Condolence Letters That Console

From the New Yorker a description of a class on writing condolence letters conducted by my friend Amy Cunningham:

“Passed away” is out; “died” is in. Don’t say, “I know how you feel” or “This is God’s plan.” Handwritten letters are always good, but you can also type something and print it on ivory paper. “I’m not opposed to preprinted cards,” Cunningham said.

To illustrate her points, she shared a few condolence letters from famous literary and historical figures. “This is not a good letter, Charlie,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to Charles Scribner, the son of his late publisher. “But I still feel too sad to write a good one.” Cunningham awarded him points for completion. “Aiming for excellence is really only going to hold you up.”

Writing to a friend’s widow, Aldous Huxley veered into esoteric musings: “How are we related to what we were? Who are we now and what were we then? . . . There are no answers, of course.” According to Cunningham, this was not “a home run,” although it might have been endearing to a friend of Huxley’s....Also, don’t make it about yourself, as Queen Victoria did in a letter to Mary Todd Lincoln after the death of the President: “No one can better appreciate than I can, who am myself utterly broken-hearted by the loss of my own beloved husband, who was the light of my life, my stay, my all, what your sufferings must be.”