Page 55 - LiveOnProjectlori with front cover

The Live-On Project

Dear Linda,
I am in the middle of a flight to St. Louis to give a reading. I was
reading a New Yorker story that made me think of my mother and all
alone in the seat I whispered to her “I know, Mother, I know.” (Found a
pen!) And I thought of you — someday flying somewhere all alone and
me dead perhaps and you wishing to speak to me.
And I want to speak back. (Linda, maybe it won’t be flying, maybe it will
be at your own kitchen table drinking tea some afternoon when you are
40. Anytime.) — I want to say back.
1st, I love you.
2. You never let me down
3. I know. I was there once. I too, was 40 and with a dead mother who I
needed still.
This is my message to the 40-year-old Linda. No matter what happens
you were always my bobolink, my special Linda Gray. Life is not easy. It
is awfully lonely. I know that. Now you too know it — wherever you are,
Linda, talking to me. But I’ve had a good life — I wrote unhappy — but
I lived to the hilt. You too, Linda — Live to the HILT! To the top. I
love you, 40-year old Linda, and I love what you do, what you find, what
you are! — Be your own woman. Belong to those you love. Talk to my
poems, and talk to your heart — I’m in both: if you need me. I lied,
Linda. I did love my mother and she loved me. She never held me but I
miss her, so that I have to deny I ever loved her — or she me! Silly Anne!
So there!
XOXOXO
Mom
-Poet Anne Sexton 1969, letter to her 15-year-old daughter, written five
years before her death.
Sexton, Anne, 1928-1974. (1977). Anne Sexton: a Self-Portrait in Letters.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin

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