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)

  Problems begin when the adolescent girl, who for years may have been her mother’s most stalwart supporter, begins to move away from her mother’s orbit. She needs to try her own wings, to be proud of her femininity, to be independent and strong. For all children, the adolescent years involve moving out and away. Here the daughter’s dilemma becomes increasingly acute as she approaches young adulthood. Her problem is this: How can I leave my mother who has no one but me? Who will take care of her in her loneliness? Who will comfort her? The Old Testament tells the story of Ruth, a young woman who loses her spouse and devotes herself to her mother-in-law. The mother, Naomi, is griefstricken. Ruth captures the passionate relationship between the two women when she says, “Whither thou goest I will go.” This ancient story translates easily into the love and compassion that daughters of divorce feel for their mothers who are grieving and alone. They are bound by the golden strands of love and compassion. Negotiating the separation is a heroic task for the daughter when the mother is lonely. Lisa sobs as she contemplates her mother’s plight and wonders what she should do. Another young woman told me that when she closes her eyes, she sees the figure of her mother “for the sad, repressed woman that she is and I cry and cry and feel that I’ll never stop crying.” Another said, “It used to be that I wasn’t sure where she left off and where I began. I feel more separate now but I pity her and I worry about her.” Another said, “My mother is a fettered person. She has the right tools but she can’t make the shift since the divorce. She’s wandered around in chains.” Most said that they don’t want to be like their mothers because that would be courting failure. They think of their mothers as women who have not been able to keep their dad’s love or to capture the love of another man. And they are terrified of growing up to be like them. The mother evokes an extraordinary mix of love, compassion, and frightened rejection.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  When I left the empty body it was no more than an embalmer's preparation, the first stage of a frightful masterpiece, a precious substance treated with salt and gum of myrrh, and never again to be touched by sun or air. On the return I visited the temple near which the sacrifice had been consummated; I spoke with the priests. Their sanctuary would be renovated to become a place of pilgrimage for all Egypt; their college, enriched and augmented, would be consecrated hereafter to the service of my god. Even in my most obtuse moments I had never doubted that that young presence was divine. Greece and Asia would worship him in our manner, with games and dances, and with ritual offerings placed at the feet of a nude, white statue. Egypt, who had witnessed the death agony, would have also her part in the apotheosis: it would be the most secret and somber part, and the harshest, for this country would play the eternal role of embalmer to his body. For centuries to come priests with shaven heads would recite litanies repeating that name which for them had no value, but for me held all. Each year the sacred barge would bear that effigy along the river; the first of the month of Athyr mourners would walk on that shore where I had walked. Every hour has its immediate duty, its special injunction which dominates all others: the problem of the moment was to defend from death the little that was left to me. Phlegon had assembled on the shore the architects and engineers of my suite, as I had ordered; sustained by a kind of clearsighted frenzy I made them follow me along the stony hills; I explained my plan, the development of forty-five stadia of encircling wall, and I marked in the sand the position of the triumphal arch and that of the tomb. Antinoöpolis was to be born; it would already be some check to death to impose upon that sinister land a city wholly Greek, a bastion which would hold off the nomads of Erythrea, a new market on the route to India. Alexander had celebrated the funeral of Hephaestion with devastation and mass slaughter of prisoners.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  She then broke and went in through a window, unlocked and opened the door, and tended to her father. By then he had been dead for nearly a day. Mom and Mamaw sobbed uncontrollably as we waited for an ambulance. I tried to hug Mamaw, but she was beside herself and unresponsive even to me. When she stopped crying, she clutched me to her chest and told me to go say goodbye before they took his body away. I tried, but the medical technician kneeling beside him gazed at me as if she thought I was creepy for wanting to look at a dead body. I didn’t tell her the real reason I had walked back to my slouching Papaw. After the ambulance took Papaw’s body away, we drove immediately to Aunt Wee’s house. I guessed Mom had called her, because she descended from her porch with tears in her eyes. We all hugged her before squeezing into the car and heading back to Mamaw’s. The adults gave me the unenviable task of tracking down Lindsay and giving her the news. This was before cell phones, and Lindsay, being a seventeen-year-old, was difficult to reach. She wasn’t answering the house phone, and none of her friends answered my calls. Mamaw’s house sat literally five houses away from Mom’s—313 McKinley to 303—so I listened to the adults make plans and watched out the window for signs of my sister’s return. The adults spoke about funeral arrangements, where Papaw would want to be buried—“In Jackson, goddammit,” Mamaw insisted—and who would call Uncle Jimmy and tell him to come home. Lindsay returned home shortly before midnight. I trudged down the street and opened our door. She was walking down the stairs but stopped cold when she saw my face, red and blotchy from crying all day. “Papaw,” I blurted out. “He’s dead.” Lindsay collapsed on the stairs, and I ran up and embraced her. We