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.

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

  Even as she began to talk, I could feel a sigh of relief somewhere inside me. Paula was one of those children who, after her parents divorced, literally and unceasingly had to raise herself. Watching her grow up from afar, there were times that I despaired for her well- being, wondering if she had any chance of ever attaining a normal adult life. There is no comparison for this situation within intact families. We heard about families in which the father lost his job, the mother fell chronically ill, or a fire destroyed all the family’s possessions. But none of these sudden losses or setbacks within intact families matched what happened to little Paula, whose whole world collapsed in less than one month’s time. The closest comparable experience for children in intact families is the sudden death of a beloved parent. Fortunately, unlike divorce, death of a young parent is uncommon in this country. Paula and I settled in for a heart-to-heart talk that lasted three and a half hours. She told me that her memory of the postdivorce years is “a blur,” but I remembered this little girl and her family quite clearly. The younger of two children, Paula was four years old when her young parents separated. Her father, a handsome, charming man from an affluent family, had been a pharmacist who owned three drugstores. He had been a devoted husband, proud of his pretty, lively wife, and close to his daughters, who resembled him in their looks and gestures. He delighted in the likeness and loved to take them both to the local playground where people admired the children’s high spirits and friendliness. Unfortunately, he made some very bad investments in the market on the advice of a friend who deceived him, and trying desperately to cover his losses and keep the information from his wife and parents, he got deeper into debt. By the time Paula turned three, he could no longer hide his financial ruin. Forced into bankruptcy, he had to sell the three stores and have his other assets frozen. Overcome with guilt, he could not bear coming home to his wife and children. Soon Paula’s parents began to fight, often and loudly. Paula’s mother, a cheerful woman who enjoyed taking care of her home and her children, became increasingly desperate as her husband spent more time away from home. The marriage ended when Paula’s father came home one Christmas Eve too upset and depressed about his financial problems to go to the family party given by his parents. When Paula’s mother accused him of not caring about her and the children, he exploded—hitting her for the first and only time. The children were standing three feet away, eyes bulging in terror. After their agitated father ran out of the house, the children watched their mother as she sat heavily in a chair, her head buried in her sweater, rocking back and forth.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I let myself in and shrugged my bag to the floor. In a few minutes I would lose the surprise, the disconcerting and exact sameness of everything in the house I had lived in all my life. My mother was out, it was dusk, and this was the silence that had been around us all the time, and that I had left her to. The rattle of the loose parquet, the jiggle of the door-catches and hesitant tick of the clock were sounds I had always known, echoing from surfaces my father had kept bare and polished for acoustic reasons. My mother had changed almost nothing in seventeen years—a new telly, a new Daihatsu Charade: and there were different library books on the hall table awaiting return, the latest issue of Common Knowledge, the local advertiser, caught in the letter-cage of the front door. I looked into the sitting-room, a smell of polish and lavender, the black mass of the piano, shadows thrown across the wall by the street-lamps and the tall unhusbanded privet hedge rocking in the wind. I hadn't meant to be back so soon in my room, with its wall of second-hand books, its air of determined privacy and make-believe. I glanced at the squeaky single bed; and there were the forlorn fauna of childhood, the one-eared rabbit and the dropsical trousered bear, passed by but still pathetically alert. I stood by my desk, where I had written a thousand adequate essays, and not a few sonnets, and looked down into the Donningtons' garden. Gerry had a rowing-machine now; the white buttock-scoops of the seat held pools of rain which gleamed in the unshielded light from their kitchen. As always, I opened the window before I lit a cigarette. It seemed Colin's car had gone out of control on the Brighton road: it was the 6-litre Craxton he'd had done up, he should have known the problem with it in the wet, with just a bit too much speed the tail swings round on a bend, then you're spinning across the lanes; you might be lucky and cartwheel down a high bank and thwack to a halt in earth and grass; or you might catch five or six other cars light ruinous blows and come out shuddering and vomiting with terror but okay; or you might shimmer sideways, seem to hover for half a second alongside the blurred rain-sluicing roof-high tyres of a twelve-wheeled juggernaut, then crumple under and be sliced to death.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "The next morning I woke up knowing I had done something terrible. I slipped out very early and cycled round to Orst's place as fast as possible: I had to warn them that the house was being watched. When I turned the corner—into our street—I saw a van parked, a group of people outside the front door, soldiers, a tall Gestapo officer who was well known in the town, the Gruppenleiter, as well as various neighbours. It was most imprudent of me, but I couldn't keep back—I should have turned away at once, my father had drummed into me how I must never involve myself unnecessarily. I came up to the edge of the group, and just then the dear old couple were brought out and pushed into the van. They didn't see me, but the image of their silent terror makes me ache to this day. There was a long pause, a stoical illusionless pause on the part of the neighbours; though they were curious too, there was a miserable sense of occasion, that something so hidden was about to be brought to light. When Orst came out, they all crossed themselves, Willem was pushing him in his wheelchair, though he was dead, and bounced and lolled as the wheels went over the cobbles. His face was bloodless and his eyes wide open: he seemed to stare angrily, his mouth was open in a sneer. There was a smell, and the women lifted their aprons to their faces. It was grotesque, but the faith of the bystanders was equal to the challenge—it was quietly stated among them who he was, tears were shed, prayers were muttered, the spectacle was taken in without flinching. "Then the soldiers hoisted the body, the painter, up into the van in his chair, and he stayed for a moment, before the doors were slammed, as if he was sitting in judgment, it was pointless my hiding in the crowd, he could see me now though he never had before. I was in that mad shocked state when your head is full of rhetorical voices: he seemed to be bitterly asking me, as he always used to, what it was I had seen in the street, what colour the clouds were now. Then he was gone—they were all gone. Later the bodies of the servants could be claimed for burial. Orst as you know has no tomb." No tomb. How often I had failed to register the negative evidence, the white canvas, the invisible wingbeat that flutters the page. "But what had happened?" "That, my dearest Edward, I do not know." And he glanced at me keenly for a second, as though I might at last be able to tell him. "Willem must have known. I watched him standing by the van, and I remember thinking how well I knew him, physically. I saw through his dreadful uniform.

