My oldest friend died ten months ago, and I’ve been writing about her ever since: Facebook posts, her obituary, a list of things I wish I could tell her in my Notes app (created four days after she died, when I desperately wished we could gossip about her pre-cremation memorial), a google doc called
That song! Thank you for writing this and all of your other Corinna writing. It's helped me process some jagged friend grief I didn't realize I was still carrying.
Of course I relate this to Abby, which still feels like an intensely private loss since all these new people I meet have no idea she's missing. Her husband just remarried last year and I have a lot of incoherent feelings about that (like how Abby would high five him because he got himself a fox, and how I'm jealous he could just up and find a new person to stand where she was standing even though I know that's now how it is for him). But it's making me nauseous to write about this here and I have things to do so that is all!
As you say, it is so characteristic of the elegy that the lost friend somehow disappears in it. Because that’s the poet’s problem, right, that the friend has disappeared and they are still here—we are still here—figuring out how to deal. This is so lovely. Thanks.
That song! Thank you for writing this and all of your other Corinna writing. It's helped me process some jagged friend grief I didn't realize I was still carrying.
Of course I relate this to Abby, which still feels like an intensely private loss since all these new people I meet have no idea she's missing. Her husband just remarried last year and I have a lot of incoherent feelings about that (like how Abby would high five him because he got himself a fox, and how I'm jealous he could just up and find a new person to stand where she was standing even though I know that's now how it is for him). But it's making me nauseous to write about this here and I have things to do so that is all!
As you say, it is so characteristic of the elegy that the lost friend somehow disappears in it. Because that’s the poet’s problem, right, that the friend has disappeared and they are still here—we are still here—figuring out how to deal. This is so lovely. Thanks.
I assume you know W.S. Merwin’s tiny poem, “Elegy”?
I don't. Oh my. Thank you.