sat there for a few minutes, crying as two children do when they find out that the most important man in their lives has died. Lindsay said something then, and though I don’t remember the exact phrase, I do remember that Papaw had just done some work on her car, and she was muttering something through the tears about taking advantage of him. Lindsay was a teenager when Papaw died, at the height of that weird mixture of thinking you know everything and caring too much about how others perceive you. Papaw was many things, but he was never cool. He wore the same old T-shirt every day with a front pocket just big enough to fit a pack of cigarettes. He always smelled of mildew, because he washed his clothes but let them dry “naturally,” meaning packed together in a washing machine. A lifetime of smoking had blessed him with an unlimited supply of phlegm, and he had no problem sharing that phlegm with everyone, no matter the time or occasion.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  So important was this road in the massive hillbilly migration that Dwight Yoakam penned a song about northerners who casti gated Appalachian children for learning the wrong three R’s: “Reading, Rightin’, Rt. 23.” Yoakam’s song about his own move from southeastern Kentucky could have come from Mamaw’s diary: They thought readin’, writin’, Route 23 would take them to the good life that they had never seen; They didn’t know that old highway would lead them to a world of misery Mamaw and Papaw may have made it out of Kentucky, but they and their children learned the hard way that Route 23 didn’t lead where they hoped. Chapter 3Mamaw and Papaw had three kids—Jimmy, Bev (my mom), and Lori. Jimmy was born in 1951, when Mamaw and Papaw were integrating into their new lives. They wanted more children, so they tried and tried, through a heartbreaking period of terrible luck and numerous miscarriages. Mamaw carried the emotional scars of nine lost children for her entire life. In college I learned that extreme stress can cause miscarriages and that this is especially true during the early part of a pregnancy. I can’t help but wonder how many additional aunts and uncles I’d have today were it not for my grandparents’ difficult early transition, no doubt intensified by Papaw’s years of hard drinking. Yet they persisted through a decade of failed pregnancies, and eventually it paid off: Mom was born on January 20, 1961—the day of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration—and my aunt Lori came along less than two years later. For whatever reason, Mamaw and Papaw stopped there. Uncle Jimmy once told me about the time before his sisters were born: “We were just a happy, normal middle-class family. I remember watching Leave It to Beaver on TV and thinking that looked like us.” When he first told me this, I nodded attentively and left it alone. Looking back, I realize, that to most outsiders, a statement like that must come off as insane. Normal middle-class parents don’t wreck pharmacies because a store clerk is mildly rude to their child. But that’s probably the wrong standard to use. Destroying store merchandise and threatening a sales clerk were normal to Mamaw and Papaw: That’s what Scots-Irish Appalachians do when people mess with your kid. “What I mean is that they were united, they were getting along with each other,” Uncle Jimmy conceded when I later pressed him. “But yeah, like everyone else in our family, they could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat.” Whatever unity they possessed early in their marriage began to evaporate after their daughter Lori—whom I call Aunt Wee—was born in 1962. By the mid–1960s, Papaw’s drinking had become habitual; Mamaw began to shut herself off from the outside world. Neighborhood kids warned the mailman to avoid the “evil witch” of McKinley Street.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Taha went out for me after lunch to deliver some papers to GS & to find me if he cd some flowers—I had a sudden yearning for those great bronze chrysanthemums. As I sometimes do, I imagined him going through the streets on my behalf, saw him by some supernatural, aerial sixth sense moving among the people, pointing to the flowers, taking the long, top-heavy cone of paper in his hands … I knew how people noticed him, sometimes were rude or cruel, all of which only deepened my pride in him. It was a mystery—for as he ambled about the prosaic London streets he moved too in the realm of my imagination, inviolable, invested with my love. He took an age to return & when he finally did come in with the chrysanthemums in a vase I asked him if everything had passed off all right, feeling a little anxious at the confidentiality of the things I gave him to carry—not on his account, whom I trust utterly, but lest he shd be waylaid. He said he was very sorry and cd he ask me something. I said of course. He said he wanted to marry Niri. I congratulated him, shook his hand, wished him every happiness, & said I looked forward to meeting his intended. He went out & shut the door, & a minute or two later I heard him leave the house. It was only then that I allowed myself to absorb the news, or rather to be transfixed by it, for it filled me with the most piercing anguish, & as he went out, wearing—I knew—his comical broad-brimmed hat, it was as if something within me had been released & I found myself gasping for breath, tears rolling down my face & the whole room & its furniture & pictures & books somehow sodden & heavy with the misery of it. It is true that the announcement of any marriage, however dear to me the couple & however perfectly suited to each other, invariably fills me with the blackest gloom; it may lift after a day or two, though not before an enduring sense has been instilled, not of the beginning of something new, but of the irrevocable ending of something innocent & old. But when the innocence is that of my own Taha … I felt it almost as if he had died—or worse, been magically translated into some other element.

