An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir by Elizabeth McCracken Page B

and then did everything, and then kept asking, and she sent out an e-mail to tell people I hadn’t told that was so beautiful — though I have never read it — that I got the most beautiful condolence notes in response. Wendy burst into hysterical tears at the sound of my voice and asked me questions until I’d told the whole story. “Was he a beautiful baby?” she wanted to know, and I wondered how she knew to ask: she was the only one who did. Margi said, “Oh, Elizabeth, please know that if any of us could absorb your pain for you, we would,” and then laughed at all my dark jokes. Bruce, remembering something just as terrible that had happened to him decades before, wrote, “There is no way for such an event to leave you who you are.” Patti, who has seen as much sorrow as anyone I know, was an extraordinary combination of complete sympathy and complete comprehension. My brother said, at the end of a long conversation, “Well, I guess as a family we’ve been pretty lucky that we haven’t had something awful happen before.” My sister-in-law Catherine texted, Poor poor darling you .
    Somehow every one of these things happened at exactly the right time for me. This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It’s what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it’s better to say nothing than something clumsy.
    I needed all of it, direct comfort, hearsay grief. Edward’s great friend Claudia’s husband, Arno, a stage manager and perhaps the calmest man I’ve ever met, burst into tears on the phone when Edward called, and when Ann called my friends Jonathan and Lib, Jonathan did, too. “Oh,” Ann said to me, “to hear that big man cry.” I couldn’t have borne listening myself, to him or Arno, but to know that they did — it felt as though they had taken part of the weeping weight from my shoulders. Of course I cried an awful lot, but I also regretted every stupid time I’d ever cried in my life before over nothing, days as a teenager I’d wept myself sick and couldn’t exactly remember why, when I should have saved up. Now, in Tipperary and near Harvard Square, big men were crying for us. Before this I’d imagined that professional mourners, people hired to cry at funerals, were always little old ethnic grandmothers, maybe because the first funeral I’d been to was for a fifth-grade classmate named Paula Leone, and her Italian aunts had howled at the graveside.
    “They shouldn’t be old women,” I told Edward in Bordeaux. “They should be big men, a whole line of them, crying.”

I don’t know what to say, people wrote, or, Words fail.
    What amazed me about all the notes I got — mostly through e-mail, because who knew how to find me? — was how people did know what to say, how words didn’t fail. Even the words words fail comforted me. Before Pudding died, I’d thought condolence notes were simply small bits of old-fashioned etiquette, important but universally acknowledged as inadequate gestures. Now they felt like oxygen, and only now do I fully understand why: to know that other people were sad made Pudding more real. My friend Rob e-mailed me first, a beautiful and straightforward vow to do anything he could to help me. Some people apologized for sending sympathy through the ether; some overnighted notes; it made no difference to me. I read them, and reread them. They made me cry, which helped. They moved me, that is to say, they felt physical, they budged me from the sodden self-disintegrating lump I otherwise was. As I was going mad from grief, the worst of it was that sometimes I believed I was making it all up. Here was some proof that I wasn’t.
    One day Ann wrote to say that people, even people who didn’t know me, had asked what they could do for me.
    “They could write,” I told her. I considered this a sign of my essential mental health, that