Quando la commedia è finnita, or How to Forward Mail

Grief is exhausting. That is one of its few mercies.

It's probably inescapable that I've been thinking a lot about death these days. A very talented clown friend died unexpectedly in January, and my grandma died the night of Valentine's Day.

Grandma did a lovely thing this winter, as she knew her life was coming to an end. She sent letters she had saved back to the people who had originally sent them to her. So sometime around Thanksgiving I got a letter from my thirteen-year-old self. The handwriting was recognizably mine, even though it was also recognizably younger. More poignant for me was discovering that that writer's relationship to language was also recognizably mine, that the love affair had begun that long ago.

And the letter itself is exuberant. I remember that year--one of the worst in an adolescence that even those who love me describe as difficult--as being almost unremittingly awful. But there it was: written proof that I still knew joy, that I wasn't so far gone that I couldn't occasionally tell other people I loved them.

So in sending me the letter, Grandma somehow managed to give me a slightly better version of myself. Which, of course, is what she'd been doing for me as long as I'd known her.

It wasn't her idea. When she was much younger, she received an old letter of hers from an older relative who was near the end of her life. I don't know whether to wish to be able to prepare for my own death. Maybe it's better for it to be sudden and quick and unexpected. (For the dying. Not so much for the ones they leave behind: Ottavio's death was proof of that.) But if I do wind up being able to prepare, I'll be sending some letters.