Walt Whitman And what comfort was there for Anna? There was the funeral. There was the memorial service. There were the practicalities: the solicitors to be seen, the papers to be signed. All these are chronicled in a flat, matter-of-fact manner as though by setting them down meticulously with dates and names Anna was doing her duty — what was left to her of her duty — towards her husband and her marriage. And there was the grief, the questioning, the regrets. For months the journal in the brown leather binding is a medley of statements of fact, of fragments, exclamations — If only he had died contented … If only he had died at peace … There are no children to be comforted, no memoirs or letters to be sorted and wept over, no heartening story to be told. There are no rituals of mourning. In the twenty-odd years I lived in England, I never found out how the English mourn. There seems to be a funeral and then — nothing. Just an emptiness. No friends and relatives filling the house.
