Unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable, Alec’s death, the persistent and reiterated loss prompted endless recollection, reflection: “As if one had swallowed a stone. The compulsive blighting.” Inexpressible—not simply because the right to the expression of grief remained with his widow and family, but, this perhaps most of all, because grief’s object was itself impossibly past. As well as the “centre, gone,” there was also completeness, forestalling understanding. And once again she voiced a criticism, the sense of some falling short on Alec’s part, some “incapacity—not for love, exactly, he was affectionate—but for passion, for great love, for intimacy sustained; for imaginative love. Compared with mine, what was his love? Strange but it was passive.” Alongside this she felt, if not anger, then the burden of her husband’s increasing frailty and her boundedness:

The wish to be away, to regain my being, to matter, to give pleasure. To matter. What use to enumerate episodes, words? Nothing is but what those represent. And that is the world, in essence, for humans. For the present, no wish to live, that is to be lively. Yet, always the life struggling up, wanting to cast off the blight. Rebellious, the impulse to be alive, oddly different from “wish to live.” Waste … The typewriter clicking, rattling, pounding on, the machine running ahead like a locomotive over every appeal for love, for company. The reciprocal time to do my own work, think my thoughts, live in my appropriate state (cannot express this—return to the realm of spontaneity, of poetry, to the centre). Clicking, clicking, rattling, pounding on.