On the Nature of Grief
Why the books? Why the babies? Why the essays? Why so many, why so fast? What’s the rush? Where’s the fire? Jane is the how, the why, the rush, and the fire. She never got to do any of the things we both wanted. Only I did.
It is rare joy to come across a personal essay that is both emotionally charged and pointedly candid. Jill Lepore, in this poignant piece, reflects on her relationship with her best friend Jane Franklin, upon her reopening and exploring the laptop Jane left for her in her will twenty years ago. Lepore details the beginnings of the friendship, the ad they put together for the paper (‘seeking similar, for friendship’), and their usage of the phrase “good egg.” Through present-day findings on Jane’s laptop, Lepore traces Jane’s struggles with depression, her inability to write, and eventual battle with and departure to leukemia – crafting a portrait of the two women that echoes of both authenticity but also a deep, resounding sense of love.
It is a testament to Lepore’s courage to write in such a way that leaves her completely vulnerable to her audience; we are, in many ways, reliving her all her years with Jane, this time with the wisdom of time and the certainty of loss. More importantly, we follow Lepore’s experience of perusing Jane’s laptop utterly unimpeded, as if a bird perched upon her shoulder; we encounter bits and pieces off Janes’s Macintosh as Lepore finds them and dive back into the past right along with her. Indeed, the magic of this piece rests in Lepore’s ability to weave such a living, breathing, intimate portrait of her friend; reading the piece, I found myself stitching together many facets of Jane Franklin, and — slowly but surely — falling in love with her all the while.
She was the sort of person who could draw anyone out, talk about anything, and forgive everything except pretension and pettiness. She was almost immoderately charming; she was irresistible. Go to a restaurant with her, and in five minutes she’d find out where the waitress had gone to high school. Go again, and she’d remember the name of that high school, and would pick up the conversation exactly where it had left off. Stop to get your dry cleaning with her only to discover that she knew the names of all the dry cleaner’s children and the titles of their favorite picture books, and that she’d brought along another book, as a gift.
“Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”
Obituaries are a delicate art; to boil down the essence of a living, breathing human being, with all the quirks and contradictions, beliefs and mannerisms, is an arduous task with little probability of anything nearing success. The few remembrances that are lauded are often singled out for their wit, humor, prose, or particular keenness of insight. What few manage to do is to capture the fullness, the indescribably flesh-and-blood hereness of a person. James and Sarah Bloom Raskin, in chronicling the 25 years of their son life, are able to produce an obituary of Thomas Bloom Raskin that is more heart than language; it somehow manages to convey – if only for a moment – the ineffable richness of a human life.
Love is threaded through and around every inch of the Raskins’ statement, leaving one to marvel how they managed to create any coherent sentences, much less a beautiful piece of prose, so steeped in devotion the piece is. If one needed a crash course on what human love was – say, if aliens were to land along the Chilean coastline – it would not be remiss to hand them the 1,769 words that these bereaved yet proud parents put out in to the world.
Tommy Lee Raskin’s obituary does one thing beyond sketching a rich portrait of a human life – it embodies hope. In Tommy’s search for justice, from Sunday school to Law school, his devotion to animal suffering, his abhorrence of cliques, and even in his battle with the disease that eventually claimed his life – the Raskins trace a constellation of hope. And so I leave you a glimpse of the grace that Tommy Raskin embodied, which even death could not diminish:
He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip, stopping all such gossipers with a trademark Tommy line — ‘forgive me, but it’s hard to be a human.’
