Blessings: An Autobiographical Fragment

p. 67

After her second son with a disability was born, Mary Craig began to get letters: “No-one in their right mind could say that they were happy for us, but almost everyone I had ever known, even only slightly, felt compelled to write, to express deep feelings, or even to apologize for the fact that they did not know how to. One letter which moved me to tears said simply: ‘We just don’t know what to say, except that you have our love and prayers . . . .’ The letters, representing as they did, so much human feeling, so much anguished groping for words, said more than the spoken word ever could . . . . It was the sheer floundering incoherence of so many of them that made them important and precious.”