved and, three months later, moved again. Somewhere along the way, the list had been lost. Even after ten years of marriage, she’d felt mortified when she thought about it. So, in the first six months after her death, I wrote and mailed eighty or so letters. The job seemed beyond me, though I went at it dutifully.

Three and a half years later, after yet another move, one of my new colleagues at Delta State University told me the story of a young woman who suddenly dropped his Shakespeare class late in the semester. She was smart and capable, and had engaged honestly in the course, and my colleague was fond of her. Why? he asked. Why must you quit now? Your grades have been exemplary. She told him she had gotten married that summer and now had over five hundred thank-you notes to write—Shakespeare had to go. Decades later, the situation still exasperated him, and my sympathy for her surprised him.

The business of grief is pure prose. Give this poor subject a verb, keep it busy. Or get it going again, so it might progress along its sentence. Poetry was lost to me. Its concentration, its formalities rebuffed and appalled. I wanted straight report, and people obliged me. In the first year after Emily’s death, I received dozens of books on grief and mourning. I couldn’t read them all, but kept them anyway. Even now, I’ll come upon one while scanning a shelf and my mind will snap back to the time I received it. Time travel of a sort: for an instant, I am completely there, returning to the smells, discomforts, and the old tugging hollowness in my belly of those moments. This gravity of grief still pulls at me, as if I might swallow myself.

The body of contemporary English language literature on mourning seemed to me then impressively large, and I still lack the heart to delve into why we are drawn so enthusiastically to these litanies of bereavement, to grief and its eventual, necessary sublimation. I wondered why I hadn’t really noticed them before, these long, lonely cries of anguish.

Unsurprisingly, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking was among the first books I received. I wanted to like the book, to need it, but individual words and phrases kept getting in the way: Corvette, New York, Richard Carroll in Beverly Hills, Brooks Brothers shorts, Quintana was at Barnard, Forty years, December 30. Why should their wealth and length of time together matter? Grief is grief, but I envied her the years, the certainty of her vocation, the seemingly gentle existence. I envied her the adulthood of her child. Emily had died on the first of December, two and a half months shy of her thirty-seventh birthday, when our oldest child was five and a half years, our youngest five months old. I even envied Didion those twenty-nine days of December. It didn’t matter that on December 30, 2004, when Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a fatal heart attack as they sat down to supper, Emily and I had celebrated our daughter Virginia’s third Christmas in our two-bedroom 1908 bungalow, whose disproportionately large hall and high ceilings made a perfect court for the Nerf basketball hoop our daughter received as a gift. I felt like being unfair, being cruel. Privilege, privilege, privilege, privilege, echoed in my head, like some lost line of Lear. I raged that Emily was denied the satisfaction of a full working life, the anxiety and pleasure of watching her daughter and son reach out for their own adulthoods.

And I put the book down.

The passage above is an excerpt from And There Was Evening and There Was Morning—Essays on Illness, Loss, and Love, forthcoming in September from WTAW PRESS. A “first look” chapbook from the memoir is available here.

San Antonio

A city I’ve never seen, though Em went once.
She brought back the River Walk on a shirt
and, for V, a shot glass, which kicked
off her collection.
……………………….There’s the Alamo and that’s
a bit of downtown. Not photographs, Sweetie,
but like cartoons. The confetti in the air
means holiday when everyone is happy.

For months, V made it her only cup
and washed it so much the scenes faded
to impression.
……………………….In the three years left to her,
Em brought back a glass from every city
she visited, a practice V and I
can’t stop continuing. Twenty nine now sit
behind San Antonio on the shelf, though
the doors have been knocked flat and ashes
glint the glass on the outskirts of town.

Some lines we still lack the heart to cross.

Leaving Asheville

Yellow of fire and fear. I have
become a violent man, seduced
by every shadow of your shape.

One half week ago and early
for the service so the children
might warm up in the loft (your daughter,

tall among them, and, at the piano,
a woman that excites me leading them
along), I reckoned them up,

the stretched days I’ve been forced
to see alone. For fifteen months the world
has been all background noise and, for that,

I want someone to thank. Next morning,
I left for these mountains, unthinking
until the smoke sparked me from myself:

clean-up fires in the backyards of the valleys—
notes on a clef—neighbors rushing in
the new season with beer and jokes

half-heard over the crackle and hiss, raking
them with a toe or propped against one
of the ringing rocks. For what did I

come here? What melody of clues
did I hope might lead me back to who
I was—amnesiac who can remember

only every hurtful thing. The night
before I left the home we thought we’d share
until we forgot ourselves and were

forgotten, I struck a man to the street
for almost nothing, and felt nothing
when his head bounced from the curb or when

he staggered upright (Were those his friends
behind him breaking into a run?);
nothing when that cab swooped in to whisk

me home as if its driver were a god
whose bright eyes flickered with his mother’s will.
As if. I’ve spent three days here. The fires

still smolder, but no one gathers near.
My love, your death will always be
the altar on which I choose to burn.