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

  The two girls were inseparable from first grade through high school graduation, and Lisa was maid-of-honor at Bettina’s wedding. In fact, Lisa gave us Bettina’s name as someone to include in our comparison group. The thing I remember most about my interview with Bettina was her statement, “I always thought of myself as a good person, and I never doubted that I would find a good man to love me and to love in return.” She referred to her home as being “rock solid.” Of course, being raised by parents who are happily married does not innoculate children against divorce or other serious troubles. Life is not so simple. In an earlier book, The Good Marriage, I interviewed several young adults who had been raised by parents who were very happy in sexually close, romantic marriages. Such parents were often so devoted to each other that their children, watching the ongoing love affair, sometimes felt excluded from the parents orbit. When these youngsters grew up, they rejected their parents as role models and opted for more reserved behavior in their own marriages. In other close-knit families, children grow so close to their parents that separation in adolescence and early adulthood is an issue. I was relieved when Bettina told me how she had decided to go to Cornell instead of her father’s alma mater, Stanford University. When the acceptance letters came, Bettina yelped, “Cornell, here I come!” Her father said to her with thinly veiled irritation, “No one turns Stanford down. ” “Well then,” Bettina answered tartly, “here goes the first.” And she tootled off. As if turned out, Bettina married another Cornell graduate and settled in upstate New York, far away from her parents. She still visits them a couple of times a year and now that her dad is retired, her parents travel more widely and often stop off to see her when they’re back east. “They’re great role models for my husband and me,” Bettina said. “They’re really savvy about how to do each life stage. I hope that we can do as well.” After talking to Bettina, I remember feeling struck by the fact that both girls started from almost the same place; they had outstanding parents, solid middle-class backgrounds, and happy memories from when they were very young. But after Lisa’s parents divorced, their paths diverged in ways no one could have predicted. “You know, I have a lot in common with my friends from divorced families,” Lisa said. “We define ourselves as children of divorce.” I’d been hearing this from others and asked Lisa to explain what she meant. “It’s sort of a permanent identity, like being adopted or something like that. I guess you might say that our parents’ divorce was the formative event in our lives. It explains why I feel the way I do. The divorce is a permanent part of me and in some ways I’ll never get over it. But it’s good and bad news.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Through Capouya meets Beauford Delaney, an artist living in Greenwich Village; he introduces Baldwin to the art world there, teaches him about music-including blues and jazz, which are fo rbid den by stepfather at home-and becomes a lifelong fr iend. Stepfather's health begins to fail. With Capouya's support, Baldwin leaves the church, preaching his last sermon at the end of senior year. 1942-44 Awarded high school diploma in January 1942. Takes la boring job at army depot under construction in Belle Mead, near Princeton, New Jersey, where Capouya is also employed. Rooms with local fa mily but visits New York on weekends and regularly sends money to fa mily. Fired from Belle Mead job; returns home and finds work at a meatpacking plant. Stepfather dies on July 29, 1943, the same day that sister Paula is born. Baldwin loses the meat packing job. Moves to Greenwich Village to concentrate on writing, staying at first with Delaney and other fri ends. Works as waiter at Calypso restaurant and enjoys the com pany of artists and writers who gather there. Has liaisons with both men and women. Around this time tells Ca pouya that he thinks of himself as homosexual. Becomes good fr iend of Eugene Worth and meets young actor Mar lon Brando while taking a theater class. Begins a novel that he calls "Crying Holy" and "In My Father's House" (later Go Te ll It on the Mountain). Meets Richard Wright in late 1944; he reads Baldwin's manuscript and recom mends it to an editor at Harper and Brothers. CHRONOLOGY 194-5-4-8 Receives $soo grant fr om Harper's Eugene F. Saxton Me morial Trust in November 194-5. Works on novel; a draft is rejected by both Harper and Doubleday. Eugene Worth commits suicide by jumping fr om George Washington Bridge in the winter of 194-6; Baldwin is deeply upset and later uses the incident in Another Country. Baldwin begins regularly writing reviews fo r The Nation and The New Leader, and in 194-8 Commentary publishes his essay "The Harlem Ghetto" and story "Previous Condition." Drafts novel "Ignorant Armies," which he abandons. Reads widely in French, Russian, and American literature includ ing Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Henry Miller, Walt Whitman, and Henry James. Wins Rosenwald fe llowship to do book on Harlem in collaboration with photographer Theodore Pelatowsk.i, whom he met through Avedon (it is never completed). Moves to Paris in November 194-8. Sees Richard Wright, who moved to France in 194-7, and meets Themistocles Hoetis and Asa Beneviste, fr iends of Wright who are planning to publish a little magazine called Ze ro, and journalist Otto Friedrich. Stays first at Ho tel de Rome then finds less expensive room at Hotel de Verneuil, where he makes a number of fri ends including English socialist Mary Keen and Norwegian journalist Gidske Anderson. Meets Truman Capote, Saul Bellow, and Herbert Gold around this time.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  A day or so later, I learned that she was under arrest for possession of heroin and that the police were at her bedside. A number of people, some ofwhom I knew, were trying to have the dying woman accorded more humane treatment. "She's sitting up today," said one of the last people to see her alive, "and if they don't bug her to death, she'll never die." Well, she is dead and I tend to concur with the woman who suggests that she was "bugged" to death. We are altogether too quick to disclaim responsibility for the fate which overtakes-so of ten-so many gifted, driven, and erratic artists. Nobody pushed them to their deaths, we like to say. They jumped. Of course there is always some truth to this, but the pressures of the brutally indifferent world cannot be dismissed so speedily. Moreover, though we disclaim all responsibility for the failure of an artist, we are happy to take his success or survival as a flattering comment on ourselves. In fact, Billie was produced and destroyed by the same society. It had not the faintest intention of producing her and it did not intend to destroy her; but it has managed to do both with the same bland lack of concern. But I do not intend to talk about Billie Holiday, who has gained her immortality dearly and who is in no need of any remarks of mine. She would have made a splendid, if some what overwhelming Bess and, indeed, I should imagine that she was much closer to the original, whoever she was, of this portrait than anyone who has ever played or sung it. She was certainly much closer to it than Dorothy Dandridge, who plays the role, loosely speaking, in the present production. I 616 ON CATFISH ROW 61 7 am told that Miss Dandridge is a singer, though she seems never to have sung in the movies, but she is not an actress. Other people in Porg_v and Bess are very gifted players indeed and under less depressing conditions have done admirable work; and there are others who give every indication of being able to act-if they could only find a director. In short, the saddest and most infuriating thing about the Hollywood pro duction of Porgy and Bess is that Mr. Otto Preminger has a great many gifted people in front of his camera and not the remotest notion of what to do with any of them. The film cost upwards of six, or sixty, millions, or billions, of dollars but all that was needed for the present result was a little card board and a little condescension. As for the cardboard, con sider the set, surely the most characterless in this opera's entire history; and as for condescension, consider the costumes, most of which seem to have been left over from one of those trav eling "Tom" shows.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It has a temple to Achilles. Terns, gulls, and petrels, all hinds of sea birds frequent this sanctuary, and its porch is cooled by the continual fanning of their wings still moist from the sea. But this isle of Achilles is also, as it should be, the isle of Patroclus, and the innumerable votive offerings which decorate the temple walls are dedicated sometimes to Achilles and sometimes to his friend, for of course whoever loves Achilles cherishes and venerates Patroclus' memory. Achilles himself appears in dream to the navigators who visit these parts: he protects them and warns them of the sea's dangers, as Castor and Pollux do elsewhere. And the shade of Patroclus appears at Achilles' side. I report these things to you because I think them worthy to be known, and because those who told them to me have experienced them themselves, or have learned them from credible witnesses. . . . Achilles sometimes seems to me the greatest of men in his courage, his fortitude, his learning and intelligence coupled with bodily skill, and his ardent love for his young companion. And nothing in him seems to me nobler than the despair which made him despise life and long for death when he had lost his beloved. I laid down the voluminous report of the governor of Armenia Minor, admiral of the expeditionary fleet. As always Arrian has worked well. But this time he is doing more than that: he offers me a gift which I need if I am to die in peace; he sends me a picture of my life as I should have wished it to be. Arrian knows that what counts is something which will not figure in official biographies and which is not written on tombs; he knows also that the passing of time only adds one more bewilderment to grief. As seen by him the adventure of my existence takes on meaning and achieves a form, as in a poem; that unique affection frees itself from remorse, impatience, and vain obsessions as from so much smoke, or so much dust; sorrow is decanted and despair runs pure. Arrian opens to me the vast empyrean of heroes and friends, judging me not too unworthy of it. My hidden study built at the center of a pool in the Villa is not internal enough as a refuge; I drag this body there, grown old, and suffer there. My past life, to be sure, affords me certain retreats where I escape from at least some part of my present afflictions: the snowy plain along the Danube, the gardens of Nicomedia, Claudiopolis turned gold in the harvest of flowering saffron, Athens (no matter what street), an oasis where water lilies ripple above the ooze, the Syrian desert by starlight on the return from Osroës' camp.

