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A friend has lost his son.

It is March 19, 1935, and Ernest Hemingway is making his second attempt to write a condolence letter to his friends, a married couple, who have lost their sixteen-year-old son after a long struggle with tuberculosis.

The letter reflects on death coming to a young person, a specter which Hemingway had witnessed on the battlefields of Europe in the waning days of World War I.

And it offers a prescription for the old, who look among friends and know that death could soon claim any one of them.

Hemingway, age 19, drove military ambulances in Milan for two months in 1918 before becoming injured.

From the letter:

“About him having to die so young.

“Remember that he had a very fine time and having it a thousand times makes it no better.

“And he is spared from learning what sort of a place the world is.

Hemingway with his family on a fishing trip, 1935.

“We all have to look forward to death by defeat, our bodies gone, our world destroyed.

“But it is the same dying we must do, while he has gotten it all over with, his world all intact and the death only by accident.

Hemingway, center, in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1937.

“You see now we have all come to the part of our lives where we start to lose people of our own age.

“We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other.

Hemingway arrived in France in mid-1944 to work as a war correspondent for Collier’s Magazine. While on this assignment. he embedded with an Army unit engaged in a large Allied offensive in the Hürtgen Forest, located at the center of Germany's defensive Siegfried Line.

“It seems as though we were all on a boat now together, a good boat still, that we have made but that we know now will never reach port.

“There will be all kinds of weather, good and bad,

“and especially because we know now that there will be no landfall we must keep the boat up very well and be very good to each other.

Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for “The Old Man and the Sea.”

“We are fortunate we have good people on the boat.”

Hemingway in 1935 and in the 1950s.

Hemingway would die in 1961 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after long suffering from depression, paranoid delusions and bipolar disorder,

…conditions which were worsened by alcoholism and traumatic brain injuries from several accidents.

A final word from his letter:

“Very few people ever really are alive.

“Those that are never die, no matter if they are gone.

‘No one you love is ever dead.”

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I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda