Merci sends wisdom from Rilke

Martijn and Susan enjoy a joyous New Year's Eve (with Suzanne and Rich) 

in Excelsior, Minnesota, ten years ago, 1988.

Dear Susan,

I'm sending along a passage which I read in the last few days, and found very comforting. I like Rilke's poetry a lot, but the book someone gave me is a collection of his correspondence. For the sake of context, I've included the entire passage, though some parts may speak more to you than others (as they did for me). I also took the liberty of adding paragraph breaks...so sue me for my editorial touch! The bolded/italic words were stressed in the original.

Thinking of you, and sending you a warm hug!

Lots of love,
Merci


"My dear S…,
I very much took your letter to heart, and, on the one hand, I wish to encourage you in your pain so that you experience it in all of its fullness, since as the experience of a new intensity it is a great experience of life and in turn leads back toward life, like everything that reaches a certain extreme degree of strength. On the other hand, I am filled with fear when I imagine how you have cut off and limited your life at this point, afraid of touching anything full of memories (and what is not full or memories?). You will freeze up if you keep doing that, you must not, dear, you have to keep moving, you have to return to the things that had been his, you have to lay hand on [your lost one's] things that are also yours due to such complex relations and attractions, S… (this might be the mission assigned to you by this incomprehensible fate).

You have to continue his life within your life to the extent that it had not been completed; his life has now passed over to yours and you who truly knew him can move forward quite as intended: make this the task of your mourning, to explore what he expected of you, hoped for you, wished would happen to you.

If I could only convince you, my friend, that his influence has not left your existence (how much more securely I feel my father's influence and assistance within me since he is no longer with us). Consider how much in daily life distracts, obscures, and renders another's love imprecise. Now especially he is here, and now he has all the freedom to be here and we have all the freedom to feel him… Haven't you felt [your lost one's] influence and affinity this way thousands of times from outer space where nothing, nothing, S…, can ever be lost? Do not believe that anything that is part of our true realities could disappear or cease to exist: that which had so steadily worked its effects on us had already been a reality independent of all our present and familiar circumstances. This is precisely why we experienced it in such a different way and as responding to a completely independent need, because from the beginning it was aimed and determined at something beyond the here and now. All of our true relations, all of our penetrating experiences reach through the Whole, through life and death; we have to live in Both, be intimately at home in both. I know people who are already facing both the one and the other quite intimately and with the same love. And is life truly less mysterious and more familiar to us than that other condition? Are they not both placed namelessly above us, and equally out of reach. We are true and pure only in our willingness toward the whole, the undecided, the great, and the greatest."

--Rainer Marie Rilke. From a letter written August 1, 1913, to Sidonie Nádherny von Borutin, from the book: "The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke," edited and translated by Ulrich Baer.