We Briefly Interrupt Our Obsessing: Week #23 of 52 Mini-Essays Project

On letter writing and mourning

Also a ruthless Scrabble player

I am not a good mourner. Is there such a thing as a good mourner? Someone who poetically rends their garments upon first hearing the horrible news, wails lustily, cleanly releasing all the grief and anger and despair like lancing a boil, and then settles gradually into a gentle sadness tinged with attractive melancholy. When I grieve I do plenty of wailing and even screaming, heaving sobs, all of that, but mostly I obsess, going over and over memories of the lost person in my mind, staring at pictures, typing up elaborate timelines of our interactions (why?), endlessly re-reading letters and emails. When my father died a few years ago, kicking off the Death-a-Palooza that Scottie and I are currently enjoying,¹ I had a whole house full of stuff that I could thrash around in: boxes of old photos and memorabilia, treasured objects from childhood, tax returns dating back to the early 1960s (why?²), and a computer stuffed with even more fodder for obsession: more photos, emails, scans of his paintings and other artwork, Amazon purchase histories,³ the works. I spent weeks floating in this sea of ephemera, telling myself that I was helping “put Dad’s estate in order” (which was true), but also, honestly, using that as a pretext for wallowing.

Scott’s mum went into the hospital in New Zealand just 10 days ago, and as we gradually became aware that she was not going to come out again, we talked a lot about the cruelty of the distance and the pandemic border closure. He—we—can’t be there to grieve in person with his siblings and other family, with all the many people who loved Lyn and relied on her for support, companionship, kindness, acerbic wit, and brisk no-nonsense comfort. (Patent pending: “Right, then!”⁴) So we will have to find other methods of grieving. Scott is not as much of an obsesser as I am—which is kind of like saying he’s not as fast a runner as Usain Bolt—but we do share a love of re-reading letters. Every time we visit (oh god—visited) his mum, Scott would pick up a volume of his grandmother’s letters and work through it for his bedtime reading. “A volume of his grandmother’s letters!” you say. Why, yes. Joyce Murray,⁵ Lyn’s mother, kept up a prolific correspondence with her sister from the time of her marriage in the late 1930s until her death in 1997. She and Lyn (and possibly some other family members—unclear) transcribed the handwritten letters and bound them in volumes that are ranged in rows on a bookcase in Lyn’s spare room. They chronicle Joyce’s loveless marriage to an educator and minister (her parents forced her to marry him even though she was in love with another man), the births of her 6 children, the time she and her husband spent founding a vocational high school for Maori boys,⁶ and beyond. For years Scott has been dipping into this archive at every visit, and he has not yet read them all.

When we first got the news yesterday at 4:00 a.m. and were crying and clinging to each other in the dark, I promised myself—and Scott—that I would not give in to my OCD mourning tendencies. No poring over photos, no obsessive re-reading of letters, and above all no timelines. I would be strong and, well, Lyn-like—not my usual neurotic mess of a self. It is now 30 hours later as of this writing, and I am proud to report that I spent only 3 or 4 hours yesterday reading Lyn’s emails, my timeline is well under a page long, and I have curated only two small albums of photos. Not bad!

But I am here to tell you—briefly, for I have to get back to them—about the letters. When Scott left New Zealand for grad school in 1992 he started a tradition, broken only by in-person visits, of writing to his mother every week, and she did the same.⁷ (For the first few years they would fax these missives back and forth.) When I came on the scene in 1999 and Lyn and I formed our own relationship, I sort of jumped into the epistolary mix. She began copying me on her emails to Scott, and I would write back sporadically, on our birthdays and anniversaries—which she never forgot⁸—or when there was something big going on, or when I just wanted to get her advice about hormone replacement therapy or something. That means that I have on my computer over a thousand emails to and from her, and Scott has many more. (I will be hacking into his machine later, I’m sure, once I’ve burned through my own stock of mourning material.) I’m only up to the mid 2010s at this point, thank heavens. It’s like the feeling of having a stash of canned goods in your pantry when a storm is coming.

