The Light of the World (Elizabeth Alexander)

 “Loss is not felt in the absence of love” – this truth is unequivocal in Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir The Light of the World, which she wrote after the death of her husband, Ficre. Alexander is a world-famous poet (she read her poem Praise Song for the Day at President Obama’s 2009 inauguration), and so the loss and heartbreak she captures in her writing is deeply affecting.

 A few passages I found especially moving:

“The earth that looks solid is, in fact, a sinkhole, or could be. Half of things are as they seem. The other half, who knows. This has always been true. But now I must know it.”

“I cried so hard I woke myself. My bed, the bedroom, the house, was suffused with sorrow. Sorrow like vapor, sorrow like smoke, sorrow like quicksand, sorrow like an ocean, sorrow louder and fuller than the church songs, sorrow everywhere with nowhere to go.”

“Now I look back from forward. Something is fading, not the memory of him but the press of memory, the urgency of writing, the closeness of him. He is somewhere in the atmosphere, but also not. He is fifty and I am fifty-one. He is smiling in the green backyard; now his garden does not grow tall, does not grow at all.”

“Though it seemed he slipped away, it could not have been easy. The heart inside of him beat all the beats it was allocated, but in his fifty years, the man lived. Not nearly enough, but not insufficiently.”

Alexander didn’t mean for The Light of the World to become a capsule of memories, though she realizes that’s partly what’s been accomplished. What she wanted people to know is that loss is our common denominator, and that no one escapes death – not our own, and not others. She would invite you to reflect on the space between the beginning and end of a life, the middle quality… the richness and the love that makes life worth living.