• 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. Chapter 2 Cherif thumped me awake next morning and excitedly told me to look out of the window. I was too slow, and missed the funny thing he wanted me to see. But a minute or two later as I was groping round and squirting a clown's beard of shaving-foam on to my jaw he called me back to where he was standing in just his vest at the half-open shutter. He had his friendly crooked hard-on. Over to the right from one of the high barred windows of that institutional building which had so far remained silent and dark, three boys were peeing into the canal. They stood up on the windowsill, pressed against the bars, and directed their dying arcs up and out—presumably in a contest to see who could reach the furthest. I watched them finish and stand down whilst the shaving-foam thinned in an almost noiseless crepitation over my stubble. In a moment or two another trio took up their positions, we heard a command quite strictly barked inside, and the one on the left was away already. It must almost have been a false start. The other two followed a few seconds later, first in hesitant spurts and tinkles, but growing in confidence until for a while all three were at full cock, like a guard of honour.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  On a burning evening in May I rode out beyond the city gates along the banks of the Orontes to meet the small group so worn by anxiety, fever, and fatigue: the ailing emperor, Attianus, and the women. Trajan determinedly kept to his horse as far as the palace door. He could hardly stand; this man once so full of vitality seemed more changed than others are by the approach of death. Crito and Matidia helped him to climb the steps, induced him to lie down, and thereafter established themselves at his bedside. Attianus and Plotina recounted to me those incidents of the campaign which they had not been able to include in their brief dispatches. One of these episodes so moved me as to become forever a personal remembrance, a symbol of my own. As soon as the weary emperor had reached Charax he had gone to sit upon the shore, looking out over the brackish waters of the Persian Gulf. This was still the period when he felt no doubt of victory, but for the first time the immensity of the world overwhelmed him, and the feeling of age, and those limits which circumscribe us all. Great tears rolled down the cheeks of the man ever deemed incapable of weeping. The supreme commander who had borne the Roman eagles to hitherto unexplored shores knew now that he would never embark upon that sea so long in his thoughts: India, Bactria, the whole of that vague East which had intoxicated him from afar, would continue to be for him only names and dreams. On the very next day bad news forced him to turn back. Each time, in my turn, that destiny has denied me my wish I have remembered those tears shed that evening on a distant shore by an old man who, perhaps for the first time, was confronting his own life face to face. I went the following morning to the emperor's room. I felt filial toward him, or rather, fraternal. The man who had prided himself on living and thinking in every respect like any ordinary soldier of his army was ending his life in complete solitude; lying abed he continued to build up grandiose plans in which no one was any longer interested. As always, his brusque habits of speech served to disfigure his thought; forming his words now with utmost difficulty he talked to me of the triumph which they were preparing for him in Rome. He was denying defeat just as he was denying death. Two days later he had a second attack. My anxious consultations were renewed with Attianus, and with Plotina. The foresight of the empress had just effected the elevation of my old friend to the all-powerful position of commander of the Praetorian cohorts, bringing the imperial guard thus under our control.

