Mourning



Mourning is the repetition of what we do not have. But it is not just a yearning for what will never again make itself present: what distinguishes mourning from what Freud and his time called melancholia is that mourning affirms-or learns to affirm-this absence. On a thin thread of words, mourning calls up what was perhaps never there to begin with, and brings it into being. And that means that mourning is at the heart of so much we most value, and its continuing claim on us. The late Jacques Derrida catalogues many of these in the course of his work: friendship, justice, the debt and the gift, inheritance, responsibility, hospitality, tradition; literature, and the arts in general. In that mourning is inseparable from speculation in all senses of the word, its hospitality to the new is also at the heart of the scattered and various disciplines that make up the humanities.

From the e-mailed publicity for "Mourning and its Hospitalities," a conference at University of Queensland, 18-20 July 2007.

Woke up after a few hours’ sleep and realised it was still true. Girls phoned to say they are coming to get me, but I am not fit to face anyone. Thousands of letters. I know these people are actually hurting, but oh God what I’m feeling is beyond comfort. Nothing helps. Especially that ‘Death is nothing at all’ bollocks. Oh really? And no, he isn’t in the sodding next room. The thoughtful strangers say it will help me but it makes me roar with rage. OK, you say I’ll meet him again. Prove it. I would like to believe it, God I would like to. If I thought it was true I’d kill myself and meet him now. I have absolutely no sense of his presence. He is utterly gone and I can’t bear it.

Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 173.

Philip Larkin on the death of a hedgehog:

Next morning I got up and it did not
The first day after death, a new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us, (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 297.


Time does not bring relief; you have all lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountainside,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,— so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Edna St Vincent Millay

Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us, (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 252.

A prayer from somebody just before the outbreak of the 1st world war, used at the funeral of the theologian John Taylor.

To have given me self-consciousness for an hour in a world so breathless for beauty would have been enough. But Thou has preserved it within me for twenty years and more, and has crowned it with the joy of this summer of summers. And so, come what may, whether life or death, and, if death, whether bliss unimaginable or nothingness, I thank thee and bless thy name.

Sheila Hancock, The Two of Us, (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 271.