Condolences to Frieda Hughes

Dear Frieda:


Sylvia Plath with Frieda and Nicholas

Please accept my greatest sympathies and condolences on the 48th anniversary of your mother’s death. Each year on February 11 when I am celebrating my oldest child’s birthday and embracing the joy that his arrival brought me, I briefly reflect upon the enormous loss that occurred on February 11, 1963 – the loss of not only a brilliant poet but the loss of a mother for an almost three-year-old and a one year old. Frequently, on this date when poetry fans and scholars remember Sylvia Plath the Poet, they overlook Sylvia Plath the Mother who left two young children behind when she succumbed to her depression and took her own life.

As a young woman, I was drawn to your mother’s poetry due to her haunting images, maudlin themes and tragic tone; her complex relationship with her mother that she so richly captured in her poetics made me reflect upon my own turbulent relationship with my mother. Just like your mother’s absence probably felt like a strong presence in your life, my mother’s presence always felt like an absence. Much of that inexplicable absence subsided when I became a mother and replaced longing with an abundance of love. I hope that you too have found abundance of love despite all the tradegy in your life.

Sylvia Plath with Frieda and Nicholas

So today, it is with sadness that I think about your mother’s maternal experiences cut short and your experiences without a mother in your life. I think about how you, the daughter of two brilliant poets, have persevered and have honored the reputations of both your mother and father. You have been dignified and poised over the years as you have shared details about the Plath-Hughes family. And even though the Plath-Hughes relationship was filled with turbulence, you and your late brother Nicholas were beautiful results of that union -- a union that lives on in their masterful poetry and in you. So today on the anniversary of your mother’s death, I wish you peace, comfort and an abundance of love.

Sincerely,

Garbageman’s Daughter