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

  He looked sheepish and I decided to let it drop. But then with a passionate outburst, he let fly, “If I had mentioned it, what good would it have done? She would have said, ‘Get lost! I’m with him now.’ You’re probably going to ask me why I’m so cautious. It’s real simple. Name one thing I could have changed. Tell me one person who asked me. Did I want them to divorce? Did I like taking orders about all my chores from my stepfather? Did my dad want me around? Did my mother ask me before she got a whole new family? Did they ask me whether I wanted tuition money for college like the other guys? Who ever asked me anything? Who listened to me? Who helped me grow up? Life is the way it is. You know that Spanish expression? Qué será será, what will be, will be. Let me tell you something else while I’m spilling my guts. Say you came to see me or asked me like on a questionnaire or the phone (his voice rose to a quavering falsetto), ‘How are you doing, Billy?’ I would swear that I was fine. I would tell you that life’s a breeze, great job, nice girl, parents’ divorce super, no sweat. I would hide my feelings like I have learned all my life with smiles and lies, even when I feel like I’m dead or wish I was. But you would know that I was bullshitting you because you knew me when. So what I’m trying to say is, I’m not lying to you.” I thanked Billy for his trust in me but was shaken by his outburst. I have struggled for years to understand the powerlessness that so many of these men feel in their relationships with women. Why was it so rare for any of them to fight for someone they loved and wanted—or even to challenge her leaving? One man who suspected his wife of infidelity tapped her telephone for weeks and found his suspicions justified. Instead of confronting her, he filed for divorce. The fact that she was the mother of his two-year-old child didn’t lead him to a moment’s hesitation. “Why didn’t you talk with her?” I asked. “What for?” he asked. This kind of passivity was not as apparent in other parts of the men’s lives. They were able to be reasonably competitive although not aggressive in the workplace. However, at home, when the partner’s behavior coincided with what they feared, it’s as if they lay down and played dead. The nightmare came alive.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  The moment I learned that “half sister” had nothing to do with my affections and everything to do with the genetic nature of our relationship—that Lindsay, by virtue of having a different father, was just as much my half sister as people I’d never seen—remains one of the most devastating moments of my life. Mamaw told me this nonchalantly as I exited the shower one night before bedtime, and I screamed and wailed as if I’d just learned that my dog had died. I calmed down only after Mamaw relented and agreed that henceforth no one would ever refer to Lindsay as my “half sister” again. Lindsay Leigh was five years older than I was, born just two months after Mom graduated from high school. I was obsessed with her, both in the way that all children adore their older siblings and in a way that was unique to our circumstances. Her heroism on my behalf was the stuff of legend. One time after she and I argued over a soft pretzel, leading Mom to drop me off in an empty parking lot to show Lindsay what life without me would look like, it was my sister’s fit of sorrow and rage that brought Mom back immediately. During explosive fights between Mom and whatever man she let into our home, it was Lindsay who withdrew to her bedroom to place a rescue call to Mamaw and Papaw. She fed me when I was hungry, changed my diaper when no one else did, and dragged me everywhere with her—even though, Mamaw and Aunt Wee told me, I weighed nearly as much as she did. I always saw her as more adult than child. She never expressed her displeasure at her teenage boyfriends by storming off and slamming doors. When Mom worked late nights or otherwise didn’t make it home, Lindsay ensured that we had something for dinner. I annoyed her, like all little brothers annoy their sisters, but she never yelled at me, screamed at me, or made me afraid of her. In one of my most shameful moments, I wrestled Lindsay to the ground for reasons I don’t remember. I was ten or eleven, which would have made her about fifteen, and though I realized then that I’d outgrown her in terms of strength, I continued to think there was nothing childlike about her. She was above it all, the “one true adult in the house,” as Papaw would say, and my first line of defense, even before Mamaw. She made dinner when she had to, did the laundry when no one else did, and rescued me from the backseat of that police cruiser. I depended on her so completely that I didn’t see Lindsay for what she was: a young girl, not yet old enough to drive a car, learning to fend for herself and her little brother at the same time. That began to change the day our family decided to give Lindsay a shot at her dreams.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "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. "It's brought so much back," I said. I went on about that summer, the horrible empty weeks which had just begun to haunt me with their apparent denial of what had come before and of the promise they had seemed to give of what was to follow. I jumped and told him about how good at drawing Dawn was: there was something sexily luxurious about the patient sittings, when the boy who had had me for real an hour before would perch across the room and stroke my outline on to paper, and I felt as if it was me who was drawing him, studying his absorbing gaze, his tongue on his lip where mine liked to be, or wetting his thumb to blur the charcoal with it. "Were you ever caught?" "I don't think we ever actually were. There were several occasions of absolutely split-second escapes, you know, when you leap into a deeply studious pose with your pubes trapped in your zip. Everyone knew we did it a lot, of course, and mocked at us out of envy, but though that wasn't a secret, the sex itself was, somehow. But it's like that, isn't it, it's amazing what you can manage, what you can fit in in the unsuspected intervals of the day." "I think I must have been a great innocent at school," said Willie, with a certain self-satisfaction. "We went out at night a lot of course. We used to meet up by the river." For an instant only I seemed to smell the damp mud and half-see the river moving in the dark, conspiratorial or perhaps indifferent.

