Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 151 of 263 · 20 per page

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  I had a poignant image in my head of a tearful young man sitting alone in the back of a dark church, leaving hurriedly after the funeral service—the dead man’s only son, unrecognized. The longing and sadness that underlie a son’s attachment to an absent father never ceases to move me. When several of the fathers in the divorce study died unexpectedly of heart attacks or strokes, the grieving of the fatherless children was passionate. They wept bitterly and clung to siblings, all crying for a man they had had little contact with over the years. I had the sense in hearing them talk and watching their tears that they were crying not for the father they knew but for the father they never had—the father they had hoped for and dreamt about as children. Billy soon joined me at the table, placing a platter of freshly baked pastries between us. According to my records, he was now thirty-five; he still had the same slight build but his face looked older. As he smiled and extended his hand, I saw deeply etched worry lines between his eyebrows and down both sides of his mouth. “I’ve been through hell,” he announced as he sat down. “I think that I’m finally climbing out, but I’m not sure. I think there may be trouble ahead.” My heart sank. “What trouble do you mean?” “My girlfriend Kristi has a son who is moving in with us. We’re going to get married as soon as my divorce comes through and Kristi’s divorce is final.” “And this worries you to be a stepfather?” “It sure does. Basically I’m scared and unhappy. I hope that my attitude will change. I never saw myself with kids. I never liked little kids or babies.” “You’d prefer not to have kids?” “I’m worried about money. But it’s more than money. Being a dad has very little appeal. Look at my experience. Up until the time that he died I was still hoping for a dramatic change in my dad, that somehow he would become a guy who wasn’t ashamed of me because I couldn’t run or swing a bat, who would say, ‘Go for it. Do what you can. I’m behind you.’ As a kid I had this great image of him as a powerful man who would win the Olympics and build business empires. I used to wait for him to visit me like you wait for rain. After he died, I began to think a lot about him and I realized that never once did he encourage me to make something of myself. He weaseled out of paying my college after he promised. When I was really sick and so depressed I tried to commit suicide, he told me that my problems were all in my head. So you might say being a father is not something that comes naturally to me. How can you give somebody something you never had or saw?”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations—over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us. All of sudden, I felt stronger. I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I shared their quiet pleasure that I was in on the secret; as well as feeling the initiate's disadvantage, the tacit admission of how clueless I had been before. I got up more suddenly than I'd meant to, and in my customary reflex stared out of the window, at the fog which annihilated the street and at the same time cast a faint illumination. "I nearly told you before," Helene said, "when we went for that walk, do you remember? But you know they never talk about it—Daddy and Lilli don't—and so it never seems quite right for me to either." "I'm just so glad they're here at all," I said after a moment, though with a sense that I shouldn't now pretend to like Maurice more than I did. I saw how the schoolboy role of know-all and competitor had lasted and soured like a tough old jacket. It was hateful of me, but I began to be irritated by the ubiquitous power of the unsaid, and by the generous little enactment of Helene's gratitude, the stooping hug that said for them the crisis was over—not still waiting to happen, somewhere along the invisible roads. "Any news of Luc?" said Matt, in a tone that for the first time admitted tender concern and caught me unawares. My voice cracked under the light pressure of sympathy. "Nothing," I said, and walked away from him, my mouth turned down at the corners like a child in the silence before a wall. I stood looking over his twisted bedding, sucking in deep breaths; wondering abstractly who'd been sleeping here. Matt kept away from me, stacked up tapes with the noisy briskness of someone pretending to do housework. After a while I went over to him and gave him a kiss. "Actually I'm terribly hungry," I said. He gave his crooked smile of relief. "Run out and get some burgers." "Okay. I don't have any money." And I dug with an inverted kind of pride into my jeans pocket and displayed a palmful of coins that would buy nothing, the change one expects a beggar or busker to be grateful for. Matt did something similar, though he brought out a bookie's roll of banknotes with large rudimentary sums jotted on the top one. He pulled a couple of thousands off and tucked them into my waistband, as if I were a stripper; then kissed me again. When I got back with the warm polystyrene boxes, he was on the phone. "Yeah . . . that's right . . . the American guy . . . Yes, really sexy . . . he's not a jerk . . . oh, a jock . . . Yeah, he's a jock all right . . . " He gave me a wink, head cocked to hold the receiver whilst he tipped the packeted condiments out of the bag. "Okay, here he is. . . Ed, yeah . . .