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

  The impact of the parents’ divorce echoes and crescendos in adulthood whether the parents were civil or not. NINETEEN Picking Up the Pieces, One by One A s I prepared to meet Billy for our twenty-five-year follow-up interview, I wondered if life had gotten any easier for him. I thought about the isolated life that he had led after his mother remarried and how at age sixteen he had moved out to live alone in his father’s house. Were the wounds of feeling unwanted still open? Had he found any relationships to sustain and heal him? These questions swirled in my head as we sat down in the bakery shop, but nothing prepared me for the suffering he had experienced since our last meeting. Two years earlier, the local newspaper reported that Billy’s father had died in the crash of a small airplane that he was piloting. I wrote Billy a brief condolence note and he called me immediately to thank me for my interest. He cried bitterly, almost clinging to the connection with me over the phone. Between sobs he said that he knew his father had not been there for him as a child or as an adult. “But I never gave up hoping that someday he would take an interest in me, even if I wasn’t the son he wanted. Now there’s nothing more to hope for. I lost the father I had and I lost the father I never had.” In rising distress he added, “My mother refused to come with me to the funeral. I hardly knew anyone there and no one knew me.” 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.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  My Roman guests, less accustomed than I to the mysteries of the East, showed a certain curiosity for those ceremonies of another race. For me, on the contrary, they were tiring and irritating to the extreme. I had ordered my boat anchored at some distance from the others, far from any habitation; but a half-abandoned temple of the time of the Pharaohs stood near the river bank and had still its school of priests, so I did not entirely escape the sound of wailing. On the preceding evening Lucius invited me to supper on his boat. I went there at sunset. Antinous refused to go with me, so I left him alone in my stern deck cabin lying on his lion skin, playing at knucklebones with Chabrias. Half an hour later, just as night fell, he changed his mind and called for a boat. Aided by a single oarsman, and pulling against the current, he rowed the considerable distance which separated us from the other boats. His entry into the deck tent where the supper was given interrupted the applause for the contortions of a dancing girl. He had arrayed himself in a long Syrian robe, sheer as the skin of a fruit and strewn over with flowers and chimeras. In order to row more easily he had freed his right arm from its sleeve; sweat was trembling on the smooth chest. Lucius tossed him a garland which he caught in mid-air; his gaiety, almost strident, did not abate for one moment, though hardly sustained by a single cup of Greek wine. We returned together in my boat with six oarsmen, followed by the cutting "good night" of Lucius from above. The wild gay mood persisted. But in the morning I happened by chance to touch a face wet with tears. I asked him impatiently the cause for such crying; he replied humbly, excusing himself on the ground of fatigue. I accepted the lie and fell back to sleep. His true agony took place in that bed, there beside me. The mail from Rome had just come, and the day went by in reading and answering it. As usual Antinous went silently about the room; I know not at what moment that fair creature passed out of my life. Toward the twelfth hour Chabrias entered, in great agitation. Contrary to all regulations the youth had left the boat without stating his purpose or the length of his intended absence; two hours at least had gone by since his departure. Chabrias recalled some strange things said the evening before, and a recommendation made that very morning, concerning me. He voiced his fears.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Edie had seen it happen, the whole thing in the time it takes to turn up the radio or glance aside at your companion. She was a bit behind Colin and Dawn in her Peugeot; she braked and zipped through on the hard shoulder to avoid the bucking and careering of the lorry, and then ploughed into the bank to dodge the front of the Craxton, with Colin in it, as it shot out from beneath. She sat quivering and weeping, gripping the wheel, and felt the thump in her back as the severed rear end of Colin's car exploded, fifty yards behind. It was a couple of hours later that she got me on the phone, at the Orst Museum. She described running along to the wreckage, ready to plunge in for Dawn, but the flames took her breath; she ran back for Colin and he was all over the crushed cabin as if he had been detonated; something in the engine was still churning and banging, the radio still going, "The Pavane of the Sons of the Morning from Job": she coughed up the words as if horrified to have known what it was, and having to tell me, and dropped the phone, but I could hear her wailing and gasping. They had been to Hove to look at a long-case clock that a friend of Edie's father wanted to sell. Edie, as the intermediary, had led them down, Dawn accompanying Colin for the run and a change of scene from the eventless shop. The clock was a good one, and Colin brought it back in the car—You just could with the passenger seat folded forward and the whole thing wrapped in blankets. Dawn had had to sit in the back. Colin knew the way home, and when they hit the motorway he overtook and powered ahead. Edie, slightly oppressed by this male challenge, had done her best to keep up. She thought they were doing about 85 when the spin happened.