To Won’s Father
June 1, 1586You always said, “Dear, let’s live together until our hair turns gray and die on the same day.” How could you pass away without me? Who should I and our little boy listen to and how should we live? How could you go ahead of me?
How did you bring your heart to me and how did I bring my heart to you? Whenever we lay down together you always told me, “Dear, do other people cherish and love each other like we do? Are they really like us?” How could you leave all that behind and go ahead of me?
I just cannot live without you. I just want to go to you. Please take me to where you are. My feelings toward you I cannot forget in this world and my sorrow knows no limit. Where would I put my heart in now and how can I live with the child missing you?
Please look at this letter and tell me in detail in my dreams. Because I want to listen to your saying in detail in my dreams I write this letter and put it in. Look closely and talk to me.
When I give birth to the child in me, who should it call father? Can anyone fathom how I feel? There is no tragedy like this under the sky.
You are just in another place, and not in such a deep grief as I am. There is no limit and end to my sorrows that I write roughly. Please look closely at this letter and come to me in my dreams and show yourself in detail and tell me. I believe I can see you in my dreams. Come to me secretly and show yourself. There is no limit to what I want to say and I stop here.
Here’s the thing about grief that nobody tells you until you’re drowning in it: it’s not dignified. It doesn’t give a fuck about your timeline or your strength or the face you’re supposed to show the world. This woman, 436 years dead, knew that. She wrote it all down and shoved it into a coffin because she understood something fundamental about human desperation, that there’s no bottom to it. No floor. Just falling.
“Come to me secretly and show yourself.”
Jesus Christ. That line. That’s not poetry. That’s a scream dressed up in ink. That’s what happens when you’ve already lost everything and you’re still trying to bargain with a universe that doesn’t take IOUs. She’s negotiating with death like it’s a bouncer at a club, like if she just says the right words, uses the right tone, maybe, maybe he’ll let her husband slip back through for one night. One dream. One goddamn conversation.
And she’s pregnant. Let that sit there for a minute. She’s carrying new life while decomposing from grief. The cruelest biological joke ever played. Her body is literally creating a person who will never know their father, who will ask “who should it call father?” and she already knows there’s no good answer. There never is.
The raw deal is this: we all make the same bargain this woman and her husband made. “Let’s live together until our hair turns gray and die on the same day.” We whisper it to each other in bed, in cars, in quiet moments when we think we’ve somehow figured out how to cheat the house. And the house always wins. Always. Someone always goes first. Someone is always left holding the bill, standing in the wreckage, writing letters to corpses.
What kills me, what really fucking kills me, is her belief that if she just writes it down, if she puts the letter in his coffin close enough to his heart… he’ll read it. He’ll find a way to respond. That’s not delusion. That’s faith in its most primal, animal form. That’s a human being refusing to accept that the conversation is over, because how can the conversation be over when you still have so much to say?
“There is no tragedy like this under the sky.”
She’s right, but she’s also wrong. The tragedy is that there are millions like it. Billions. Every person who ever loved someone and lost them has written this letter in their head, on paper, in the air, in the screaming silence of their bedroom at 4:27 AM. The words change. The language changes. The century changes. But the howl? The howl is eternal.
We’re all just trying to cheat death with words, with memory, with letters we know will never be read. And sometimes, just sometimes, someone finds them 436 years later, and the dead speak again, and we’re reminded that every person who ever walked this miserable, beautiful planet has known this specific flavor of devastation. That we’re connected across time by our capacity to be absolutely destroyed by love.
There’s no comfort in that. Maybe just the knowledge that when we fall, we fall into a crowd.