Monday, August 29, 2011

How do we hear this and live?

Excerpt from A Broken Heart Still Beats; after your child dies.  It is a collection of grief anthologies. These two quotes are by Mark Twain.  The first is from The Autobiography of Mark Twain, after the death of his daughter Susy, 24 years old.  The second is from The Death of Jean, thirteen years later when his daughter Jean died at 29.

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.  There is but one reasonable explanation of it.  The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words.  The power to realize their full import is mercifully wanting.  The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss-that is all.  It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.

About three in the morning, while wandering about the house in the deep silences, as one does in times like these, when there is a dumb sense that something has been lost that will never be found again, yet must be sought, if only for the employment the useless seeking gives, I came upon Jean's dog in the hall down-stairs, and noted that he did not spring to greet me, according to his hospitable habit, but came slow and sorrowfully.  Poor fellow, did he know?  I think so....  They told me that the first mourner to come was the dog.  He came uninvited, and stood up on his hind legs and rested his fore paws upon the trestle, and took a last long look at the face that was so dear to him, then went his way as silently as he had come.  He knows.

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