Lyn was a beautiful writer. Nothing elaborate, no reaching for the thesaurus, no rhetorical flights of fancy. Just clearly written, grammatically impeccable, witty missives filled with colorful details about her own daily existence and the cast of characters who populated her life—most of whom we never met, but will now sorely miss. (Who will tell us what’s going on with Don and Carol next door, how Trish is doing since the death of her husband Alan, or whether her coworker Margaret could ever be persuaded to retire?) And the narrative pacing! She knew how to tell a story and how to end a letter on a wry note that left you giggling and shaking your head. Not to get all generational and these-kids-today about it, but her letter-writing talent was clearly nurtured and shaped by a culture that still valued that skill, and an educational system that gave her a solid grounding in the basics.⁹ And, of course, practice practice practice. Thousands upon thousands of letters.

Yesterday when we were on a Zoom call with Scott’s siblings, we mentioned the volumes of Joyce’s letters and asked them to be put aside so Scott could finish reading them. That prompted Hamish to tell us that they had just come across Lyn’s own stash—for years she had been printing out all the emails she received and storing them in a separate binder for each correspondent. “But your binder is definitely the fanciest,” Hamish laughed wryly, in true younger brother fashion. About an hour later I had my nose back in my own archive, and came across this bit in a letter from June 2016:

I devoured your two epistles on screen, printed them off and re-read them and have just re-read them again. They will now go into the file of letters with Scott’s name on and you can re-read them many years hence. I have kept files of letters from all of you but yours Scott are the most prolific by a country mile and go back to 1989. What an incredibly loyal correspondent you have been over the years and you will never know how appreciated and precious the letters are. I can imagine that if I am unfortunate enough to ever be immobile or bedridden in my dotage what a huge pleasure it will give me to read them again from start to finish. I will need months of immobility to do them justice.

Lyn’s greatest anxiety—a true, deep fear—was being ill and dependent. It makes perfect sense to me that she would already be hedging her bets against such a terrifying possibility, planning how she would manage if it came to that, anticipating what might bring her comfort. I am deeply, abjectly grateful that she never had to turn to her trove of letters under those circumstances. I only wish that my own re-reading was happening many, many more years hence.

1. Actually, we are now in the throes of Death-a-Palooza II. The first round was 2009-10, when we lost Scott’s father, our dear friend Elizabeth, and both of our cats in the space of a year. This time we’ve lost my father, my mother, another wonderful cat, and now his mother. Please god let it be over.

2. I think the answers to both parenthetical “why”s in this paragraph are the same.

3. Such a rich trove! Endless hours of reminiscing and speculation await your heirs in this resource.

4. Up there with “Number 8 wire,” “Kiwi ingenuity,” and “She’ll be right” in the national lexicon.

5. Née Hogg, for all the 18th-century Scottish literature buffs following along at home.

6. This is now a point of much discussion, at least between me and Scott. While it was not a residential school, like those in Canada whose explicit mission was cultural extirpation (and whose implicit mission was abuse and murder), how could it not have had some of the same effects, even if unintended? The boys were older, it was true, and there was no stated program of cultural “rehabilitation.” But it was founded by a Pakeha (white European) educator and Presbyterian minister, so you do the math.

7. I’m sure that Lyn, like any dedicated letter writer in this age of electronic communication, repurposed material through some judicious cutting and pasting. Heck, we all do it—you’ve got a lot of people to keep up with. There’s no shame in it, as long as there is also stuff in the letter that is personal for you. She would always take the time to bracket the funny story about what happened at work that’s clearly going into everyone’s email that week with personal questions and responses to what you had written in your last. A true artist.

8. Unlike my own biological mother, who never acknowledged my birthday and even before her dementia took zero interest in the personhood of my spouse (or, indeed, of me).

9. Lyn never went to university, so as incredible as it is to contemplate, all that grammatical and rhetorical training came from her public high school education.