the deepening ground

According to The Encyclopedia Britannica, Alfred, Lord Tennyson took nearly eighteen years to fully process the grief of losing his good friend Arthur Henry Hallam. We find this in his elegiac masterpiece, In Memoriam A. H. H. While it may be Tennyson’s greatest work and certainly earned him renown for its “131 sections, … prologue, and … epilogue” tracing the stages of grief over the loss of a loved one, it’s clearly too long for a sympathy card.

In my quest to find the fitting word in season to send to my cousin, I looked for something from Mary Oliver. She has much to offer on the subject of grief in short but powerful poems. However, on that journey, I ended up discovering a newer poem by Wendell Berry, and while I did not send it on to my cousin, not fully knowing where she was on her own grief-journey, I tucked it away here for safe keeping, for the right time, for the right word and the reminder that, truly, “We are the absent ones” easily “distracted among / our obligations.”

---

The Loved Ones
by Wendell Berry

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. They enter our dreams.
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.
We are the absent ones.

Published in the print edition of the November 24, 2025 issue of The New Yorker