On a note of grief--(i)

The hand is not cramped. It's a mannered cursive that would be perfectly readable if it weren't so tiny: fancy G's on God; an extra swirl on upper-case Ws. He learned his penmanship well. And I can tell, simply by the smooth hand, that he was still a young man, a young father, a young preacher.

"Dear Friends," it begins--somehow he knew them. "One cannot help to express our heartfelt sympathy in your terrible grief and affliction." 

The hand and the voice is my grandfather's, and he's writing to a couple whose son had just died, age six. It is postmarked "Jenison, Michigan, April 8, 1918."  Here's how I picture it--he's writing this note at the kitchen table. My grandma Schaap sits in the chair beside him, reading perhaps. She is almost seven-months pregnant with my father.

"We were greatly shocked at the news that your dear Nelson had passed away." The woman who sent me the note that accompanied the 100-year-old letter explained that it was written to her grandparents, who had treasured it, having received just after the death of their son, who had died suddenly of scarlet fever. 

"Scarlet fever" is one of those childhood killers all but banished from our lives today, but the name still horrifies. A red mask covers the face, a light rash covers the body, a strawberry tongue. Laura Ingalls Wilder's sister went blind from it, and when it came on back then, a century ago, in some communities it came as a plague.

"Mrs. Schaap burst out in tears when I told her what had happened at your place," my grandpa says, and then: 

We can more feel for you since it is yet so fresh in our memory when we lost our little Agnes, of about the same age as your little boy was. 

I taught writing for years. It was my job to evaluate style as well as content, and I can't help but recognize the fractured syntax in that line. Look at it again. The sentence came haltingly to my Grandpa because putting what he felt into words required thinking back. Simply bringing his little daughter’s death up makes the awkward syntax of that sentence weep.

Their little Agnes died of something unknown at the time. Doctors tried to save her life by a procedure thought then very cutting edge, one of the first even attempted in the state of Michigan--something called a transfusion. For some time, Grandpa Schaap lay beside his precious daughter, the doctors having created some means by which the draw his blood out to flow into her veins. For three days, prospects brightened immensely; the local paper carried the story. She seemed to be in recovery.  Then, suddenly, she was gone.

My aunt once told me that she remembered her father, my grandpa, lying face down on the living room floor after his daughter's death. That darkness persisted, she told me, until he packed the family in the wagon and took a call to a country church in Lucas, Michigan, where the congregation met them on the lawn. When he stepped off that wagon, she said, he was a new man.

He doesn't tell that story to the recipients, but it's here nonetheless--in both what he wrote and how he wrote out what he wanted to say.

My grandpa, the writer, and my grandma, his wife, as well as the letter's recipients have all been gone for more than a fifty years; but when I read this 100-year old note of sympathy and grief, the story lingers, as do the characters. 

A Christian psychologist once told me that, following the death of a child, parents should be forgiven for just about anything they do to themselves or to others for the next five years. It takes a long time for grief to find its own level in the heart. I don't know.  But I think it's here in the note.

_____________________

More from the letter tomorrow.