Letters of Note: Grief
Four centuries of letters written in the face of loss, resisting consolation-by-formula and gathering the strange, furious, tender things people actually write when someone dies.
Letters written in the face of loss, from the famous and the entirely unknown, across four centuries. Usher’s selection resists consolation-by-formula, gathering instead the strange, furious and tender things people actually write when someone has died. Some console, some rage, some simply report the weather; the effect of reading them together is to make grief look less like a single emotion than a whole vocabulary.
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Maria Popova
Upon receiving the news, the thirty-five-year-old writer sent his friends an extraordinary letter, part consolation for and part consecration of a loss for which there is no salve, found in Shaun Usher’s moving compilation Letters of Note: Grief (public library).
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