Very few are spared losing someone they love. When it happens, when someone we love dies, a reaction is called for—the loss echoes from the heavens, resounds deep inside of us. Even the absence of an apparent reaction, or perhaps especially such a palpable absence, is part of the response: we are surprised to still be living, we are dismayed that after such a tragedy we can and do still live. Guilt may set in; guilt at not feeling—not continuously, not persistently, not all of our waking moments and for the rest of our lives feeling—the spectacular tragedy of the loss. As Camus remarks in his play Caligula, "Most people imagine that a man suffers because out of the blue death snatches away the woman that he loves. But his real suffering … comes from the discovery that grief, too, cannot last." As if in continuation of this thought, Camus writes in The Plague that "really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one's thoughts be diverted by anything; by meals, by a fly that settles on one's cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere." But there are always meals, flies, itches, and duties, which is why, according to Camus, life is difficult to live; and why, perhaps, grief cannot last.

If thinking of someone always is difficult when they are with us, it might perhaps be easier—the urge more pressing—when they no longer are. We may become split, whether we realize it or not, between on the hand giving ourselves up entirely to grief (seems like the response, the only one worthy of the one we loved), while on the other hand and at the same time, for our own sanity and wellbeing (and from the perspective of the one who loved us and had our interests at heart), we feel as if, eventually, we ought to move on. Eventually is, of course, not a discreet entity—we may wait for it while it never 'arrives'.  

The only comfort, historically, has been the thought that we will one day be reunited with the one we love. Offered by most of the world's religions, not everyone can accept this comfort. In the face of so-called modernity, in the absence of God and afterlife, one cannot resort to blissful fantasies of once again holding the dearly departed, of once more sharing laughter… Something tangible—a future reunion after death—is withheld; is there anything that we can put in its place? In the event (it is properly and can only truly be described as an event) of heart-shattering loss, is there anything that we can build? Is there something we can create, for the one we love, to put them—ourselves—back together again? Because what is loss, if not absence; and what is more natural than wanting to put something in the place of what has gone?

Anatole, the second child of the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, died in 1879 at the age of eight. Tole, as he was affectionately called, suffered from the same disease as his father—a kind of rheumatism, apparently in aggravated form. For a long time he lay ill, and the Mallarmé family lived between hope and fear. As Mallarmé wrote to a friend: "My sick little boy smiles at you from his bed, like a white flower remembering the vanished sun." That was to be the last news of Anatole's condition that Mallarmé shared; when he returned from mailing the letter to his friend, he learned that his son had passed away. 

Earlier, Mallarmé had written a tombeau ("tomb") poem for Edgar Allan Poe, as well as, later on, for Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine. The idea behind the tombeaux seems to be not only to grieve the deaths of these great artists, but also to immortalize, to eternalize, to preserve their being in some form—a form created, carefully tended, by Mallarmé. This can be seen as a specific form of the general idea of art as a way of capturing reality, of holding something in time and space. We bury the things we love, thereby giving it a place in the earth. In a similar way, a tomb poem buries its subject through—and ultimately in—art, and yet preserves it for all who still want to see.    

Shattered by the death of his son, for which he furthermore felt guilty, given the hereditary nature of the disease that caused Anatole such suffering, Mallarmé began working on a tombeau poem for his cherished dead son. He was never able to finish it.

When Mallarmé died in 1898, he left 202 sheets of fragmentary notes that would be published for the first time in 1961 as Pour un tombeau d'Anatole. (I have the 1983 bilingual translation by Paul Auster, A Tomb for Anatole, published by New Directions. There is a newer, 2003 edition translated by Patrick McGuinness, For Anatole's Tomb, which I have not yet read). With regard to the notes, Auster puts it well: they are "…a kind of uhr-text, the raw data of the poetic process. Although they seem to resemble poems on the page, they should not be confused with poetry per se. Nevertheless, more than one hundred years after they were written, they are perhaps closer to what we today consider possible in poetry than at the time of their composition. For here we find language of immediate contact, a syntax of abrupt, lightning shifts that still manages to maintain a sense, and in their brevity, the sparse presence of their words, we are given a rare and early example of isolate words able to span the enormous mental spaces that lie between them…" I would add that, in the spaces between the words, we find a father's love for his son, his pain in missing him, his guilt over making him suffer, even if unintentionally; in short, we find here the most important things that cannot be conveyed directly through language, but only through the deep undercurrents that move below words. We find gestures that move us beyond that which can be said—that bring us into the space between the emotions and the utterances that try to latch on and explain them.  

It is telling that Mallarmé never finished his tomb for Anatole. A tomb can never be truly finished; but building one is probably the most that a person can do for the one they loved who is no longer there. And for oneself, still there.

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