“Antiphon”: Old friends explore personal grief through correspondence ...Middle East

Preface 

We have been friends for forty-five years. Although our lives have followed very different trajectories, and we’ve mostly moved in separate circles of acquaintances, we share commonalities of experience from growing up in the same East Coast town and attending the same college. We came of age together during a period of great social transition for women, with a similar eagerness to learn, to succeed at work, to love and to experience the world. 

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Our orbits first intersected long ago during these formative years in the 1970s and 1980s, and then again nearly four decades later when time and experience had reshaped both of our lives. Chris had moved from the East Coast to Breckenridge, Colorado, and embarked on her third marriage after years of tumultuous personal relationships. Jane was navigating her separation after twenty-five years of marriage, facing the challenge of shifting into life as a single expat woman in Greece. 

Our affinity for one another’s stories and approaches to life blossomed as we reconnected. But before long, the recent, hard-won stability of our lives was shaken, first by the death of Jane’s twenty-two-year-old son Greg by suicide and then by Chris’ implacable diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. All at once, each of us became trapped in a state of mourning—inertia, sadness, and loss made it impossible to discern a path forward. What if, Chris suggested, we try writing to one another? About what we are going through, about anything, really. Just write. 

Even before we began this correspondence, we’d talked together about the phenomenon of people distancing themselves, consciously or not, from each of us in the wake of our personal tragedies. It’s a profoundly human response, and Western culture is rife with none-too-reassuring examples of friends, families, and communities turning away from those hapless individuals whose lives have been upended by a chance meeting with fate. 

When God decides to inflict the most horrific trials on his faithful servant, everyone around Job scatters. The innocent victims of the Greek gods, subject to the brutal whims of those who feel only desires and are heedless of consequences, are similarly abandoned by family and friends racing to get themselves out of the line of divine fire. 

Sometimes, that distancing comes from a sense of inadequacy in the face of stark tragedy: How can I possibly help or make this better? I can’t imagine what this person is going through (nor can I bear to). I’ll just avoid the topic and the person. 

But for us, avoidance was not and is not an option. Jane had to confront the unbearable sight of her child in a drawer in a hospital morgue; Chris stood frozen and uncomprehending as her physician husband read her first MRI results and wept. 

To survive what in the darkest moments seems unsurvivable, we’ve learned that we must have people in our lives ready to bear witness with us. Family, friends or neighbors who call, knit blankets, or sew quilts, send favorite books or meals. People who check in gently, listen without judgment. These have not always been the people that we expected, but they have been the friends we need, offering the extraordinary gifts of their generosity and steadfastness. 

Important in a different way is having someone to turn to who is experiencing a similarly bleak and inescapable reality. That person gets it; they know the suffering we are confronting won’t “get better,” that we won’t wake up to find it was all a terrible nightmare, that there are no miracles. We have become, for each other, the witness who walks beside you. 

We have loved these months of corresponding with each other for the simple yet life-affirming feeling of having someone to walk with in the deep woods. Writing has affected us both minutely and profoundly. The words we write can’t change what is, but they have made it more bearable. Most of our writing is straightforward, but we’ve also shared poems, fantasy, and flights of imagination. Having this sacred space in which to write about our grief in the context of lives that go on, grow, and bring joy and gratitude, along with the pain and moments of desolation, makes it easier for each of us to find hope and purpose. 

If we have anything to offer the world, it’s the honest conversation of two friends as we try to find ways to live lives of meaning while also waking each day to the ongoing experience of terrible loss. Our writing meanders. Sometimes, we address the specific trauma that moved us to write, but just as often, we reflect on what we are reading, doing, and thinking, and the people and experiences that have helped to shape us into the women we are today. 

We did not set out to create anything more than the conversation between us, but we’ve come to believe that our conversation could resonate with others. If this is so, then that is grace. 

