In second grade, we learned that Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, had died of milk sickness when he was very young.
I grieved for her. She was dead–would have been dead anyway, it being more than 100 years past that original death when I found out. I felt sorry for Abe, with a step-mother and all (being naive and only 7 I didn’t realize that stance might be prejudiced, hadn’t considered that fairy tales give step-moms a bad rap–probably undeserved.) Anyway, I didn’t analyze the feeling: I was sad. I didn’t want Abraham Lincoln’s mother to have died so young.
Later, I learned that in a billion years the sun will explode–and that made me sad as well. A grade school friend (other people have always been smarter about this than I) pointed out that I would be long dead by then. I was pretty good with numbers, I knew a billion was a big number and meant a long, long time. But I was sad for awhile.
Just now I read that Nicholas Hughes, age 47, son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes–the world’s champion survivor–killed himself in Alaska just weeks ago. He and his still living sister Frieda live in my memory as the two dead babies coiled at the dead mother’s breast in one of the Ariel poems. We all grieved for Sylvia and for Anne–Sexton. I grieved as well for John Berryman, whose verse I loved and whose wry spirit sparkled in my mind’s eye. I’m glad I never met him. Rumor has it he came to our college campus once so drunk he puked in the car on the way to the airport.
Get close to the dead and you’re done for.
I never grieved for Robert Lowell–who knows why?
Linda Sexton wrote a lovely reflection on Nicholas and the legacy of suicide. Parents who kill themselves leave an awful wreckage. I don’t have to comment on that; it’s quite well known. Berryman’s father killed himself when John was 10. Nicholas and Frieda lost their’s before they were three. Did they remember her at all?
Maybe Nicholas’ life was a triumph of sorts–he outlived Sylvia by 15 years. His father died some years ago–naturally, so at least his son spared him that terrible grinding guilt of thinking having been convicted by many of driving the mother to death he might, thus, be guilty also of his son’s.
So I’m sad. Sad as I only get over people I’ve never met.
Nicholas, as I learned about your mother–as I learned about Abe Lincoln’s mother–you became to me a tiny, indeterminate presence outside the kitchen on a cold morning in London. And she was vivid, blond, desperate, half psychotic and dead in an open gas stove like the one I grew up with. She had fallen asleep and left a legacy I admired more than any I can think of–not you, but three books of exceptional poetry, vivid, charged with intellect and imagination, and deathless.
So I wondered about you. And wondered. From time to time, knowing nothing until today when I opened the NYT online and found this editorial by Linda Sexton, saying how she has wanted to die by her own hand and wondering whether your sister may be OK. And I guess you were for awhile–a longish while. I trust there was some happiness, some love.
And so here I sit with little tears in my aging, well adjusted, half-decent poet’s eyes. I still miss Nancy Hank and John Berryman, wish they’d gone on–to see their children succeed, to celebrate the way life is supposed to succeed life and descent into death as a kind eventuality, not sought, not speeded up, expected, deferred, deflected and finally, inevitable and accepted. And I wish that for Nicholas, as well, who left his research and colleagues who liked and admired him.
Now he’s dead like Nancy and John, as the sun will be one day. And you and I. No doubt that’s the source of the sadness. At age 7 you can be sad and hopeful both. At 57 it’s harder–the dead seem deader and farther away. Especially those we only know as words.
