The Letter to Alcott
Some letters are written to the dead because the living need to say it regardless.
Alcott || Letter || Grief || Closure
She wrote the letter in April, in the particular quiet of a Sunday morning when the city outside was still catching up with itself after the week, and the office had the weekend quality of a space that has been full and is now empty and has not yet decided to be anything in the absence of people. She wrote it by hand, on plain paper, because the typewriter would have been too formal for what she wanted to say and formality would have been the wrong register for a letter to someone who had tried to do the right thing and had died before knowing whether it worked. She did not address it to anyone — she just began writing, in the middle of things, the way you write to someone you know well: The Institute is closed. The medical board revoked Voss’s licence in March. The patients are placed. The report has been published in a redacted form that protects the patients’ identities while making the institutional failings visible enough that the people who need to change things have, I think, changed some of them. I don’t know if that’s enough. It never feels like enough. But it is what there is. She continued for two pages. She told Alcott about Irene Marsh and her technique of present-focus and the way she sat in the garden of the residential facility looking at the sky with a deliberateness that was visible from across the garden. She told her about Hargreaves in the doorway of the police station with his face turned up to the open air. She told her about Bruck’s concert and the two hours of academic discussion that followed without disagreement. She told her about Carey’s letters, dry and brief and full of dark humour. She told her about the day she had sat in the filing room with her own name in a file dated 1959 and had decided — and here she was honest about this, because honesty was what the letter was for — decided to be frightened properly, to fully feel the fear of what it meant, and then to continue, because the continuing was the thing that Alcott had sent her to do and she was not going to let fear be the reason it wasn’t done. She finished: I don’t know if you sent me because you thought I’d succeed or because you had no one else. I don’t know if I was the right person or simply the available one. I know that the thing you spent years trying to expose is now exposed. I know that the people who were being harmed inside it are now outside it. I know that the work you began — the attending to the truth of it, the refusal to be managed away from the truth — produced something that will last. You were right. You were right for a very long time without confirmation and you kept going anyway. That’s a form of courage that doesn’t get enough recognition because it doesn’t look like anything from the outside. It just looks like someone who keeps showing up. I kept showing up. Thank you for believing I would. She folded the letter. She did not send it. She placed it in the desk drawer with the green notebook. Both of them could stay there. Both of them belonged to the record of the thing, the private record that did not need to be filed anywhere because it was already everywhere she looked.