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

  I lost my wife. I lost my reputation. I lost my—I lost my dignity.” He was speaking loudly and passionately and looked to be on the verge of tears. “I lost everything,” he continued. He calmed himself and tried to smile, but it didn’t work. He looked soberly at the camera. “It’s rough, it’s rough, man. It’s rough.” I watched worriedly while Walter crouched down close to the ground and began to sob violently. The camera stayed on him while he cried. The report switched back to me saying something abstract and philosophical, and then it was over. I was stunned. I wanted to call Walter, but I couldn’t figure out how to dial him from Sweden. I knew it was time to get back to Alabama. Introduction Higher Ground I wasn’t prepared to meet a condemned man. In 1983, I was a twenty-three-year-old student at Harvard Law School working in Georgia on an internship, eager and inexperienced and worried that I was in over my head. I had never seen the inside of a maximum-security prison—and had certainly never been to death row. When I learned that I would be visiting this prisoner alone, with no lawyer accompanying me, I tried not to let my panic show. Georgia’s death row is in a prison outside of Jackson, a remote town in a rural part of the state. I drove there by myself, heading south on I-75 from Atlanta, my heart pounding harder the closer I got. I didn’t really know anything about capital punishment and hadn’t even taken a class in criminal procedure yet. I didn’t have a basic grasp of the complex appeals process that shaped death penalty litigation, a process that would in time become as familiar to me as the back of my hand. When I signed up for this internship, I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that I would actually be meeting condemned prisoners. To be honest, I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a lawyer. As the miles ticked by on those rural roads, the more convinced I became that this man was going to be very disappointed to see me. — I studied philosophy in college and didn’t realize until my senior year that no one would pay me to philosophize when I graduated.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  “I’ve lost him, and you’re not making this any easier!” Mom had always had a temper, though, so I dismissed even this. Mom seemed bothered that anyone but her was grieving. Aunt Wee’s grief was unjustified, because Mom and Papaw had a special bond. So, too, was Mamaw’s, for she didn’t even like Papaw and chose not to live under the same roof. Lindsay and I needed to get over ourselves, for it was Mom’s father, not ours, who had just died. The first indication that our lives were about to change came one morning when I woke and strolled over to Mom’s house, where I knew Lindsay and Mom were sleeping. I went first to Lindsay’s room, but she was asleep in my room instead. I knelt beside her, woke her up, and she hugged me tightly. After a little while, she said earnestly, “We’ll get through this, J.”—that was her nickname for me—“I promise.” I still have no idea why she slept in my room that night, but I would soon learn what she promised we’d get through. A few days after the funeral, I walked onto Mamaw’s front porch, looked down the street, and saw an incredible commotion. Mom was standing in a bath towel in her front yard, screaming at the only people who truly loved her: to Matt, “You’re a fucking loser nobody”; to Lindsay, “You’re a selfish bitch, he was my dad, not yours, so stop acting like you just lost your father”; to Tammy, her unbelievably kind friend who was secretly gay, “The only reason you act like my friend is because you want to fuck me.” I ran over and begged Mom to calm down, but by then a police cruiser was already on the scene. I arrived on the front porch as a police officer grabbed Mom’s shoulders and she collapsed on the ground, struggling and kicking. Then the officer grabbed Mom and carried her to the cruiser, and she fought the whole way. There was blood on the porch, and someone said that she had tried to cut her wrists. I don’t think the officer arrested her, though I don’t know what happened. Mamaw arrived on the scene and took Lindsay and me with her. I remember thinking that if Papaw were here, he would know what to do. Papaw’s death cast light upon something that had previously lurked in the shadows. Only a kid could have missed the writing on the wall, I suppose. A year earlier, Mom had lost her job at Middletown Hospital after Rollerblading through the emergency room. At the time I saw Mom’s bizarre behavior as the consequence of her divorce from Bob. Similarly, Mamaw’s occasional references to Mom “getting loaded” seemed like random comments of a woman known for her willingness to say anything, not a diagnosis of a deteriorating reality. Not long after Mom lost her job, during my trip to California, I heard from her just once.