Along with the myriad of losses, from door keys to the love of one's life, there is none more unimaginable, more mysterious in its unnatural violation of life and time, than the loss of a parent to a child.
Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was twenty years old and living in France when he befriended Gerald and Sara Murphy. The couple eventually returned to America when one of their sons fell ill, but it was their other son, Baoth, who died after contracting meningitis.
When he received this news, this thirty-five-year-old writer sent his friends an extraordinary letter, part of consolation and part of offering for the loss that has no cure, found in the moving book of Shaun Usher. Letters of Commentary: Grief (public library).
On March 19, 1935, Hemingway writes:
Dear Sarah and Gerald:
You know that there is nothing we can ever say or write… Yesterday I tried to write to you but I failed.
It's not so bad for Baoth because he had a good time, always, and he did something now that we all have to do. You're just finishing…
About him dying young – Remember you had a great time and having it a thousand times doesn't make it any better. And he can't learn what the world is like.
Corner yours loss: more than his own, so it's something you can, legitimately, be brave about. But I can't be brave about it and with all my heart I'm sick for you both.
However, honestly and coldly, I know that anyone who dies young after a happy childhood, and no one has ever made a more happy childhood than you did for your own children, has won a great victory. We must all look forward to death in defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed; but the same death that we have to do, when he has finished everything, his whole world is complete with only accidental death.
With a wonderful feeling that evokes Anaïs Nin's admonition against intimate selfishness, and the poet Meghan O'Rourke's deep faith that “the people we love the most become part of us in the flesh, embedded in our synapses, in the ways in which memories are created,” adds Hemingway:
Very few people ever really live and those who never die; even if they are gone. No one you love has ever died.
In this, echoing Auden's insistence that “we must love one another or die,” he comes the closest he has ever come to sorting out the meaning of life. Like David Foster Wallace, who spoke about the meaning of life so clearly just before he died of depression, Hemingway too would not grasp that meaning because of the pain that would take his life four centuries later. Now, from the place of the first fortune of life, he writes:
We must live, now, one day at a time and be very careful not to hurt anyone. It seems that we are all in a boat together, a good boat, which we have made but which we know will not reach the harbor. There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad, and especially now that we know there will be no fall we have to keep the boat very high and be very good to each other. We are lucky to have good people on board.
Fill young Dostoyevsky's joy about the meaning of life just after his death sentence was revoked, Emily Dickinson in love and loss, Thoreau in living with loss, and Nick Cave – who lived, twice, the unimaginable grief of Murphys – in grief as a portal to life, then he looked at your heart in healing and in your life.
