In the weeks after the funeral, Helen provided endless comfort, but so, too, did my many other friends, and I felt that I was living in the luxury of their sympathy, and that sympathy so preoccupied me that sometimes I lost for a little while any sense of my own sadness. As the months went by, however, that sympathy seemed to fall away. I went to England a few times; friends in New York and friends in London had never seemed more different, though the meaning of their friendship came in the end to parity. The English say to you frankly (Bernard said it, too): it will take you years and years and years to recover from this. The English say to you: it would be in poor form for you to tell me too much about your suffering. The English say to you: the thing to do is not to express your pain. The English say to you: you’re being very brave and good not mentioning that you are at a pitch of anguish, pretending that life is fine, and that’s just what you should go on doing.

The Americans, on the other hand, say: let it all hang out. The Americans say: tell me what is in your mind and on your mind. The Americans say: whatever you are suffering I want to be part of; I want to suffer it with you. And the Americans listen to you for one or two months with an intensity of focus before which the fragile constructs of your sorrow crumple. After two months, when Americans ask how you are, you say, as you would to the English: I’m fine. You say that because if you say anything else you will be called on to explicate it and unravel it and include the person to whom you are responding in it. You say that because you make people too uneasy if you say, simply: I feel that life itself has lost its purpose. You say that because people don’t know how to respond if you say: I feel so worn out that I have stopped answering the telephone. America and England are both terrible countries for mourning, but perhaps there are no countries that are better. At least in England people give you some credit for pulling yourself together; in America people only assume that your suffering was never so great in the first place, that if things weren’t fine you would say so.