Cousin Monica
talked a great deal of my father. This was easy to her, for her early
recollections were full of him.
One of the terrible dislocations of our habits of mind respecting the dead
is that our earthly future is robbed of them, and we thrown exclusively
upon retrospect. From the long look forward they are removed, and every
plan, imagination, and hope henceforth a silent and empty perspective. But
in the past they are all they ever were. Now let me advise all who would
comfort people in a new bereavement to talk to them, very freely, all they
can, in this way of the dead. They will engage in it with interest, they
will talk of their own recollections of the dead, and listen to yours,
though they become sometimes pleasant, sometimes even laughable. I found it
so. It robbed the calamity of something of its supernatural and horrible
abruptness; it prevented that monotony of object which is to the mind what
it is to the eye, and prepared the faculty for those mesmeric illusions
that derange its sense.
Cousin Monica, I am sure, cheered me wonderfully. I grow to love her more
and more, as I think of all her trouble, care, and kindness.
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