A letter of condolence is among the most painful to receive and among the hardest to write. But when crafted with grace and humility, it can both heal and lift the spirits of the recipient. That is why Abraham Lincoln’s consoling letter to Mrs Lydia Bixby, whose five sons were believed to have died fighting for the Union in the American Civil War, is still hailed as a high-water mark of his eloquence, ranking alongside the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address.
It is also why, when the prose falters, such letters compound the anguish rather than console.
So it is wholly understandable that Jacqui Janes, the mother of a guardsman killed in Afghanistan, should feel that a letter of condolence she received from the Prime Minister in which he misspelt the family’s surname has salted her wounds rather than helped to heal them.
Nobody relishes seeing his or her name misspelt, especially in a letter of such emotional weight. Yet the letter is speckled with multiple spelling errors. In one way this might seem only to compound Gordon Brown’s callousness. A more generous view might be that here was a letter penned in haste by a man who wrote from his heart but whose handwriting is all but illegible.
The Prime Minister writes in a scrawl. But we should admire that he does write, and by hand. And we must beware venting any distress we may feel over the war in Afghanistan at Mr Brown by proxy. His failure here is the ineffectiveness of his private office, which could have spared him this clumsiness. But there is a gulf between clumsiness and callousness. Magnanimity might yet spur Mrs Janes to applaud Mr Brown’s motive in writing to her, even if she can rightly fault his execution.