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I sat in a kind of frozen observance of my own in the sitting-room, with the silent monument of the piano, the massed records and the unsinging sheet-music—my mother had left a Bach aria open on the music-stand. From beyond, Sir Thomas Beecham peered out over his signature with a look of testy merriment that I thought inappropriate. I thought how much people know when they die: that canterbury full of music, not just known but gone into in some adult never-satisfied way that I couldn't understand. I had always been too easy and ignorant a judge, and said it was lovely the first time, and also the second quite different time, and soon lost patience as he kept working it towards some future state I couldn't envisage and which now would never be. His going was so slow, and so unprecedented in my experience, that I found it hard to bear in mind or even to believe in. He was quieter than usual, hating to make a fuss, but sometimes coldly demanding. He was glad that I was getting on with things, racing out after minimal bursts of revision to meet my friend on the common, showing the stifled high spirits of a boy with a secret happiness; his occasional words of reproach rankled with me for days, since I knew I was spending less of my time with him than before; an unadmitted fear of illness kept me away. "Let's have some music tonight," he would say, and catch my hesitation, my momentary reordering of my plans. A large oval mirror hung by two chains above our fireplace. There was something aloof about it—it was never one of those mirrors that embrace a room and give it back to itself with a hint of strangeness and enhanced worth. Though I had become rather vain of late and conceited about my inky quiff, I tended not to consult it; but when we had a record on and I was sprawled on the sofa opposite, my eyes would dwell on the slipped horizon of the wall behind me reflected in its high ellipse—a sun-yellow wall like an empty beach reaching up to the sky of shadowed white ceiling, a birdless distance that took on splendour or desolation according to the music and the varying light of the months.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I closed my eyes. The sun was hot and high. I tried to recall what my life had been like back in Buffalo. My past already felt like a dream that receded in the moment of waking. Life in New York City shot past me every day, hurtling by like clattering subway cars. I couldn’t remember a time when the world was slower and I was part of it. Screeching tires woke me from my reverie. A woman’s scream raised goose bumps on my arms. I raced to the corner. “Call an ambulance,” she shouted. “Hurry! For god’s sake, hurry!” The ambulance needn’t have rushed. I knelt down beside his lifeless body. His hands were finally still. I wiped the trickle of blood running from his lip with my thumb. A gurgling sound came from his mouth and blood bubbled over his lips and down his cheek. A pool of blood spread under his head. A nightstick poked me in the shoulder. “On the sidewalk, buddy,” the cop nudged me. His squad car was patked in the middle of 7 Avenue. The man from the newsstand came over to look at the body. “What’s he wearing, a skirt?” he asked the cop. “Beats me,” the cop shrugged. The woman sobbed. “They hit him on purpose, officer. There were four of them: two men and two women. The light was red. They stepped on the gas and ran him over. They were laughing.” The words tumbled out, punctuated with sobs. She dropped to her knees and keened. “Oh my god,” she sobbed, louder and louder. “Oh my god!” An older man put down his briefcase and moved toward her. “Are you alright?” he asked. “Oh god!” her voice rose. “Lady, are you hurt?” He sounded panicky. “Are you OK?” She shook her head and rocked back and forth on her knees. “Oh god,” she repeated, “they were laughing.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Calm down, lady,” he soothed her. “It was only a bum.” It was one of those muggy New York City summer nights when the temperature sticks at one hundred damn degrees. I stripped down to light sweatpants and a tenement T-shirt and headed for the gym. I didn’t usually go to the gym in the evening. I hated the after-work crowd lined up for weights. But I guessed right that night. The city’s population wilted in the intense heat and headed for the coolest spots in town. The gym was practically all mine. I worked my body till it felt like coiled steel, and groaned when the trainer announced it was past 11:00 P.M. closing time.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Luc was waiting at Ostend, staring out to sea through salt-stippled glass. He looked hollow-cheeked, eyes narrowed in hurt and defiance; I felt he had been robbed of his beauty, and that I would hardly have singled him out from the other kids around him. He had become a victim, to be stared at and pitied, to provoke pity for his family and friends—and just at the moment when his future was clearing like hills in the first light, to be ready for him when he woke. I stood in front of him and repeated his name, though I knew he couldn't see me, or recall the night he had taken my life in his arms. He gazed past me, as if in a truer kinship with the shiftless sea. A few late walkers passed us, and saw me vigilant in my huge unhappy overcoat; they didn't know if it was the charts of tides and sunsets I was studying, or the named photos of the disappeared. A Note on the Author Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the novels The Swimming-Pool Library, The Spell, and The Line of Beauty. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, and The Line of Beauty won the Man Booker Prize for fiction and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in London.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  They found an extensive magazine collection, including a few issues of Beaver Hunt (a periodical that I can assure you has nothing to do with aquatic mammals). Mamaw found it hilarious. “Fucking Beaver Hunt !” she’d roar. “Who comes up with this shit?” She and Denise hatched a plot to take the magazines home and mail them to the pallbearer’s wife. After a short deliberation, she changed her mind. “With my luck,” she told me, “we’ll get in a crash on the way back to Ohio and the police will find these damned things in my trunk. