“The Correspondent” by Virginia Evans recently made The Baltimore Sun’s weekly bestseller list. I count it as one of my favorite books I read last year. It is both devastating and hopeful. As a psychiatrist who has trained to work with older adults and with adults with medical illness, several themes in the book resonated with the stories I bear witness to.
“The Correspondent” is an epistolary novel that tells the story of Sybil van Antwerp — a septuagenarian retired lawyer who lives by herself in Annapolis — through her correspondence with friends, family and even authors and public figures she admires. These handwritten letters, which lend a quaint quality to the storytelling, are a delightful throwback to an era when penmanship was celebrated.
When we meet Sybil, she lives by herself and is self-sufficient. She is in generally good health, but her vision is dwindling. Her children live away from her, and she corresponds with them from time to time, though those relationships could be closer than they are. She is a lifelong learner who continues to audit courses at the university. She is a mentor and supporter to Harry, the son of her former colleague.
As we understand Sybil better, we begin to understand the genesis of her letter-writing habit, and what role it serves and doesn’t serve in her emotional life. At the heart of this book is unfathomable sorrow that shapes the trajectory of all of her relationships and informs her actions and inactions.
Like Sybil, so many older adults grapple with loss as they age — the loss of loved ones, of sensory faculties. Navigating these losses reshapes one’s sense of self. In reflecting on the life one has lived, there can be grief of another sort — coming to terms with what one’s life was, and what it wasn’t. One of the tasks of psychotherapy in those approaching their later and final years is to help people make peace with the life they have lived. No life is perfect, yet ideally, one wraps up life having accepted the shortcomings and tragedies while taking pride and joy in the accomplishments and meaningful relationships. Ideally, one is also able to make the amends one can, say the words that are dying to be spoken, often those of affection or apology. In terms of Erikson’s stages of development, Sybil would be in this “ego integrity versus despair” phase.
Completing the developmental tasks of this phase means developing a sense of a life well lived, a life that is complete unto itself despite its flaws and tragedies. If this does not happen, a sense of despair or bitterness results. The book captures powerfully the rich possibilities that lie between integrity and despair, as Sybil reckons with the fallout of her life’s tragedies.
The book portrays how much is possible in what the book calls “the winter” of one’s life — new connections, new friendships, new companionship, healing of self and relationships, new experiences, growth, forgiveness, redemption. While the book shows all that is possible as one grows much older, it also does not shy away from acknowledging the irreversibility of certain losses, the irrevocability of certain choices and the capacity of some pain to swallow chunks of one’s self and life with it. Some words cannot be unsaid, some actions cannot be undone. Life breaks each of our hearts in unique ways, and not all of us always recover. The book achieves the fine balance between showing us that we can be deeply hurt and broken, and we can also inflict deep pain upon others, but we are not doomed to live in pain or be racked with guilt forever.
Sybil bears a tremendous burden and gnawing guilt. As a psychiatrist, I cannot help but wonder if the right mental health support would have helped Sybil isolate less and connect more as she grappled with the enormity of her loss, and if that support could have helped her forgive herself earlier in life.
Yet, as the book beautifully portrays, things can move ever so slightly in the direction of light even when we have been walking very long on a path that is less well-lit. Complex as life may seem, it is sometimes simpler than we make it. For all the sorrow, there is joy and the possibility of renewal — no matter how old we are.
Shruti Mutalik ([email protected]) is a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai Hospital.