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  The moment I learned that “half sister” had nothing to do with my affections and everything to do with the genetic nature of our relationship—that Lindsay, by virtue of having a different father, was just as much my half sister as people I’d never seen—remains one of the most devastating moments of my life. Mamaw told me this nonchalantly as I exited the shower one night before bedtime, and I screamed and wailed as if I’d just learned that my dog had died. I calmed down only after Mamaw relented and agreed that henceforth no one would ever refer to Lindsay as my “half sister” again. Lindsay Leigh was five years older than I was, born just two months after Mom graduated from high school. I was obsessed with her, both in the way that all children adore their older siblings and in a way that was unique to our circumstances. Her heroism on my behalf was the stuff of legend. One time after she and I argued over a soft pretzel, leading Mom to drop me off in an empty parking lot to show Lindsay what life without me would look like, it was my sister’s fit of sorrow and rage that brought Mom back immediately. During explosive fights between Mom and whatever man she let into our home, it was Lindsay who withdrew to her bedroom to place a rescue call to Mamaw and Papaw. She fed me when I was hungry, changed my diaper when no one else did, and dragged me everywhere with her—even though, Mamaw and Aunt Wee told me, I weighed nearly as much as she did. I always saw her as more adult than child. She never expressed her displeasure at her teenage boyfriends by storming off and slamming doors. When Mom worked late nights or otherwise didn’t make it home, Lindsay ensured that we had something for dinner. I annoyed her, like all little brothers annoy their sisters, but she never yelled at me, screamed at me, or made me afraid of her. In one of my most shameful moments, I wrestled Lindsay to the ground for reasons I don’t remember. I was ten or eleven, which would have made her about fifteen, and though I realized then that I’d outgrown her in terms of strength, I continued to think there was nothing childlike about her. She was above it all, the “one true adult in the house,” as Papaw would say, and my first line of defense, even before Mamaw. She made dinner when she had to, did the laundry when no one else did, and rescued me from the backseat of that police cruiser. I depended on her so completely that I didn’t see Lindsay for what she was: a young girl, not yet old enough to drive a car, learning to fend for herself and her little brother at the same time. That began to change the day our family decided to give Lindsay a shot at her dreams.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I insisted; I made absolute demand; I employed every means to try to draw his pity, or to corrupt him; he will be the last man whom I shall have implored. Finally won over, he promised me to go and seek the dose of poison. I awaited him in vain until evening. Late in the night I learned with horror that he had just been found dead in his laboratory, with a glass phial in his hands. That heart clean of all compromise had found this means of abiding by his oath while denying me nothing. The next day Antoninus was announced; this true friend could barely hold back his tears. The idea that a man whom he had come to love and to venerate as a father suffered enough to seek out death was to him insupportable; it seemed to him that he must have failed in his obligations as a good son. He promised me to add his efforts to those of my entourage in order to nurse me and relieve my pain, to make my life smooth and easy to the last, even to cure me perhaps. He depended upon me to continue the longest time possible in guiding and instructing him; he felt himself responsible towards the whole empire for the remainder of my days. I know what these pathetic protestations and naïve promises are worth; nevertheless I derive some relief and comfort from them. Antoninus' simple words have convinced me; I am regaining possession of myself before I die. The death of Iollas, faithful to his duty as physician, exhorts me to conform, to the end, to the proprieties of my profession as emperor. Patientia: yesterday I saw Domitius Rogatus, now become procurator of the mint and entrusted with a new issue of coins; I have chosen for it this legend, which will be my last watchword. My death had seemed to me the most personal of my decisions, my supreme redoubt as a free man; I was mistaken. The faith of millions of Mastors must not be shaken, nor other Iollases put to so sore a trial. I have realized that suicide would appear to signify indifference, or ingratitude perhaps, to the little group of devoted friends who surround me; I do not wish to bequeath to them the hideous picture of a man racked by pain who cannot endure one torture more.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Once it had been an incongruous interruption of my father's practising. But later, when nobody else much came, the words Mirabelle and doorbell became almost synonymous with each other. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, looking at Gray's "Elegy" in The Golden Treasury: I was amazed to find how little of it I remembered. I didn't see it as especially appropriate for my dead friend, who blushed, but not unseen, and wasted none of his sweetness. I thought she must just like its tone of maxim-studded consolation. "It's the end," she said, and pointed to the verse beginning "One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill". Then the bell ding-donged. "Ten fifty-five," she said, with irony but no resentment. Mirabelle was sixty-four now, a year older than my mother; but whereas my mother never aged in my eyes, and remained at an ideal forty of competence and prettiness, her friend struck me, after a couple of months' absence, as abruptly an old woman. The hugeness had become wheeziness and powdered underchins, and the odd compromise of her marriage, it turned out, was under unexpected strain. At first she was all cheer, subsiding on to a startled kitchen chair, and examining me closely. "It's lovely to see you, darling, but he's looking a bit pale, a bit black under the eyes, isn't he, Peg? I expect it's the late nights out there." "I think he has lost weight," my mother answered obliquely. "I expect you've got one of those lovely Dutch boys, haven't you, with blond hair, grey eyes— very friendly." "I'm not actually in Holland," I said, shying away from the complicated truth. "He's here for the funeral—you know . . . " said my mother. "Darling, it's too unbearable. Poor you, poor them, oh dear . . . You know Willie's had a third, a little boy: they couldn't decide what to call the little chap, they've just called him Number Three or something silly like Marmaduke, which I thought was in danger of sticking. Anyway, now they're going to name him in memory of your friend." "What, Dawn . . . ? I'm not sure that's . . ." "No, Ralph, silly." "I think Ralph Turlough would be a very good name," I said, though feeling that Willie had somehow managed to miss the point. "I'm sure they'd love to see you." She hesitated, and took the coffee my mother was passing her. "I've been taking refuge there myself, of late. Well, I can help with the baby." And then the story came out—how Geoffrey, within weeks of his recent retirement, had gone into a resolute depression, had claimed that their life together was pointless, that he had never loved her, never even liked her much, and that he knew all about her affairs with numerous other men, including, one rather gathered, my own father. "And I never!" she said, in Dandy Nichols cockney.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  She then broke and went in through a window, unlocked and opened the door, and tended to her father. By then he had been dead for nearly a day. Mom and Mamaw sobbed uncontrollably as we waited for an ambulance. I tried to hug Mamaw, but she was beside herself and unresponsive even to me. When she stopped crying, she clutched me to her chest and told me to go say goodbye before they took his body away. I tried, but the medical technician kneeling beside him gazed at me as if she thought I was creepy for wanting to look at a dead body. I didn’t tell her the real reason I had walked back to my slouching Papaw. After the ambulance took Papaw’s body away, we drove immediately to Aunt Wee’s house. I guessed Mom had called her, because she descended from her porch with tears in her eyes. We all hugged her before squeezing into the car and heading back to Mamaw’s. The adults gave me the unenviable task of tracking down Lindsay and giving her the news. This was before cell phones, and Lindsay, being a seventeen-year-old, was difficult to reach. She wasn’t answering the house phone, and none of her friends answered my calls. Mamaw’s house sat literally five houses away from Mom’s—313 McKinley to 303—so I listened to the adults make plans and watched out the window for signs of my sister’s return. The adults spoke about funeral arrangements, where Papaw would want to be buried—“In Jackson, goddammit,” Mamaw insisted—and who would call Uncle Jimmy and tell him to come home. Lindsay returned home shortly before midnight. I trudged down the street and opened our door. She was walking down the stairs but stopped cold when she saw my face, red and blotchy from crying all day. “Papaw,” I blurted out. “He’s dead.” Lindsay collapsed on the stairs, and I ran up and embraced her. We sat there for a few minutes, crying as two children do when they find out that the most important man in their lives has died. Lindsay said something then, and though I don’t remember the exact phrase, I do remember that Papaw had just done some work on her car, and she was muttering something through the tears about taking advantage of him. Lindsay was a teenager when Papaw died, at the height of that weird mixture of thinking you know everything and caring too much about how others perceive you. Papaw was many things, but he was never cool. He wore the same old T-shirt every day with a front pocket just big enough to fit a pack of cigarettes. He always smelled of mildew, because he washed his clothes but let them dry “naturally,” meaning packed together in a washing machine. A lifetime of smoking had blessed him with an unlimited supply of phlegm, and he had no problem sharing that phlegm with everyone, no matter the time or occasion.