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go out with everyone thinking I was a lesbian—and a perverted one at that!” So they threw the magazines away to “teach that pervert a lesson” and never spoke of it again. This side of Mamaw rarely showed itself outside of Jackson. Deaton’s funeral home in Jackson—where she’d stolen those Beaver Hunt s—was organized like a church. In the center of the building was a main sanctuary flanked by larger rooms with couches and tables. On the other two sides were hallways with exits to a few smaller rooms—offices for staff, a tiny kitchen, and bathrooms. I’ve spent much of my life in that tiny funeral home, saying goodbye to aunts and uncles and cousins and great-grandparents. And whether she went to Deaton’s to bury an old friend, a brother, or her beloved mother, Mamaw greeted every guest, laughed loudly, and cursed proudly. So it was a surprise to me when, during Papaw’s visitation, I went searching for comfort and found Mamaw alone in a corner of the funeral home, recharging batteries that I never knew could go empty. She stared blankly at the floor, her fire replaced with something unfamiliar. I knelt before her and laid my head in her lap and said nothing. At that moment, I realized that Mamaw was not invincible. In hindsight, it’s clear that there was more than grief to both Mamaw’s and Mom’s behavior. Lindsay, Matt, and Mamaw did their best to hide it from me. Mamaw forbade me to stay at Mom’s, under the ruse that Mamaw needed me with her as she grieved. Perhaps they hoped to give me a little space to mourn Papaw. I don’t know. I didn’t see at first that something had veered off course. Papaw was dead, and everyone processed it differently. Lindsay spent a lot of time with her friends and was always on the move. I stayed as close to Mamaw as possible and read the Bible a lot. Mom slept more than usual, and I figured this was her way of coping. At home, she lacked even a modicum of temper control. Lindsay failed to do the dishes properly, or forgot to take out the dog, and Mom’s anger poured out: “My dad was the only one who really understood me!” she’d scream.

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

  One of the interesting trends in American culture over the last ten years has been the growth of the men’s movement in which men acknowledge their important roles as fathers and protectors of their families. However, in none of the many publications by the fathers’ groups are fathers urged to support their children in college. Rather, they are encouraged in these publications to spend time with young children. The needs of older children are unacknowledged. At the same time, the cost of a university education has risen steeply. It’s become much harder for young people to work their way through college. It may soon be impossible. A recent study shows that fewer children of divorce even apply to the nation’s top colleges. 8 At the present time and in the foreseeable future, children from divorced families end up less well educated than their peers coming from intact homes. This is a dramatic example of the children’s lament that they are the ones paying for their parents’ divorce. A NINETEEN Picking Up the Pieces, One by One s I prepared to meet Billy for our twenty-five-year follow-up interview, I wondered if life had gotten any easier for him. I thought about the isolated life that he had led after his mother remarried and how at age sixteen he had moved out to live alone in his father’s house. Were the wounds of feeling unwanted still open? Had he found any relationships to sustain and heal him? These questions swirled in my head as we sat down in the bakery shop, but nothing prepared me for the suffering he had experienced since our last meeting. Two years earlier, the local newspaper reported that Billy’s father had died in the crash of a small airplane that he was piloting. I wrote Billy a brief condolence note and he called me immediately to thank me for my interest. He cried bitterly, almost clinging to the connection with me over the phone. Between sobs he said that he knew his father had not been there for him as a child or as an adult. “But I never gave up hoping that someday he would take an interest in me, even if I wasn’t the son he wanted. Now there’s nothing more to hope for. I lost the father I had and I lost the father I never had.” In rising distress he added, “My mother refused to come with me to the funeral. I hardly knew anyone there and no one knew me.” 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.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Even my remorse has gradually become a form of possession, though bitter, and a way of assuring myself that, to the end, I have been the sorry master of his destiny. But I am well aware that other factors exist, namely, the will and decision of that fair stranger who each loved one is, and remains for us, in spite of everything. In taking upon myself the entire fault I reduce the young figure to proportions of a wax statuette which I might have shaped, and crushed, in my hands. I have no right to detract from the extraordinary masterpiece which he made of his departure; I must leave to the boy the credit for his own death. It goes without saying that I lay no blame upon the physical desire, ordinary enough, which determined my choice in love. Similar passions had often occurred in my life; these frequent adventures so far had cost no more than a minimum of pledges, troubles, or lies. My brief fancy for Lucius had involved me in only a few follies easy to mend. There was nothing to keep this supreme affection from following the same course, nothing except precisely that unique quality which distinguished it from the