LETTERS OF CONDOLENCE.
Probably no branch of the epistolary art has ever given to
friendly hearts so much perplexity as that which has to do with
writing to friends in affliction. It is delightful to sit down and
wish anybody joy; to overflow with congratulatory phrases over a
favorable bit of news; to say how glad you are that your friend is
engaged or married, or has inherited a fortune, has written a
successful book, or has painted an immortal picture. Joy opens the
closet of language, and the gems of expression are easily found;
but the fountain of feeling being chilled by the uncongenial
atmosphere of grief, by the sudden horror of death, or the more
terrible breath of dishonor or shame, or even by the cold blast of
undeserved misfortune, leaves the individual sympathizer in a mood
of perplexity and of sadness which is of itself a most
discouraging frame of mind for the inditing of a letter.
And yet we sympathize with our friend: we desire to tell him so.
We want to say, "My friend, your grief is my grief; nothing can
hurt you that does not hurt me. I cannot, of course, enter into
all your feelings, but to stand by and see you hurt, and remain
unmoved myself, is impossible." All this we wish to say; but how
shall we say it that our words may not hurt him a great deal more
than he is hurt already? How shall we lay our hand so tenderly on
that sore spot that we may not inflict a fresh wound? How can we
say to a mother who bends over a fresh grave, that we regret the
loss she has sustained in the death of her child? Can language
measure the depth, the height, the immensity, the bitterness of
that grief? What shall we say that is not trite and
commonplace--even unfeeling? Shall we be pagan, and say that "whom
the gods love die young," or Christian, and remark that "God does
not willingly afflict the children of men?" She has thought of
that, she has heard it, alas! often before--but too often, as she
thinks now.
Shall we tell her what she has lost--how good, how loving, how
brave, how admirable was the spirit which has just left the flesh?
Alas! how well she knows that! How her tears well up as she
remembers the silent fortitude, the heroic patience under the pain
that was to kill! Shall we quote ancient philosophers and modern
poets? They have all dwelt at greater or less length upon death
and the grave. Or shall we say, in simple and unpremeditated
words, the thoughts which fill our own minds?
The person who has to write this letter may be a ready writer, who
finds fit expression at the point of his pen, and who overflows
with the language of consolation--such a one needs no advice; but
to the hundreds who do need help we would say that the simplest
expressions are the best. A distant friend, upon one of these
occasions, wrote a letter as brief as brief might be, but of its
kind altogether perfect. It ran thus: "I have heard of your great
grief, and I send you a simple pressure of the hand." Coming from
a gay and volatile person, it had for the mourner great
consolation; pious quotations, and even the commonplaces of
condolence, would have seemed forced. Undoubtedly those persons do
us great good, or they wish to, who tell us to be resigned--that
we have deserved this affliction; that we suffer now, but that our
present sufferings are nothing to what our future sufferings shall
be; that we are only entering the portals of agony, and that every
day will reveal to us the magnitude of our loss. Such is the
formula which certain persons use, under the title of "letters of
condolence." It is the wine mixed with gall which they gave our
Lord to drink; and as He refused it, so may we. There are, no
doubt, persons of a gloomy and a religious temperament combined
who delight in such phrases; who quote the least consolatory of
the texts of Scripture; who roll our grief as a sweet morsel under
their tongues; who really envy the position of chief mourner as
one of great dignity and considerable consequence; who consider
crape and bombazine as a sort of royal mantle conferring
distinction. There are many such people in the world. Dickens and
Anthony Trollope have put them into novels--solemn and ridiculous
Malvolios; they exist in nature, in literature, and in art. It
adds a new terror to death when we reflect that such persons will
not fail to make it the occasion of letter-writing.
But those who write to us strongly and cheerfully, who do not
dwell so much on our grief as on our remaining duties--they are
the people who help us. To advise a mourner to go out into the
sun, to resume his work, to help the poor, and, above all, to
carry on the efforts, to emulate the virtues of the deceased--this
is comfort. It is a very dear and consoling thing to a bereaved
friend to hear the excellence of the departed extolled, to read
and re-read all of the precious testimony which is borne by
outsiders to the saintly life ended--and there are few so
hard-hearted as not to find something good to say of the dead: it
is the impulse of human nature; it underlies all our philosophy
and our religion; it is the "stretching out of a hand," and it
comforts the afflicted. But what shall we say to those on whom
disgrace has laid its heavy, defiling hand? Is it well to write to
them at all? Shall we not be mistaken for those who prowl like
jackals round a grave, and will not our motives be misunderstood?