Christina and Jane, August 2025 

November 12, 2022 Breckenridge, Colorado 

I pull on my boots and follow the logging road behind the house as it climbs the open hillside, then continues on into the woods. I take the same walk almost every day. The repetition never bothered or bored me as I was inside my own head, distracted by an ever-changing cascade of thoughts, images, and mundane preoccupations. Once, my mind might have jumped from a story I was working on to lunch plans with my husband to fretting over when I was going to tackle the decluttering project in my clothes closet and file drawers. I might hardly have noticed my rugged exterior surroundings. 

Today, I scramble down a trail to a pool that is hidden from the dirt road. My eyes search this scant bit of water: near the center, at the very bottom of the pool, a bubbling up of sand reveals an under-ground spring. This is what I want to see. “Sacred spring,” I murmur to myself and watch the pulse and swirl of water as if willing it to offer me a sign of hope. In this arid terrain, the life-sustaining spring is a small, determined miracle—like a flame flickering and pushing back the dark in a world that has become, for me, cloaked in dread. 

“Antiphon: A Call and Response in a Year of Grief and Renewal”

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Everything changed after I received the results of the MRI scan of my brain in March of this year. The test had been ordered following a series of strange visual disturbances. My doctor, my husband, and I had been unconcerned, confident that this test was probably unnecessary; surely the symptoms were due to ocular migraines. We were wrong. 

On April 8, 2022, I had surgery to remove a tumor from the right occipital lobe of my brain, diagnosed as a grade-four glioblastoma. The median life expectancy for patients like me, my surgeon and neuro-oncologist told me only after asking if this was information I wanted to know, is fourteen to twenty-two months. Hands in my lap in the doctor’s office, I counted on my fingers: I have until sometime between May 2023 and January 2024. 

Now, I do not want to focus on what is going on inside my head—literally or figuratively. But I need to walk. Only these days I concentrate on seeing outside of myself as if this will help make sense of what is happening to me. How do I fit into this world around me? Is there any purpose to this life that I am moving through suddenly, much too quickly? Around a bend and further up the logging road, a path leads off into the woods. I take this and eventually emerge onto a wide overlook with the Colorado mountains, capped in early snow, sweeping out before me. 

Maybe I am hoping for a broader view, a sense of perspective, and yet right now, I look around and struggle to see where my place is, or has ever been for that matter. 

As I begin down the switchback trail, wary of ice under last night’s snow, my mind backslides into fear-filled chatter. Then, a sound overhead catches my attention, stops me. I can’t quite place the noise but know it is from some kind of bird. It is a great “klack-klack-klack” mixed with a loud screeching. 

I stand on the hillside where sage and small wild rose bushes huddle under a cold sky, and snow crystals gust through the air. The noise above anchors me in time: late fall—the season of long journeys. I look up, and I see the sandhill cranes, a dozen maybe, high above me. Their long legs drift behind them as they fly in a slow circle, their voices crying out to one another. I know that they will meet up with others, creating bigger circles in the air, and then, in one mysterious moment, that circle will unwind. Individual groups of birds will peel off instinctively and fly together south. 

I fumble for my phone to take a picture. When I look up again, they are gone. Gone! I wanted to see them circling one more time! I wanted to take one snapshot that would capture this strange, beautiful ritual like a certainty. But there is no certainty. Everything comes down to chance, doesn’t it? How will all the cranes survive the journey that lies ahead? It is so cold and even colder up in that late November sky. Some will surely die. When I come off the trail, I am drenched in inexplicable grief. 

I want to know: Why? 

Why were we all made so beautiful and so fragile? Why made to have a sense of purpose, toward which we fly? Or voices that call to each other or beating wings? 

Thank you for reading these words, 

Chris 

November 14, 2022 New York, New York 

I walk through the park to be alone, to observe the masses of humans sharing the space but living different things. At this point, I know the paths through New York’s Central Park almost by feel; my internal GPS plots my route from home to the park depending on where I cross 5th Avenue to avoid waiting for the light. The Manhattan sport of jaywalking, where it’s a point of pride never to wait at an intersection if possible, is ingrained, and the momentary pleasure of seamless striding is part of why I walk. 