others. Mere habit would have led us to that inglorious but safe ending which life brings to all who accept its slow dulling from wear. I should have seen passion change into friendship, as the moralists would have it do, or into indifference, as is more often the case. A young person would have grown away from me at about the time that our bonds would have begun to weigh me down; other sensual routines, or the same under other forms, would have been established in his life; the future would have held a marriage neither worse nor better than many another, a post in provincial administration, or the direction of some rural domain in Bithynia. Or otherwise, there would have been simple inertia, and court life continued in some subaltern position; to put it at the worst, one of those careers of fallen favorites who turn into confidants or panders. Wisdom, if I understand it at all, consists of admitting each of such possibilities and dangers, which make up life itself, while trying to ward off the worst. But we were not wise, neither the boy nor I. I had not awaited the coming of Antinous to feel myself a god, but success was multiplying around me the sense of vertiginous heights. The seasons seemed to collaborate with the poets and musicians of my escort to make our existence one continuous Olympian festival.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But I had never felt empowered—never believed that I had the ability and the responsibility to care for those I loved. Mamaw could preach about responsibility and hard work, about making something of myself and not making excuses. No pep talk or speech could show me how it felt to transition from seeking shelter to providing it. I had to learn that for myself, and once I did, there was no going back. Mamaw’s seventy-second birthday was in April 2005. Just a couple of weeks before then, I stood in the waiting room of a Walmart Supercenter as car technicians changed my oil. I called Mamaw on the cell phone that I paid for myself, and she told me about babysitting Lindsay’s kids that day. “Meghan is so damned cute,” she told me. “I told her to shit in the pot, and for three hours she just kept on saying ‘shit in the pot, shit in the pot, shit in the pot’ over and over again. I told her she had to stop or I’d get in trouble, but she never did.” I laughed, told Mamaw that I loved her, and let her know that her monthly three-hundred-dollar check was on the way. “J.D., thank you for helping me. I’m very proud of you, and I love you.” Two days later I awoke on a Sunday morning to a call from my sister, who said that Mamaw’s lung had collapsed, that she was lying in the hospital in a coma, and that I should come home as quickly as possible. Two hours later, I was on the road. I packed my dress blue uniform, just in case I needed it for a funeral. On the way, a West Virginia police officer pulled me over for going ninety-four miles an hour on I–77. He asked why I was in such a hurry, and when I explained, he told me that the highway was clear of speed traps for the next seventy miles, after which I’d cross into Ohio, and that I should go as fast as I wanted until then. I took my warning ticket, thanked him profusely, and drove 102 until I crossed the state line. I made the thirteen-hour trip in just under eleven hours. When I arrived at Middletown Regional Hospital at eleven in the evening, my entire family was gathered around Mamaw’s bed. She was unresponsive, and though her lung had been reinflated, the infection that had caused it to collapse showed no signs of responding to treatment. Until that happened, the doctor told us, it would be torture to wake her—if she could be awakened at all. We waited a few days for signs that the infection was surrendering to the medication. But the signs showed the opposite: Her white blood cell count continued to rise, and some of her organs showed evidence of severe stress. Her doctor explained that she had no realistic chance of living without a ventilator and feeding tube.

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

  In contrast, in a postdivorce family, the child often takes responsibility for the one or both parents who are temporarily or lastingly overwhelmed by the crisis. This situation can be compounded by the adult’s subsequent disappointments in relationships. A formerly competent mother or father is unable to carry on as before. Recovery from a divorce is a lot harder than we have realized and it lasts a lot longer. As a result, the burden falls on the child who steps forward to take charge—out of compassion and often out of unrealistic guilt. This is one way that divorce profoundly changes not only the child’s experience but, as Karen illustrates, the whole personality of the child as she grows up and becomes an adult. Caregiving that involves sacrificing one’s own wishes for the needs of others is poor preparation for happy choices in adult relationships, as we’ll see in coming chapters. TWOSunlit MemoriesThe more I thought about Karen, the more I wondered what I would find in talking to young adults who were raised in unhappy intact marriages—whose parents were similar to Karen’s parents before their divorce. Would these children move into the breach as caregivers or would they somehow be protected by their parents’ decision to stay together? Would they be able to keep their distance from their parents’ unhappiness or, like so many children of divorce, be drawn into the vortex of ongoing conflict? Thus I was eager to meet the young people we recruited to serve as our comparison group for the adult children of divorce. When we began, I honestly didn’t know what we’d find. If we could lure them into participating, how candid would they be? As busy adults with families and jobs, would they be willing to talk with my colleagues and me for several hours at a time? Would we end up, as many researchers do, talking only to women, who tend to be more comfortable discussing relationships?