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  When their marriages fail there is no way most mothers can maintain the same level of physical and emotional involvement with their children. As Paula and every other young child of divorce told me, the biggest loss they faced was the loss of their mother. One day she was there, giving hugs of encouragement, fetching and carrying as needed, and the next day she was out the door, giving orders as she exited. For young children, the sudden loss of mommy’s attention is unimaginably traumatic—akin to slowly freezing after being plucked from a warm, balmy climate. Your mother is your whole world. She provides food and comfort. Under her watchful approval, you experience growth and joy in your own development. And then you’re placed in the care of strangers. Tragically, in their thankless task of providing everything to keep the family afloat, mothers often lose the ability to keep their primary emotional investment in their children. The focus of divorce policy and intervention has centered on the loss of the father, which is profound for many divorced children. But the loss of a mother pervades and forever changes the way a child, especially a young child, experiences the world. For the preschool children in our study the loss of their mother was central and their suffering was enduring. Twenty-five years later they cried as they remembered, “My mother was really not there. No one was there.” Talking to these children at that time and as they recalled their childhoods made me think of the song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” This emotional cut-off—from feeling that you are the center of your mother’s attention to feeling that you are a peripheral appendage—remains an enduring part of mother-child relationships in many divorced families. While mothers desperately struggle to raise their children alone, many enriching parts of their shared lives must change. Mothers no longer have the time to witness and participate in their child’s everyday life. They don’t have the luxury to plan playdates and have friends to the house. Baking and cooking are abandoned for convenience meals. There is no time to monitor a child’s small ups and downs, their worries and achievements; there is no other parent with whom to share and to strategize the child’s future. Budding talent and potential trouble areas are overlooked in the mad rush to get out of the house and to get to bed in order to have the energy to meet another day. Overseeing table manners and teaching the niceties of life give way to making sure clothes are washed and the house is presentable. Fatigue and anxiety consume tolerance, softness, and cheeriness. There arises a harsher, stricter personality in which smiles are often forced and irritability reigns. The transformation of one’s mother and the loss of her availability is abrupt and, for many children of divorce, permanent. It is the hidden but most significant loss for young children following divorce, and we have almost completely overlooked its impact.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "No, she's been wonderful with the baby, much more than with the other two"—as if that was the only reason for her coming round. "Here's a good long life to Ralphie number two," I said, chinning my glass. "A new Dawn, you might say." Perhaps there were unhappy implications to this. "He was the first of our schoolfriends to go—that's why I chose his name." This wasn't true, or it depended what you meant by friends; our old boys' magazine now had two epochs to its obituary page—the steady professional deaths of the pre-war generations, and the cluster of pinched-off careers, nothing much to say about them yet, dead at twenty-four or twenty-nine, or thirty-three, no causes given, where before it had been climbing accidents. "It was a very sweet idea. I'm so confused by the shock of this death, having started in a way to prepare for a different one. But if he'd gone as it were knowingly, he'd have been very touched at what you've done. He rather loved you, you know." "Well, I rather loved him," said Willie smugly. "In my way—of course, not like you did." I looked at him with a sceptical little smile, so that he went on, "Even I could see that he was jolly handsome." Well, yes, he was quite handsome—dark curls, blue eyes—but that wasn't the point of Dawn, it wasn't why men wanted him. Willie reminded me of people without a sense of humour, who laugh at the wrong moment, or for too long. There was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum's violet end. "I was trying to tell Alison about you two at school, and how scandalous you were. She wasn't very impressed. She said she thought that was what all public schoolboys did—you know she can be a bit left-wing." "We're all a bit left-wing, dear." "Mmm." "I hope she doesn't think you ever carried on like that. She must know you were the great untouchable." Willie looked into his glass and shook the ice around in it. "I didn't really want to be untouchable, you know. But I just wasn't into it. I tried quite hard sometimes; everyone would be mooning about one of the new boys—don't you think he's a perfect orchid, isn't he just like a dark little kitten—and I'd search my heart, but all I could ever see was a rather anxious little chap who'd had his cricketbat stolen, or whatever." "You are aware that virtually the entire school had a crush on you?"

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I pushed the door open and she went ahead of me into the house, going just a few feet before she dropped onto the tile of the entranceway, a spot she claimed as if it had long been hers, and gave a quick deep sigh as she laid her head on her paws. She kept her eyes on me as I tossed my keys in the little dish by the door, her tail more subdued but still striking the wall beside her as I put my bag down, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Okay, Mama, I said again, you sleep there, we’ll sleep and in the morning we’ll feel better, though I feared I wouldn’t feel better, in body and spirit both I thought I would likely feel much worse. And then, because the dizziness didn’t pass or maybe because I wanted her warmth next to me, I lowered myself to the floor, I stretched myself out beside her and laid one hand on her flank. We’ll sleep, I said again, and she rolled onto her side, her stomach toward me, and placed one of her paws against my chest. It would leave a mark, I knew, I would have to scrub it out in the morning, but what did it matter, I thought as I closed my eyes, what does it matter, why not let it stay. DECENT