There are rare moments of fleeting human connection, like the Tuesday morning when a tawny hawk flew close overhead above the reservoir and settled on a branch right above the path. One young couple dove for their phones to take photos; another couple, closer to me in age, smiled with me conspiratorially in that fleeting New York acknowledgement of shared experience. I stayed, watching the hawk for a few more minutes, perhaps hoping that its air of calm control would impart some sense of balance. 

I don’t stop to think if I am observed, even as I slot the people I see into transient mental categories. Northern European tourists wrestling with unfolded maps, the mother patient, the father intent, the gawky teen children wavering between curiosity and boredom; two women in their early forties, fit as racehorses in Lululemon, with matching blonde ponytails threaded through the baseball caps emblazoned with their law firm’s name, their pace matched by the intensity of their conversation; an old man in a wheelchair with motionless, gnarled, spotted hands folded atop the blanket covering his legs, sitting next to his aide, a young Asian man with a kind face; an African immigrant kneeling, his prayer rug spread over crisp, fallen leaves. 

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It’s my drug of choice, this daily walking. I weave in between slower walkers, maintaining a steady, aerobically challenging pace, listening to a podcast as I choose the daily variations in my path while observing the other park visitors. I can control this one thing, and my day is ordered by it. For these two hours, I can avoid thinking about the big existential question of who I am and what I want. 

I know that I no longer can hold certain that I will find joy and purpose now that grief limns every thought, every reaction. I spent most of the past year finishing the newly urgent checklists of things I had to accomplish in my reinvention as a New Yorker. Grief-fueled anger and fear spurred me through divorce and the dismantling of the thirty years of my life in Greece. I am starting to settle my raw roots in a new place that I hope will be permanent. 

But what still evades me is peace, a sense that this move toward permanence will bring the resolution I had hoped for without realizing that was my goal. It unsettles me, the sense that I am failing at something, that I should have figured out by now what to want. How to want. I do not need, but I should want, right? 

Other walks remind me starkly of how privileged I am not to need. Madison Avenue, after nine p.m., is marked by the barely intrusive presence of those who need. Their cardboard shelters are set up in boutique doorways where they seek safety while telegraphing vulnerability. I wonder what the calculus of fear must be. I feel guilty that I have such security but no peace. 

I have a photo over my desk of one of the last times I felt truly whole. I am seated on the beach, my beach, between my two boys, in August of 2020. We’re together, a rare enough event when my oldest lives so far away and all the more precious because of the pandemic that makes travel so difficult and perilous. There is nothing more I want in that moment but to savor the sunset with them before going back to the house and cooking dinner for them, watching them splash in the pool and joke with their friends. 

I am angry with myself for not knowing how precious this would be, for not paying more attention to every detail, for letting it be ordinary. I will not have that ordinary ever again. Is that why, instead of trying to find beauty and purpose in each day, I choose to experience life through mute observation? Can I avoid further pain if I fail to choose anything to care about? 

But this city is where I have chosen to be at home, and sometimes it is enough. The Canada geese on the rowboat lake call to mind Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese”: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” I am still finding my place in the family of things. 

Talk soon, 

Jane 

Christina Holbrook graduated with a BA from Wellesley College and spent most of her career in New York City involved in the printing and publishing of art and photography books. She now lives in Breckenridge, Colorado, with her husband, Alan. “All the Flowers of the Mountain,” her first novel, received the 2023 Colorado Book Award for Romance, the 2023 IPPY Bronze Medal for Romance and the 2025 IPPY Silver Medal for Fiction Audiobook.

Jane Flynn received her BA from Wellesley College and her JD from Harvard Law School. In 1990, she left the U.S. for Athens, Greece, where she learned Greek, cofounded an autism advocacy nonprofit and served on the board of the Mediterranean Garden Society. She returned to New York in late 2020 following the death of her younger son by suicide. “Antiphon” is her first published work.

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