on grief

1913 RILKE letters, collected in The Dark Interval

My Dear Sidie,

Your letter really touches my heart. On the one hand, I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength. But on the other hand, I am very concerned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and attraction are after all also yours.

1913 RILKE letters, collected in The Dark Interval

You must, Sidie, (this is the task that this incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it has been unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours. You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your existence (how much more reliably I feel my father to be effective and helpful in me since he no longer dwells among us). Just think how much in our daily lives misleads and troubles us, and renders another person’s love imprecise for us. But now he is definitely here, now he is completely free to be here and we are completely free to feel him … Haven’t you felt your father’s influence and compassion a thousand times from the universe where all, truly all, Sidie, is beyond loss? Don’t believe that something that belongs to our pure realities could drop away and simply cease. Whatever had such steady influence on us had already been a reality independent of all the circumstances familiar to us here. This is precisely why we experienced it as something so different and independent of an actual need: because from the very beginning, it had no longer been aimed at and determined by our existence here.

1913 RILKE letters, collected in The Dark Interval

All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both. I know individuals who already face the one and the other without fear and with the same love—for is life really more demystified and safely entrusted to us than that other condition? Are not both conditions in a place namelessly beyond us, out of reach? We are true and pure only in our willingness to the whole, the undecided, the great, to the greatest. Alas, if I could tell you just how I know it, then deep within your mourning, a tiny kernel of dark joy would take shape.

1907 RILKE letters, collected in The Dark Interval

while I am completely engulfed in my sadness, I am happy to sense that you exist, Beautiful. I am happy to have flung myself without fear into your beauty just as a bird flings itself into space.

1919 RILKE letters, collected in The Dark Interval

only one thing is urgently needed: to attach oneself with unconditional purpose somewhere to nature, to what is strong, striving and bright, and to move forward without guile, even if that means in the least important, daily matters. Each time we tackle something with joy, each time we open our eyes toward a yet untouched distance we transform not only this and the next moment, but we also rearrange and gradually assimilate the past inside of us. We dissolve the foreign body of pain of which we neither know its actual consistency and make-up nor how many (perhaps) life-affirming stimuli it imparts, once dissolved, to our blood!

1919 RILKE letters, collected in The Dark Interval

I learned this experience very early on through various circumstances, and it was then confirmed from pain to pain: what is here and now is, after all, what has been given and is expected of us and we must attempt to transform everything that happens to us into a new familiarity and friendliness with it. For where else should we direct our senses, which after all have been exquisitely designed to grasp and master what is here?!