PEOPLE But it isn’t serious, he said, waving his hand at the snarl of traffic on the boulevard leading into the center, of course not, if it were serious we would be part of it, nie shofyorite , taxi drivers he meant, we would blockade the streets like we did during the Changes, everyone would be on strike. You could be proud in those days, he said, meaning 1989, when Communism fell, we were proud, we were organized. I was young then, it was a wonderful time. I could have left, he said, I could have gone anywhere, Europe, America, but I didn’t want to go anywhere, I wanted to stay here. We thought it was the most exciting place to be, we thought we would make something out of our country, we had so much hope, do you understand, we felt so much hope because finally we were free. Free, he said, then sucked hard on his cigarette, turning to the window to blow the smoke away from me, we thought we would make something new but we didn’t.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  He is surprised he has never noticed it before. “The little graveyard where my people are! So small the window frames the whole of it. Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it? There are three stones of slate and one of marble, Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those. But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child’s mound———” “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,”she cried. With that, the wife slips past him, goes downstairs and turns on him “with such a daunting look,” and heads for the front door. Puzzled, he asks, “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?” “Not you!” she answers. Nor perhaps can any man, she adds, reaching for her hat. The farmer, asking to be allowed into her grief, continues with these unfortunate words: “I do think, though, you overdo it a little. What was it brought you up to think it the thing To take your mother-loss of a first child So inconsolably—in the face of love. You’d think his memory might be satisfied———” When his wife remains aloof, he exclaims, “God, what a woman! And it’s come to this, / A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.” His wife responds that he doesn’t know how to speak, that he has no feelings. She watched him through her window as he briskly dug their son’s grave, “making the gravel leap and leap in air.” And after finishing digging, he went into the kitchen. She remembers, “You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave And talk about your everyday concerns. You had stood the spade up against the wall Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.” The wife insists that she won’t have grief treated in this fashion. Nor let it be lightly dismissed. “No, from the time when one is sick to death, One is alone, and he dies more alone. Friends make pretense of following to the grave, But before one is in it, their minds are turned And making the best of their way back to life And living people, and things they understand. But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!” The husband responds patronizingly that he knows she will feel better for having said these things. It’s time to end grief, he suggests. “[Your] heart’s gone out of it: Why keep it up?” The poem ends with the wife opening the door to leave. Her husband tries to block her: “Where do you mean to go? First tell me that. I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—” Enthralled, I read the piece straight through, and at the end I had to remind myself of the reason I was reading it. What key to Irene’s inner life did it hold?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "The loop?" I nodded. This was the basic family walk, followed times out of number, that avoided the far end of the common, and brought one gently down through patches of alder and thorn towards Blewits, before turning back sharply and running home parallel with the road. I said, "I rang Dawn's parents this morning." "I ought to. I don't really know them." "She seemed quite calm." She had spoken in a slow, drugged, but practical way. They thought he died instantly, but then with the fire . . . well, what was left of him? "She didn't say so, but I got the feeling she wasn't sorry he'd gone like this, rather than . . . in a few months' time perhaps. And then he came on, I've never known how to cope with him at the best of times, he actually said, 'Well, no one can say he died of AIDS, Edward.' I suppose it will strike them in a day or two, some griefs are too big to take in all at once." "Poor things." I knew my mother had a sick worry about me not being careful—not having been careful. One of my candid moments had been when I told her my negative test-result. "She asked me to choose something to read at the funeral. It's rather difficult . . . not 'Dawn' by Gordon Bottomley, anyway, I think." After a pause, she said, "I love the end of Gray's 'Elegy', I remember I read that a lot after your father died. It reminds me of all our walks. Or you could do a bit out of Lycidas." "That might be too moving. I've got to get through it." "And what's happening about his friend from the antique shop?" "She didn't say. She may not know. People are often rather miffed if there's another death at the same time—it's as though it's been done deliberately, to steal their thunder." "Who wants thunder?" my mother said. I wasn't in the same house as Dawn; I was in Raleigh, which had a strong tradition of smokers, beauties and abstract expressionists, while he was hidden away in Drake, a dour, disciplined house that smashed everyone at rowing and rugby sevens. The school wasn't old or great, which perhaps explained why it had chosen such creakily historic house-names—Sidney, Frobisher: portraits of these ruff-necked adventurers hung in the stale air of the dining-hall. There was something touchingly childish about it.