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  This man, so nobly parsimonious for his personal needs, was now seized by a passion for expenditure. Barbarian gold raised from the bed of the Danube, the five hundred thousand ingots of King Decebalus, had sufficed to defray the cost of a public bounty and donations to the army (of which I had had my part), as well as the wild luxury of the games and initial outlays for the tremendous venture in Asia. These baneful riches falsified the true state of the finances. The fruits of war were food for new wars. Licinius Sura died at about that time. He was the most liberal of the emperor's private counselors, so his death was a battle lost for our side. He had always been like a father in his solicitude for me; for some years illness had left him too little strength to fulfill any of his personal ambitions, but he had always enough energy to aid a man whose views appeared to him sane. The conquest of Arabia had been undertaken against his advice; he alone, had he lived, would have been able to save the State the gigantic strain and expense of the Parthian campaign. Ridden by fever, he employed his hours of insomnia in discussing with me plans for reform; they exhausted him, but their success was more important to him than a few more hours of life. At his bedside I lived in advance, and to the last administrative detail, certain of the future phases of my reign. This dying man spared the emperor in his criticisms, but he knew that he was carrying with him to the tomb what reason was left in the regime. Had he lived two or three years longer, I could perhaps have avoided some tortuous devices which marked my accession to power; he would have succeeded in persuading the emperor to adopt me sooner, and openly. But even so the last words of that statesman in bequeathing his task to me were one part of my imperial investiture. If the group of my followers was increasing, so was that of my enemies. The most dangerous of my adversaries was Lusius Quietus, a Roman with some Arab blood, whose Numidian squadrons had played an important part in the second Dacian campaign, and who was pressing fiercely for the Asiatic war. I detested everything about him, his barbarous luxury, the pretentious swirl of his white headgear bound with cord of gold, his false, arrogant eyes, and his unbelievable cruelty toward the conquered and to those who had offered their submission.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  As they sat and discussed things, Papaw buried his head in his hands and did something Uncle Jimmy had never seen him do: He wept. “I’ve failed her,” he cried. He kept on repeating, “I’ve failed her; I’ve failed her; I’ve failed my baby girl.” Papaw’s rare breakdown strikes at the heart of an important question for hillbillies like me: How much of our lives, good and bad, should we credit to our personal decisions, and how much is just the inheritance of our culture, our families, and our parents who have failed their children? How much is Mom’s life her own fault? Where does blame stop and sympathy begin? All of us have opinions. Uncle Jimmy reacts viscerally to the idea that any of the blame for Mom’s choices can be laid at Papaw’s feet. “He didn’t fail her. Whatever happened to her, it’s her own damned fault.” Aunt Wee sees things in much the same way, and who can blame her? Just nineteen months younger than Mom, she saw the worst of Mamaw and Papaw and made her own share of mistakes before coming out on the other side. If she can do it, then so should Mom. Lindsay has a bit more sympathy and thinks that just as our lives left us with demons, Mom’s life must have done the same to her. But at some point, Lindsay says, you have to stop making excuses and take responsibility. My own view is mixed. Whatever might be said about my mom’s parents’ roles in my life, their constant fighting and alcoholism must have taken its toll on her. Even when they were children, the fighting seemed to affect my aunt and mother differently. While Aunt Wee would plead with her parents to calm down, or provoke her father in order to take the heat off her mother, Mom would hide, or run away, or collapse on the floor with her hands over her ears. She didn’t handle it as well as her brother and sister. In some ways, Mom is the Vance child who lost the game of statistics. If anything, my family is probably lucky that only one of them lost that game. What I do know is that Mom is no villain. She loves Lindsay and me. She tried desperately to be a good mother. Sometimes she succeeded; sometimes she didn’t. She tried to find happiness in love and work, but she listened too much to the wrong voice in her head. But Mom deserves much of the blame. No person’s childhood gives him or her a perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card—not Lindsay, not Aunt Wee, not me, and not Mom. Throughout my life, no one could inspire such intense emotions as my mom, not even Mamaw. When I was a kid, I loved her so much that when a kindergarten classmate made fun of her umbrella, I punched him in the face.