Is not sympathy sometimes malice in disguise? Does not the phrase
"I am so sorry for you!" sometimes sound like "I am so glad for
myself?" Undoubtedly it does; but a sincere friend should not be
restrained, through fear that his motive may be mistaken, from
saying that he wishes to bear some part of the burden. Let him
show that the unhappy man is in his thoughts, that he would like
to help, that he would be glad to see him, or take him out, or
send him a book, or at least write him a letter. Such a wish as
this will hurt no one.
Philosophy--some quaint and dry bit of old Seneca, or modern
Rochefoucauld--has often helped a struggling heart when disgrace,
deserved or undeserved, has placed the soul in gyves of iron.
Sympathetic persons, of narrow minds and imperfect education,
often have the gift of being able to say most consolatory things.
Irish servants, for instance, rarely hurt the feelings of a
mourner. They burst out in the language of Nature, and, if it is
sometimes grotesque, it is almost always comforting. It is the
educated and conscientious person who finds the writing of a
letter of condolence difficult.
Perhaps much of our dread of death is the result of a false
education, and the wearing of black may after all be a mistake. At
the moment when we need bright colors, fresh flowers, sunshine,
and beauty, we hide ourselves behind crape veils and make our
garments heavy with ashes; but as it is conventional it is in one
way a protection, and is therefore proper. No one feels like
varying the expressions of a grief which has the Anglo-Saxon
seriousness in it, the Scandinavian melancholy of a people from
whom Nature hides herself behind a curtain of night. To the sunny
and graceful Greek the road of the dead was the Via Felice; it was
the happy way, the gate of flowers; the tombs were furnished as
the houses were, with images of the beloved, and the veriest
trifles which the deceased had loved. One wonders, as the tomb of
a child is opened on the road out of Tanagra, near Athens, and the
toys and hobby-horse and little shoes are found therein, if, after
all, that father and mother were not wiser than we who, like
Constance, "stuff out his vacant garments with his form." Is there
not something quite unenlightened in the persistence with which we
connect death with gloom?
Our correspondents often ask us when a letter of condolence should
be written? As soon as possible. Do not be afraid to intrude on
any grief, It is generally a welcome distraction; to even the most
morbid mourner, to read a letter; and those who are So stunned by
grief as not to be able to write or to read will always have some
willing soul near them who will read and answer for them.
The afflicted, however, should never be expected to answer
letters, They can and should receive the kindest and the most
prompt that their friends can indite, Often a phrase on which the
writer has built no hope may be the airy-bridge over which the
sorrowing soul returns slowly and blindly to peace and
resignation. Who would miss the chance, be it one in ten thousand,
of building such a bridge? Those who have suffered and been
strong, those whom we love and respect, those who have the honest
faith in human nature which enables them to read aright the riddle
of this strange world, those who by faith walk over burning
ploughshares and dread no evil, those are the people who write the
best letters of condolence. They do not dwell on our grief, or
exaggerate it, although they are evidently writing to us with a
lump in the throat and a tear in the eye--they do not say so, but
we feel it. They tell us of the certain influence of time, which
will change our present grief into our future joy. They say a few
beautiful words of the friend whom we have lost, recount their own
loss in him in a few fitting words of earnest sympathy which may
carry consolation, if only by the wish of the writer. They beg of
us to be patient. God has brought life and immortality to light
through death, and to those whom "he has thought worthy to
endure," this thought may ever form the basis of a letter of
condolence.
"Give me," said the dying Herder, "a great thought, that I may
console myself with that." It is a present of no mean value, a
great thought; and if every letter of condolence could bear with
it one broad phrase of honest sympathy it would be a blessed
instrumentality for carrying patience and resignation, peace and
comfort, into those dark places where the sufferer is eating his
heart out with grief, or where Rachel "weeps for her children, and
will not be comforted, because they are not."