Letter to My Daughter

Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou Read Free Book Online Page A

Book: Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou Read Free Book Online
Authors: Maya Angelou
is not how you work, so I am obliged to refuse any offer you might make.”
    I thought I could have added, “I promise you, you do not want me as your adversary because, once I feel myself under threat, I fight to win, and in that case I will forget that I am thirty years older than you, with a reputation for being passionate. Then after the fray, if I see I have vanquished you I would be embarrassed that I have brought all the pain, brought all the joy, brought all the fear, and the glory that I have lived through, to triumph over a single woman who did not know that she should be careful of who she calls out and I would not like myself very much. And if you bested me I would be devastated and might start to throw things.”
    I am never proud to participate in violence, yet, I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves, that we can be ready and able to come to our own defense when and wherever needed.

Mrs. Coretta Scott King
    Over the last few years, and even in the last few months, I have said reluctant goodbyes to friends I have known over forty years. Friends I miss, with whom I learned many of life’s sweetest and most painful lessons.
    I still miss James Baldwin and Alex Haley and the loud talking, shouting, laughing, crying weekends that we shared. Betty Shabazz is near enough for me to remember what she was wearing when I last cooked dinner for her. Tom Feelings and I produced a book together and he drew a portrait of my late mother, which hangs in my bedroom. I spoke to Ossie Davis a few days before he died and agreed to stand in for him and his wife Ruby Dee at an engagement they could not cover in Washington, D.C.
    And recently, I waved farewell to Coretta Scott King, a chosen sister. As I approach my birthday every year, I am reminded that Martin Luther King was assassinated on my birthday and each year for the last thirty years, Coretta Scott King and I have sent flowers or cards to each other or shared telephone calls on April 4.
    I find it very difficult to let a friend or beloved go into that country of no return. I answer the heroic question, “Death, where is thy sting?” with “It is here in my heart, and my mind, and my memories.”
    I am besieged with painful awe at the vacuum left by the dead. Where did she go? Where is he now? Are they, as the poet James Weldon Johnson said, “resting in the bosom of Jesus”? If so, what about my Jewish loves, my Japanese dears, and my Muslim darlings. Into whose bosom are they cuddled?
    I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.
    When I find myself filling with rage over the loss of a beloved, I try as soon as possible to remember that my concerns and questions should be focused on what I learned or what I have yet to learn from my departed love. What legacy was left which can help me in the art of living a good life?

    Did I learn to be kinder,
    To be more patient,
    And more generous,
    More loving,
    More ready to laugh,
    And more easy to accept honest tears?
    If I accept those legacies of my departed beloveds, I am able to say, Thank You to them for their love and Thank You to God for their lives.

Condolences
    For a too brief moment in the universe the veil was lifted. The mysterious became known. Questions met answers somewhere behind the stars. Furrowed brows were smoothed and eyelids closed over long unblinking stares.
    Your beloved occupied the cosmos. You awoke to sunrays and nestled down to sleep in moonlight. All life was a gift open to you and burgeoning for you. Choirs sang to harps and your feet moved to ancestral drumbeats.
For you were sustaining and being sustained by the arms of your beloved.
    Now the days stretch before you with the dryness and sameness of desert dunes. And in this season of grief we who love you have become invisible to you. Our words worry the empty air around you and

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