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The cars bearing the family nudged their stately way out across the abashed, resentful traffic for the drive northwards to the crematorium. The rest of us gathered loosely on the gravel, I ran over to Edie and we clutched each other in a brief agony of sobbing and stifled shouts. The de Souzays were to give a reception later and she said to come with them now. I clambered into the back of their long senatorial Daimler and into the hushed, complex atmosphere of this other family. We crept forward giving sympathetic smirks to the people who hardly heard the car. Gerald lowered the window and called out, "Come to us at one, you know where it is", though the Sindon boys looked a bit at a loss. The lad with the motor-bike seemed to have made friends. Others straggled along the road into the centre of town, advised of the fire and mulled wine at the George IV. Out ahead of them was a brisk stooped figure in a dark grey coat and trilby, flicking his walking-stick forward at each stride. "Can we fit him in?" murmured Anne, and her husband slowed as she lowered her window in turn. "Can't we give you a lift, Perry?" she called out. But he kept on walking, merely raising his hat and hooting back, "I'm fine, thank you!" "See you later, then." "He's nearly ninety, you know," she said as we moved on. "How very sweet of him to have turned out." I glanced back at him, wondering if he'd remembered our meeting as he heard me read, now that I was fatter and older and never wrote poems. He still looked about him in the same way, as if anticipating greetings, still had that air of redundant youthfulness. There was something moving and irrelevant in his having come, as though Georgian England must be represented at these end-of-century exequies. Later, much later. Five and twenty to midnight the greeny-white figures dimly showed. The day doused in drink and almost out. I rambled home from someone's house, alone but charged up by intense communings with virtual strangers, the compulsive unity that follows a funeral and its unambiguous end. The night was damp and still, the street-lamps hazed among the nearly bare trees, a moment I recognised when no one was about except barmen from pubs walking their Alsatians, taxis bringing passengers from the last train and leaving their perfume of burnt fuel. I turned into Fore Street and saw an unusual phenomenon: across the far end a great roll of pearly fog that gave the lamps at the common's edge the air of a promenade at a melancholy lakeside resort. Fog had become so rare in my adult years that I looked on it as something miraculous, lucent but opaque, unaccountable in where it lay. I walked towards it slowly, down the middle of the road, and when I got to the low fence, stepped over and into its drizzly embrace.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well, I rather loved him," said Willie smugly. "In my way—of course, not like you did." I looked at him with a sceptical little smile, so that he went on, "Even I could see that he was jolly handsome." Well, yes, he was quite handsome—dark curls, blue eyes—but that wasn't the point of Dawn, it wasn't why men wanted him. Willie reminded me of people without a sense of humour, who laugh at the wrong moment, or for too long. There was always something lacking in those men who had never had a queer phase as boys, it showed in a certain dryness of imagination, a bland tolerance uncoloured by any suppression of their own, a blindness to the spectrum's violet end. "I was trying to tell Alison about you two at school, and how scandalous you were. She wasn't very impressed. She said she thought that was what all public schoolboys did—you know she can be a bit left-wing." "We're all a bit left-wing, dear." "Mmm." "I hope she doesn't think you ever carried on like that. She must know you were the great untouchable." Willie looked into his glass and shook the ice around in it. "I didn't really want to be untouchable, you know. But I just wasn't into it. I tried quite hard sometimes; everyone would be mooning about one of the new boys—don't you think he's a perfect orchid, isn't he just like a dark little kitten—and I'd search my heart, but all I could ever see was a rather anxious little chap who'd had his cricketbat stolen, or whatever." "You are aware that virtually the entire school had a crush on you?" "Well, I don't know about that. It could be quite lonely at times, and I felt a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. In the dorm I pulled the sheets over my head or pretended to sleep if ever naked figures went scampering past. I did feel I was missing out." "I don't think you missed out on much. I don't remember much of all that. They might have wanted to do things, but you know they were all too bourgeois and inhibited. I used to long to be at some great ancient school, with a real rigour of vice." "Well, you and Ralphie did okay." "That wasn't vice, darling, it was love." I saw Willie's almost instant mastering of the surprise of being called darling, watched him as he sprawled a fraction more unguardedly on the sofa, as if to deny the intrusive intimacy of my tone and absorb the jolt of grief that must account for it. Perhaps at that moment I saw how isolated I felt in losing Dawn, though he hadn't been mine for . . . sixteen years.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  She was our mom, too.” That said it all, so I continued to sit in silence. The day after the funeral, I drove back to North Carolina to rejoin my Marine Corps unit. On the way back, on a narrow mountain back road in Virginia, I hit a wet patch of road coming around a turn, and the car began spinning out of control. I was moving fast, and my twisting car showed no signs of slowing as it hurtled towards the guardrail. I thought briefly that this was it—that I’d topple over that guardrail and join Mamaw just a bit sooner than I expected—when all of a sudden the car stopped. It is the closest I’ve ever come to a true supernatural event, and though I’m sure some law of friction can explain what happened, I imagined that Mamaw had stopped the car from toppling over the side of the mountain. I reoriented the car, returned to my lane, and then pulled off to the side. That was when I broke down and released the tears that I’d held back during the previous two weeks. I spoke to Lindsay and Aunt Wee before restarting my journey, and within a few hours I was back at the base. My final two years in the Marines flew by and were largely uneventful, though two incidents stand out, each of which speaks to the way the Marine Corps changed my perspective. The first was a moment in time in Iraq, where I was lucky to escape any real fighting but which affected me deeply nonetheless. As a public affairs marine, I would attach to different units to get a sense of their daily routine. Sometimes I’d escort civilian press, but generally I’d take photos or write short stories about individual marines or their work. Early in my deployment, I attached to a civil affairs unit to do community outreach. Civil affairs missions were typically considered more dangerous, as a small number of marines would venture into unprotected Iraqi territory to meet with locals. On our particular mission, senior marines met with local school officials while the rest of us provided security or hung out with the schoolkids, playing soccer and passing out candy and school supplies. One very shy boy approached me and held out his hand. When I gave him a small eraser, his face briefly lit up with joy before he ran away to his family, holding his two-cent prize aloft in triumph. I have never seen such excitement on a child’s face. I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is. But that moment, with that boy, was pretty close for me. For my entire life, I’d harbored resentment at the world.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Bill still looked disturbed. ‘He’s a wonderful man, Lord Nantwich,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the things you’ll find out.’ ‘You see, I didn’t know until today that you even knew him.’ ‘I didn’t even know until yesterday that you did.’ He did not smile, and I suspected some slight friction, or horripilation of jealousy like that of the cattily possessive Lewis. ‘He knows a huge number of people,’ he said more tolerantly. ‘How did you get caught up with him?’ It seemed disloyal to tell the truth so I said simply that I had met him at the Corry. ‘He doesn’t go there very often these days,’ said Bill, as if to imply that in that case I had been exceptionally lucky. ‘No, it was fortunate. The thing is, Bill, I would value your help—what you know about him. I would acknowledge it of course in the book.’ He appeared satisfied by this. ‘I suspect you may be a leading witness.’ ‘You make it sound like a trial or something,’ said Bill. I picked up my beer and looked at him interrogatively. ‘Do you want me to tell you now?’ he asked, clearly uncertain, as I was, about how biographers worked. ‘Not now,’ I smiled. ‘But I’d like it if we could get together soon. You’re not touching your drink.’ ‘I’m sorry, Will. I’d like to in a way, but I think with the mood I’m in tonight it wouldn’t be a good thing. It’s never a good thing, to be honest, when I go back on the booze. Somehow it always lands me in trouble.’ Looking at his ungainly muscularity, I wondered if it nursed and suppressed an instinct for violence. Perhaps his self-denial had been painfully learnt, and was the clue to a double life whose difficult side was all in the past. We walked together through bleak, twilit streets to the Underground, and rode into town on the Central Line. Over, or rather under, the noise of the train and in the near-emptiness of the carriage he confided in me. His confidences, though, were not about himself: they were the secrets and crises of others that he had observed. He told me feelingly about how the boy Alastair’s mother had died of leukaemia, and the struggles of the father to look after him properly. He said how Roy, at the Corry, had come off his motorbike and severed a tendon in his knee. Something more came out about the Nantwich Cup too—how Charles had created it in memory of a friend of his who had been killed, though Bill was vague about the details, and when I asked him how he had met Charles, assumed a kind of dignified obtuseness, as though so intimate and critical a subject could not be so lightly approached. Could there have been something between the two men?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was as if I saw him through field-glasses dancing & singing in a place so far away that when he opened his mouth, when his lips moved, no sound disturbed the silence. I went round & round the room, mastering my feelings & then yielding to them again. I fetched up in front of the chrysanthemums, which he had arranged in the tall Tang vase that used to be in the hall at Polesden. They were utterly immaculate, ripe yet dry & glossy, the colour of their great clustering heads autumnal while their leaves were green. They might almost have been lacquered art-works, & one had to squeeze them or pinch their petals to prove that they were perishable. I ran over the brief scene of a few minutes before again & again in my mind, each time with renewed pain, & recognised the unspeakable deference with which he had as it were offered the flowers & suppressed his own excitement. He showed, as so often, his tender & acute intimation of my feelings while not altogether being able to contain his own. I understood too in time why he had been so cocky for the last few days, pulled as he must have been between gaiety & apprehension. So the chrysanthemums—in that way that inanimate things have of implicating themselves in moments of crisis—swam before my eyes like emblems of his years of fidelity, and festive tokens of his future, now elegiac, now heartlessly splendid. I pulled myself together & went into the study & swallowed a large glass of whisky. I tried to get on with the proofs of my Sudan book, as a mechanic exercise, but of course the merest table of figures seemed to speak of my sweet Taha & our past together, & sent the memory ferreting around for the tenderest spots, the purest moments of selflessness & mutual service. Perhaps these inspired me in a way—for I wrote him a cheque for £200, then thinking better of it wrote him one for £100 instead; then I tore them both up & wrote another for £500 and put it in an envelope, and trotted up to the attic to leave it in his room. It’s a room I’ve so rarely been into, & I had to hold myself back from maudlin pillow-stroking reverie. It reminded me too of a room in the Sudan, since there is nothing in it save the bed covered with its beautiful shawl, a rug on the bare boards, & a little table with a photograph of Murad, and that other taken just before we left Khartoum, outside the Sudan Club—he & I standing side by side, smiling against the sun. But I cd scarcely bear to look at it, & hurried out again. Such simple, reassuring things were turning against me.