'i wanted to fill my elegy with light'

1.0 I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he's dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history.  So I began to think about history.

1.1 History and elegy are akin. The word 'history' comes from an ancient Greek verb meaning 'to ask.' One who asks about things -- about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell -- is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

 6.1 When my brother died (unexpectedly) his widow couldn't find a phone number for me among his papers until two weeks later. While I swept my porch and bought apples and sat by the window in the evening with the radio on, his death came wandering slowly towards me across the sea.

(Anne Carson, Nox)