Hail and Farewell

Dear Emily,

Not yet a year into the Covid pandemic, I started teaching Jesmyn Ward’s phenomenal essay “On Witness and Respair,” about her husband’s sudden death. The essay was published in Vanity Fair in September 2020. Ward’s husband, Brandon, died in January 2020 at age 33. The essay is beautiful, heartbreaking, a stunning piece of writing. If she had written it at any point in her life, the essay would still have been quite an accomplishment as art transforming grief into language. That Ward wrote it in the months after her husband died, while still raising her children who had lost their father, and during both a world health pandemic killing millions and the eruption of protests due to the continued police murder of black men and women—and Ward is black, as was her husband, are their children—is nothing short of extraordinary.

I cannot help but think of Ward’s essay, and be humbled by it, writing now to you. You died on Monday. I am starting to write this letter to you on Wednesday morning from downtown York, about a mile from where you lived, not far from me and the campus where we worked together as professors for a decade. You died suddenly, so suddenly I never saw you sick for the brief time that you were. The last time I saw you I had expected, as we all expect in our seeing people, to see you again, soon or in the future, there was no rush then. As professors, we existed in each others lives in cycles, as semesters began, happened, ended, and then absent from one another again during breaks, then back once again, like the sun rising and setting or the ocean tide. The only break in this pattern was people quitting or retiring, which often felt accidental or error, like a stitch missed. The students all moved around us—I suppose it was they who were the sea—in and out, coming and going, arriving and graduating or leaving like water against the shore or through canyon.

Your husband texted me Monday morning how you were gone. “Emily died.” Maybe any death beyond our children, parents, our close family or our spouses, feels this way to some degree, I mean feels like something precious we haven’t sacrificed or bled for, a feeling that is a combination of your own life laid alongside their death. There is something sacred about this world we misunderstand, and I worry such misunderstanding puts us at great risk. I have not lived enough in that sacred, but it is also the only place I have ever lived. I don’t know if I have earned the right—sacrificed, bled—to write you about your own dying, and so soon, but I think the only way to be enough for anything is the doing. It feels like the tricky “reverse narration” that Alison Bechdel describes about her father’s death in Fun Home, a book I am sure we talked about more than once, as I’ve taught it near every semester I’ve been teaching. Bechdel says about her dead father that, though gone, he was there for her in the creation of her book we read, that he was there for her writing it as a thing for understanding and knowing. We don’t speak of language enough like that—not the we of you and me, writers and professors—but socially, culturally, broadly, how saying the thing connects to seeing and knowing anything. Fun Home gave Alison something about herself and her father, in a way created herself, created his fatherhood or reshaped it—and the tricky reverse narration of doing it beyond his death rather than during his life feels something like writing to you now, hoping to earn in some metaphysical and also deeply personal way prior permission from you post action, language as a kind of time travel of knowing, like it is in Ted Chiang’s incredible short story “The Story of Your Life,” where language is a technology that can actually reach across time and space to look into and exist in time past and time future. And doesn’t it?

I was telling your husband on Monday when he asked what it was like to work with you all these years about a time you told me that, though you usually had trouble working with or getting along with creative writing professors, you thought I was an exception. It made me feel good you seeing me this way, noticing and appreciating how serious I was and remain about it all, the language and the teaching. I spent our shared years mostly making pretty language or talking about pretty language in classrooms, while you, four offices away, did qualitative studies about the evangelical experience in the classroom, data analysis of social media discourse, and critically assessed pulpit rhetoric, taught the history of rhetoric and gave brief overviews of statistical analysis. All while I wrote my little poems and stories and encouraged our students to do the same. I told your husband how much that mattered to me, your kindness and observation. I couldn’t put into words what he’d asked of me that evening on the day you died, which was to talk about what it was like working alongside you all those years, so I resorted to anecdote and generality. Kind. Caring. Easy. Brilliant. Like language pointillism of my experience of you. I try to persuade my students that images can communicate more directly and quickly than abstract explanation. One afternoon, around 1pm, walking into your office where you stood by your desk, always soft lamp light on, not glaring overhead fluorescents, creek bisecting the parking lot out the window behind you, a large iced coffee alongside your MacBook, Taylor Swift playing at the volume where music remains experience not backdrop, you forever half smiling, forever half serious. I wish I could remember which song was playing. I can just hear her voice in my memory. I wish we had talked about her music more.

A friend, who I know you’d met and worked with a few times, came in while I was writing this and we talked about my writing this letter to you and my wanting to get it out to you by Friday, tomorrow then, now, today, as I continue to write, and he said he found fascinating writing and art made so close to the actual experience, though, he added, so much writing advice is to not do this, to not create art in the vacuum of the immediate, and to instead get more distance, to pause, to evaluate, as though some greater, better understanding can be found beyond some future daybreak. We take time and then it takes us. You might remember back in 2020, a month before Covid broke open, when D. Watkins told a large audience at the college how his writer friend had died before he had actually published all of the work he had been for years and years tinkering with, making perfect, and how D said he took that to heart, as a call to not wait on your saying. He told the audience to write the things now. Don’t wait.

I still taught my class the Monday you died, American literature, a class this semester where we read Fun Home and The Bell Jar and where I’ve asked the students to take writing art seriously as a thing that changes the world as much as guns and money. We’ve talked about how all books, all poems, all works of literature are at their core letters with an imagined addressed, how we are always, unavoidably writing, making, living in response to and against the lives of others, and it is the misunderstanding of writing as mere commodity, entertainment, or object that confuses the deep, essential magic of what language does to and for us. I didn’t know whether or not to cancel class that day you died, as I couldn’t quite understand, and still yet, that you had died, and then class was suddenly upon me, the morning became afternoon after hours of writing people or trying not to write people, listening to the wrong music, crying and trying not to try not to. I looked around the internet for a poem to read to the students about death, some elegy. I didn’t read any poem. I went to class and told the students they could leave if they wanted to, that they didn’t have to stay. They all stayed.

One poem I found that afternoon that stuck with me was "Catullus 101,” an elegy written by the Roman poet Catullus to his dead brother, a poem famously difficult to translate, though poet Anne Carson did translate it after her own brother died, and she built her book Nox—Latin for night—around that translation. What stuck with me, and what I emailed all of our writing students the following day, Tuesday, at the end of a message about losing you and how it all felt and how we were there for them still, was the famous last words of the poem, “ave atque vale,” or ”hail and farewell.”

Hail and farewell—

Travis