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  In later years, Mamaw sometimes spoke of a daughter who died in infancy, and she led us all to believe that the daughter was born sometime after Uncle Jimmy, Mamaw and Papaw’s eldest child. Mamaw suffered eight miscarriages in the decade between Uncle Jimmy’s birth and my mother’s. But recently my sister discovered a birth certificate for “Infant” Vance, the aunt I never knew, who died so young that her birth certificate also lists her date of death. The baby who brought my grandparents to Ohio didn’t survive her first week. On that birth certificate, the baby’s brokenhearted mother lied about her age: Only fourteen at the time and with a seventeen-year-old husband, she couldn’t tell the truth, lest they ship her back to Jackson or send Papaw to jail. Mamaw’s first foray into adulthood ended in tragedy. Today I often wonder: Without the baby, would she ever have left Jackson? Would she have run off with Jim Vance to foreign territory? Mamaw’s entire life—and the trajectory of our family—may have changed for a baby who lived only six days. Whatever mix of economic opportunity and family necessity catapulted my grandparents to Ohio, they were there, and there was no going back. So Papaw found a job at Armco, a large steel company that aggressively recruited in eastern Kentucky coal country. Armco representatives would descend on towns like Jackson and promise (truthfully) a better life for those willing to move north and work in the mills. A special policy encouraged wholesale migration: Applicants with a family member working at Armco would move to the top of the employment list. Armco didn’t just hire the young men of Appalachian Kentucky; they actively encouraged those men to bring their extended families. A number of industrial firms employed a similar strategy, and it appears to have worked. During that era, there were many Jacksons and many Middletowns. Researchers have documented two major waves of migration from Appalachia to the industrial powerhouse economies in the Midwest. The first happened after World War I, when returning veterans found it nearly impossible to find work in the not-yet-industrialized mountains of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee. It ended as the Great Depression hit Northern economies hard.4 My grandparents were part of the second wave, composed of returning veterans and the rapidly rising number of young adults in 1940s and ’50s Appalachia.5 As the economies of Kentucky and West Virginia lagged behind those of their neighbors, the mountains had only two products that the industrial economies of the North needed: coal and hill people. And Appalachia exported a lot of both. Precise numbers are tough to pin down because studies typically measure “net out-migration”—as in the total number of people who left minus the number of people who came in. Many families constantly traveled back and forth, which skews the data.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  We all conferred and decided that if, after a day, Mamaw’s white blood cell count increased further, we would pull the plug. Legally, it was Aunt Wee’s sole decision, and I’ll never forget when she tearfully asked whether I thought she was making a mistake. To this day, I’m convinced that she—and we—made the right decision. I guess it’s impossible to know for sure. I wished at the time that we had a doctor in the family. The doctor told us that without the ventilator Mamaw would die within fifteen minutes, an hour at most. She lasted instead for three hours, fighting to the very last minute. Everyone was present—Uncle Jimmy, Mom, and Aunt Wee; Lindsay, Kevin, and I—and we gathered around her bed, taking turns whispering in her ear and hoping that she heard us. As her heart rate dropped and we realized that her time drew near, I opened a Gideon’s Bible to a random passage and began to read. It was First Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verse 12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” A few minutes later, she was dead. I didn’t cry when Mamaw died, and I didn’t cry for days thereafter. Aunt Wee and Lindsay grew frustrated with me, then worried: You’re just so stoic, they said. You need to grieve like the rest of us or you’ll burst. I was grieving in my own way, but I sensed that our entire family was on the verge of collapse, and I wanted to give the impression of emotional strength. We all knew how Mom had reacted to Papaw’s death, but Mamaw’s death created new pressures: It was time to wind down the estate, figure out Mamaw’s debts, dispose of her property, and disburse what remained. For the first time, Uncle Jimmy learned Mom’s true financial impact on Mamaw—the drug rehab charges, the numerous “loans” never repaid. To this day, he refuses to speak to her. For those of us well acquainted with Mamaw’s generosity, her financial position came as no surprise. Though Papaw had worked and saved for over four decades, the only thing of value that remained was the house he and Mamaw had purchased fifty years earlier. And Mamaw’s debts were large enough to eat into a substantial portion of the home’s equity. Lucky for us, this was 2005—the height of the real estate bubble. If she had died in 2008, Mamaw’s estate likely would have been bankrupt. In her will, Mamaw divided what remained between her three kids, with a twist: Mom’s share was divided evenly between me and Lindsay. This undoubtedly contributed to Mom’s inevitable emotional outburst. I was so caught up in the financial aspects of Mamaw’s death and spending time with relatives I hadn’t seen in months that I didn’t realize Mom was slowly descending to the same place she’d traveled after Papaw’s death.