To love anyway is both the great tragedy and the great triumph of life. When two people have loved one another, each has become embedded in the marrow of the other’s being and both have had a profound experience that cannot be unhad even when the slender thread of grace between them is severed, by death or disenchantment. Death, of course, is only one species of loss, one way our loved ones can leave us.
We can also be left in life, left behind, left wondering where love goes when it goes. At its most discomposing, abandonment can feel like a living death. All deep loss has one thing in common: It opens an absence so acutely felt it kidnaps us from presence, takes us away from our own lives and their insistent, inconvenient, sacred ongoingness.
In memory or in fantasy, we end up refugees from reality, ceding the only thing that is ever ours for the keeping: the living moment. In all missing, we miss life. That is what the achingly missed Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934–August 31, 2026) explores in this gasp of a poem, originally published in the November 17, 2025 issue of The New Yorker: The loved ones we call the dead depart from us and for a while are absent.
And then as if called back by our love, they come near us again. We feel they have been near us when we have not thought of them. They are simply here, simply waiting while we are distracted among our obligations.
At last it comes to us: They live now in the permanent world. Couple with physicist Richard Feynman’s extraordinary love letter to his wife written long after her untimely death, then revisit Wendell Berry on creativity and love and his timeless antidote to despair. — Published November 8, 2026 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/11/08/wendell-berry-loved-ones/ — The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses.
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