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Shortly: I was to meet Eugene sometime between 194 3 and 1944 and "run" or "hang" with him until he hurled himself off the George Washington Bridge, in the winter of 1946. We were never lovers: for what it's worth, I think I wish we had been. When he was dead, I remembered that he had, once, obliquely, suggested this possibility. He had run down a list of his girl friends: those he liked, those he 1·eally liked, one or two with whom he might really be in love, and, then, he said, "I wondered if I might be in love with you." I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea. But I was to hurt a great many people by being unable to imagine that anyone could possibly be in love with an ugly boy like me. To be valued is one thing, the recognition of this assessment demanding, essentially, an act of the will. But love is another matter: it is scarcely worth observing what a mockery love makes of the will. Leaving all that alone, however: when he was dead, I realized that I would have done anything whatever to have been able to hold him in this world. Through him, anyway, my political life, insofar as I can claim, formally, to have had one, began. He was a Socialist-a member of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) and urged me to join, and I did. I, then, outdistanced him by becoming a Trotskyite-so that I was in the interesting OTHER ESSAYS posttton (at the age of nineteen) of being an anti-Stalinist when America and Russia were allies. My life on the Left is of absolutely no interest. It did not last long. It was useful in that I learned that it may be im possible to indoctrinate me ; also, revolutionaries tend to be sentimental and I hope that I am not. This was to lead to very serious differences between myself and Eugene, and others: but it was during this period that I met the people who were to take me to Saul Levitas, of The New Leader, Randall Jarrell, of The Nation, Elliott Cohen and Robert Warshaw, of Com mental')', and Philip Rahv, of Pat'tisan Review. These men arc all dead, now, and they were all very im portant to my life. It is not too much to say that they helped to save my life. (As Bill Cole, at Knopf, was later to do when the editor assigned Go Tell It On The Mountain had me on the ropes.) And their role in my life says something arresting concerning the American dilemma, or, more precisely, per haps, the American torment. I had been to two black newspapers before I met these people and had simply been laughed out of the office: I was a shocshine boy who had never been to college.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There's a dead boy in my play, it really pivots on a dead boy. The whole action of the play is involved with an effort to discover how this death came about and who really, apart from the man who physically did the deed, was responsible for it. The action of the play involves the terrible discovery that no one was innocent of it, neither black nor white. All had a hand in it, as we all do. B__!:!!J_bis. boy is all the ruined children that I have \�tch�:�ll.nJ¥_1jie_ hcing-�ets up and down this nation_, being dcstrQ¥.t.d_as we sit here, and being de stroyed in silence. This boy is, somehow, my subject, my tor n1cnt, too. A nd I think he must also be yours. I've begun to be obsessed more and more by a line that comes from William Blake. It says, "A dog starved at his master's gate/Predicts the ruin of the State." The story that I hope to live long enough to tell, to get it out somehow whole and entire, has to do with the terrible, terrible damage we are doing to all our children. Because what is happening on the streets of Harlem to black boys and girls is also happening on all American streets to everybody. It's a terrible delusion to think that any part of this republic can be safe as long as 2o,ooo,ooo members of it are as menaced as they arc. The reality I am trying to get at is that the humanity WORDS OF A NATIVE SON 7 1 3 of this submerged population is equal to the humanity of any one else, equal to yours, equal to that of your child. I know when I walk into a Harlem funeral parlor and see a dead boy lying there. I know, no matter what the social scientists say, or the liberals say, that it is extremely unlikely that he would be in his grave so soon if he were not black. That is a terrible thing to have to say. But, if it is so, then the people who are responsible for this are in a terrible condition. Please take note. I'm not interested in anybody's guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The other men, my friends, too, helped me and held me, and showed in their laconic condolences an understanding I could never have received in the world at large. It would be unedifying to describe as it would be needless torture to recall those days when the world first changed, and became a world without my Taha. It was a terrible destitution, and my knowledge is all bound up with my physical experience of the hard coir mattress where I lay, the few properties of my cell, the bladeless razor, the little framed square of looking-glass in which I caught my tear-blotched face, the steady night-time smell of the chamberpot. As the autumn drew on it grew colder in the prison, but if one held one’s hand to the black iron vent through which warm air was supposed to issue into each cell one felt only a slight chill stirring, which seemed to come from far away. It was a time of incessantly recurrent images of my sweet dead friend, and of a thousand memories fanned into the air by this cold draught. I haunted and interrogated the past even as it interrogated me. London, Skinner’s Lane, Brook Street, the Sudan—how had we passed all that time? Why did we not burn up every moment of it, as we would if we could have it all again? The journey back to England surfaced in dreams and occupied my days, the train to Wadi Halfa panting across the desert, reading old newspapers in the white, shuttered carriages while Taha, alas, was obliged to travel with the guard; and the stops, which had no names, but only a number, painted on a little shelter beside the track; and the steamer to the First Cataract and the visionary beauty of Aswan. And I went further back, prone and defenceless, to Oxford and Winchester, shrinking from the world, curling up in the warm leaf-mould of earlier and earlier times, drawing some wan, nostalgic sustenance from those dead days. My life seemed to go into reverse, and for a month, two months, I was a thing of shadows. It was in vain to tell myself that this was not my way: I was impotent with misery and deprivation. Then, as the end came in sight—it was the dead of winter—something hardened in me. I saw the imaginary verdure beyond the frosted glass. I began to think of the world I must go back to, with its brutal hurry and indifference. I would have to take on a new man. I would have to move again in the company of my captors and humiliators and be glanced at critically for signs of the scars they had inflicted. I would have to do something for others like myself, and for those more defenceless still. I would have to abandon this mortal introspection and instead steel myself. I would even have to hate a little.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Most men who are thrust into this role don’t understand how hard it is to build a new parent-child relationship. This is one of the many roles in the divorced family for which there is no dress rehearsal. People getting married a second time assume that an interested stepfather will slide smoothly into the shoes of an absent father. The new man arrives on the scene with great expectations and energy. But in my experience, the transition rarely works quickly or easily, especially if the biological father is still front and present in the child’s life. There are of course circumstances when a stepfather truly replaces a biological parent and is acknowledged as such—for example, when a child is very young and has limited contact with the biological parent. Compared with cultivating the interests of an older child, reaching out to little children is easier for stepfathers. It’s fun to toss toddlers into the air, hold them on your laps, read them stories, or put them to bed. And young children have an easier time responding because they usually don’t have conflicting loyalties that hinder their new attachments. But finding common ground with an older child takes a lot more time because it depends on gradually building a genuine friendship, winning the cooperation of the child, and making it clear that the stepfather does not intend to displace the biological father in the child’s affection. Time, patience, and persistence are key components to becoming a successful stepparent and to creating a happy remarried family. Good intentions are important, but that’s only a bare beginning. Building a close bond with a child takes as much time as building a close relationship with an adult. It requires sustained effort and most of all genuine affection that can outlast the child’s resistance and anxiety about trusting a new adult whom they fear may disappear. Stepparenthood in the child’s heart is never a given. It is earned. Billy’s stepfather wanted to be a parent to Billy and made many overtures to the boy during the first year of the marriage. So why did he fail? He was not in direct competition with Billy’s father and he did not expect Billy to choose between them. I suspect one reason is that he did not need Billy in his life. He already had a son and very soon he and Billy’s mother had a new baby boy. Thus he had little incentive to pursue a relationship with a difficult, angry boy. Essentially, after a few attempts, he gave up trying to build a relationship. To make matters even harder, his son was good-looking and athletic—everything Billy was not. Billy would have loved to be like his stepbrother and it broke his heart when all the family members, including his own father, spoke glowingly of this rival. No one ever seemed to admire Billy.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I looked at the clock. It was 6:30 P.M. Mr. Dill was dead by now. I was very tired, and it was time to stop all this foolishness about quitting. It was time to be brave. I turned to my computer, and there was an email inviting me to speak to students in a poor school district about remaining hopeful. The teacher told me that she had heard me speak and wanted me to be a role model for the students and inspire them to do great things. Sitting in my office, drying my tears, reflecting on my brokenness, it seemed like a laughable notion. But then I thought about those kids and the overwhelming and unfair challenges that too many children in this country have to overcome, and I started typing a message saying that I would be honored to come. On the drive home, I turned on the car radio, seeking news about Mr. Dill’s execution. I found a station airing a news report. It was a local religious station, but in their news broadcast there was no mention of the execution. I left the station on, and before long a preacher began a sermon. She started with scripture. Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time he said, “My grace is sufficient. My power is made perfect in your weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may work through me. Since I know it is all for Christ’s good, I am quite content with my weaknesses and with insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. I turned off the radio station, and as I slowly made my way home I understood that even as we are caught in a web of hurt and brokenness, we’re also in a web of healing and mercy. I thought of the little boy who hugged me outside of church, creating reconciliation and love. I didn’t deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that’s how mercy works. The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent—strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration. I drove home broken and brokenhearted about Jimmy Dill. But I knew I would come back the next day. There was more work to do.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  We held Walter’s funeral at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church near Monroeville on a rainy Saturday morning. It was the same pulpit where over twenty years earlier I had spoken to the congregation about casting and catching stones. It felt strange to be back there. Scores of people packed the church, and dozens more stood outside. I looked at the mostly poor, rural black people huddled together with their ungrieved suffering filling the sad space of yet another funeral, made all the more tragic by the unjustified pain and unnecessary torment that had preceded it. I often had this feeling when I worked on Walter’s case, that if the anguish of all the stressed lives, the pain of all of the oppressed people in all of the menaced spaces of Monroe County could be gathered in some carefully constructed receptacle, it could power something extraordinary, operate as some astonishing alternative fuel capable of igniting previously impossible action. And who knew what might come of it—righteous disruption or transformational redemption? Maybe both. The family had a large TV monitor near the casket that flashed dozens of pictures of Walter before the service. Almost all of the photos were taken on the day he was released from prison. Walter and I stood next to each other in several of the photos, and I was struck by how happy we both seemed. I sat in the church and watched the pictures with some disbelief about the time that had passed. When Walter was on death row, he once told me how ill he had become during the execution of one of the men on his tier. “When they turned on the electric chair you could smell the flesh burning! We all were banging on the bars to protest, to make ourselves feel better, but really it just made me sick. The harder I banged, the more I couldn’t stand any of it. “Do you ever think about dying?” he asked me. It was an unusual question for someone like Walter to pose. “I never did before, but now I think about it all the time,” he continued. He looked troubled. “This, right here, is a whole ’nother kind of situation. Guys on the row talk about what they’re going to do before their executions, how they’re going to act. I used to think it was crazy to talk like that, but I guess I’m starting to do it, too.” I was uncomfortable with the conversation. “Well, you should think about living, man—what you’re going to do when you get out of here.” “Oh, I do that, too. I do that a lot. It’s just hard when you see people going down that hall to be killed. Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain’t right. People are supposed to die on God’s schedule.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He summoned two officers, who went to Joe’s cage to unlock it. The cage was so small that when they tried to remove Joe’s wheelchair, the spokes on the chair got caught on the cage, and they couldn’t budge it. I stood there watching for several minutes while more officers got involved in an increasingly elaborate effort to dislodge Joe’s wheelchair from the tight cage. They pulled up on the wheelchair. Then they pushed down on the chair, raising the front off the ground, but this didn’t work, either. They tugged at the chair with loud grunts and tried to force it free, but it was completely stuck. Two inmate trusties who had been mopping the floor stopped to watch the officers struggle with the wheelchair and the cage. They finally offered to help out, even though no one had asked for their input. The officers silently accepted the assistance of the inmates, but none of them could come up with a solution. As the staff became more frustrated by their inability to get Joe out of the cage, there was talk of using pliers and hacksaws, of putting the cage on its side with Joe in it. Someone suggested trying to lift Joe from his wheelchair to remove him without the chair, but both Joe and the chair were packed so tightly into the cage that no one could get in to move him. I asked the guards why he was in the cage in the first place, which prompted a brusque response: “Lifer. All lifers have to be moved with higher security protocols.” I couldn’t see Joe’s face while all of this was going on, but I could hear him crying. He occasionally made a whining sound, and his shoulders jerked up and down. When the staff proposed turning the cage on its side, he moaned audibly. Finally, the prisoner trusties suggested lifting the cage and tilting it slightly, which everyone agreed to try. The two trusties lifted and tilted the heavy cage, while three officers yanked Joe’s chair with a violent pull that finally dislodged it. The guards gave each other high fives, the inmate trusties walked away silently, and Joe sat motionlessly in his chair in the middle of the room, looking down at his feet. I walked over to him and introduced myself. His face was tear-stained, and his eyes were red, but he looked up at me and began clapping his hands giddily. “Yeah! Yeah! Mr. Bryan.” He smiled and offered me both of his hands, which I took. I wheeled Joe to a cramped office for our legal visit. He continued cheering quietly and kept clapping his hands in excitement. I had to argue with the attending prison guard for permission to close the door and talk confidentially with Joe.