A Friend

A friend died very recently. I don't yet know what day. I came back earlier this week, late on a rainy and utterly black night to find a terrible message waiting for me. The next morning I drove into a rising and reaching fog. It had been cold overnight. The rain and humidity from the previous night had frozen not in sheets or crusts on the ground but as heavy frost, a strange, almost supernatural, turn in the weather. In the morning, a thick, misty fog, made from the previous night's rain, went up in tendrils, into cold but warming air and a bright sky, into the blue sky of morning after a storm in the night.

I hesitate to write about her here, but the world must know what has happened. I know nothing yet except that she is gone, nothing outside of what a couple of friends have told me. I hadn't seen my friend in a long time, but that was okay. Just knowing that she was in the world was enough. Even if I had never seen her again, knowing that she was still with us would have been enough. I won't name her. This isn't the place for that. I don't want to sully her with this association. After all, the word weird is in the title of my blog (even if I have tried to show that weird is a concept that predates and rises above the level of most weird fiction and science fiction). She came from something higher and finer. The Internet is a lowly and shabby place. It's mostly garbage. And yet here I am still writing about her. I guess I'm trying to make this shabby place into something better. I hope that remembering her will help raise it up.

My friend was a wonderful person. She had a bright and positive personality. The world was a better and happier place with her in it. Now she is gone, taken from us, and it has been diminished. The hole that's left is not just the size and shape of her. It's much bigger than that. And pieces keep falling away, like how a bank is cut and undermined by a fast-flowing river. I feel like something has been taken from inside of me, too. I don't know whether more pieces will go, or if this will end and the cuts will soften and smooth over.

She was a professor of English literature. She specialized in British literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially literature by women and about women, feminism, women's rights, and women's suffrage. She taught us one book about a woman and another by a woman. In her own book she wrote about Joseph Conrad. Recently I wrote about Conrad, too. If I can find a copy of her book, I can see what she wrote about him and about other authors of his time. In a photograph of her, taken in her office, there are books by Conrad on the shelf behind her. I always liked to hear about her research. She traveled to England before the coronavirus, there to look for primary sources. To me it sounded like an adventure. The last time I talked to her was under a great dome.

My friend loved and was excited by literature. It's rare to find someone who loves what you love and cares about what you care about. When you find her, you discover a kindred spirit. Weird fiction and science fiction are fine, but they are mostly just entertainments. In literature, though, there is enormous power, depth, scope, and meaning. Literature is one of our greatest creations, I think, and shows back to us so much about ourselves, our lives, our hearts and minds, the nature of our existence, our relationships with each other, our place in the universe. She saw in literature all of that and wanted others to see it, too. Her love and excitement went out around her like a cloud--a gently forceful and persuasive and inviting cloud. That's one of the reasons I say that the hole that is left in her dying is so much larger than she was in her person.

She was a good teacher. She had enough confidence in herself, in her love for and excitement about literature, most of all in her subject matter to stand in front of a group with an open book in front of her, while theirs were closed, or maybe only half open, and to lead them--to lead us--and to say to us, "Follow me." And we did. But now she's gone and I don't know what we're supposed to do. This feeling is not about the loss of her as a teacher but as a whole and wonderful person. We need her still because we love her. She has gone ahead of us, though, and we will surely all follow those whom we have lost. But maybe once again she has read the book ahead of us and she understands it, or at least she understands it better than we do, and maybe she can lead us again. And we will learn from her and follow.

Nothing that exists passes out of existence. Because she and everyone else who has left us existed, she and they exist. I am certain of that. Her body and spirit have separated from each other. Her body has gone back to the earth, which is where it came from. Her spirit has gone somewhere else, which is where it came from. We will never again see on this earth the people who have left us. But I believe we will all see each other again.

The saying is that journalism is the first draft of history. Maybe grief and sorrow are the first draft in learning how to live without someone whom you have loved--but whom you can always still love, because love, once created, cannot be destroyed. Because love is imperishable.

Terence E. Hanley, Saturday, March 29, 2025.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley