About
a month ago I received a letter from a woman whose book club had been
discussing The Fall of a Sparrow. Everyone
was pleased with the fact that my protagonist, Woody, had recovered from the tragedy of his daughter’s
death in a terrorist bombing in Italy and had gotten on with his life. But they
were distressed by the epitaph he chose for his daughter’s tombstone.
The
original epitaph, which Woody’s wife had chosen, was la sua voluntade รจ nostra pace, a line from Dante (“His will is our
peace”).
Woody
had the stone sanded down and reinscribed with the following epitaph:
contra vim veneris
non herbam inveneris,
contra vim mortis
non crescat herba in hortis.
Against the strength of love
You will find no herb;
Against the strength of death
No herb grows in the garden.
I like this epitaph because I think it tells the truth without being morbid, but
in a later novel, The Italian Lover,
Woody’s wife, as she lies dying in a convent, persuades Woody to change it to “There’s
a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”
Last
week I received another letter:
Dear Professor Hellenga,
I just wanted you to know how pleasantly surprised I was to
receive your letter. When I shared its contents with my book club, it sparked
another lively discussion about which of the three epitaphs each of us would
pick and why.
As a seventy-year-old woman who has been battling ovarian
cancer for the last ten years, my choice was, “There’s a special providence in
the fall of a sparrow.” To me, it not only means that things happen when they
are supposed to but also that every life, no matter how small, has meaning. And
besides, it takes us full circle back to the title of your book. (I must tell
you, however, that there were others in the group that sided with you and Woody!)
Thank you so much for taking the time to share the
information regarding the original source of Woody’s selection for Cookie’s inscription, as well as his motivation for choosing it. It was interesting that
it came from Bernice Fox, the very person that you were honoring with your
lecture on the date (March 3rd) I received your letter.
Best wishes in all your future endeavors. I will periodically
check the shelves t Barnes and Noble for anything new under the “H”s.a
Sincerely,