Dear Elma,
About bees: did I send you my favourite poem by the late Karl Shapiro? Faced with death, he compared himself to a cut flower rather than a flower with roots, and the poem ends like this:
Yesterday I was well, and then the gleam
The thing sharper than frost cut me in half
I fainted and was lifted high. I feel
Waist-deep in rain. My face is dry and drawn,
My beauty leaks into the glass like rain
When first I opened to the sun I though
My colors would be parched. Where are my bees
Must I die now? Is this a part of life?
Sometimes I mutter to myself, Where are my bees? That’s what I’m missing, just that. So simple. And this is why I can’t think of a spring holiday. But I’m starting to, despite the thing sharper than frost, which is always there.
A beautiful Saturday afternoon, and the sun, at last, is out.
love,
c.
Dear E.,
On the weather channel right now, where all the announcers are, in their own words, “passionate about the weather,” we are told that a weather bomb is on its way to Atlantic Canada and will reach us tonight; but I am secure and warm in this wonderful old house—wood fire burning in the downstairs entrance hall, both cats (Nicholas Nickleby and his sister, Kate) comfortably stretched on the rug in front of it, Alasdair writing songs in his top-floor studio—and I am free for these moments to be with you.
Certainly I think now, much more than I used to, about dying as the last living thing I must do. But without the rather more specific time frame you have—though even yours and Carol’s cannot be specific—my own dying seems altogether theoretical, which it is not.
I wonder if you remember the lines I gave to a character in my novel Swing Wide the Door, an actress who drank too much and said to everyone she met, including the gay Salvation Army officer, whose story it is: “What are you dying from? Laughter? Old age? Boredom? Fatigue? Cynicism? Obesity? Stress? Cancer? It’s got to be something. We’ve all got to die of something.” And the comment on that: “She’s only dying because once upon a time she was born, like the rest of us.” That’s the way I feel, I guess, but I haven’t had to attend any “dress rehearsals” (as you put it) just lately, so it goes on feeling unreal.
Here I am, quoting myself! But then I don’t have a wonderful poem to quote, such as Karl Shapiro’s, and it’s a truly haunting image. Bees. I am lucky. Mine are still around. But not forever. I woke from a reassuring dream two nights ago, and wrote down the sentence I was saying in my sleep (could I have been to you?): “We hope you are happy there, journeying through galaxies with all your friends who are there already. We’ll be joining you ourselves one day, which will turn into eternity.”
Putting my exact scribbled words (with not a single letter changed) from a sheet of paper into this computer for you now seems like a strange and distant message, but I hope you will receive it differently and with the love that comes with it. May you find peace. You know I’m thinking of you.
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
Dear A.,
How extraordinary that you should dream those words. (Well, no, it isn’t. I should have guessed that you, of all people, would have had those thoughts.) Did I ever tell you that, while I do not believe in reincarnation on this earth, I would not be surprised to find that we somehow go on evolving in other galaxies? The image fits in with the strange visions I had shortly after I started receiving treatment—all the cosmic patterns and designs—so beautiful and vividly coloured. When I think of it, they’re a little like the best “trips” described in Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.
But while a part of me certainly relates to the poem Carol quotes, I don’t really identify with the flower Shapiro describes so beautifully.
Right now, I feel that my root system is doing fine. It’s not the season for blooming. (Or bees.) And I guess I also believe in that seed far beneath the winter snows, though it may not fit in very logically with travelling through galaxies. But for this spring, anyway, who can tell? Even about bees?
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
Even in this new year, which had begun with a funeral, Elma was able to believe that her own root system was “doing fine,” and Carol could wonder if a spring holiday might be possible, “despite the thing sharper than frost” that was ever present.
Because I believed that the language of words was constantly failing me on this journey with Elma and Carol, a journey that was harder than I knew when I agreed to bear them company, I looked sometimes beyond words to say what I wanted to say, and found it in Alasdair’s music. He had written a work entitled Spirit Room that I decided to send to Elma, together with his explanatory program note:
Spirit Room, a work for piano and orchestra, was inspired by a dream in which the golden light emanating from beneath a closed door seemed to beckon the dreamer to open it and release the energetic spirit within. This image was the starting-off point for the musical work, which develops its own organic structure free from a sense of programmatic narrative. The first movement is longer and explores a slowly transforming lyrical theme, while the shorter scherzo-like second movement alternates, at a brisk tempo, between a lively tune and subsequent variations of itself.
Elma wrote that she played the work immediately upon receiving it, and, as I learned later, she played it many more times in the three months she had left to live. So obvious was it to her that there was a beckoning light under a door she would one day have to go through, a door that would take her into a brilliant world of colour and energy, that Spirit Room became an identifying part of her final quest.
January of that year, however, had been a relatively good month. As Carol had promised, Elma received a galley proof of Unless. She had asked to have it sent, fearing she might not live long enough to hold the published novel in her hands.
Dear A.,
I am loving the illicit reading of Carol’s novel. Maybe it’s the subject matter (a lot to do with mother/daughter relationships); maybe that I’m more focused now that I’m not restricted so much to reading at the end of a working day. But I’d say it’s her crowning achievement.
Not to be greedy, but do you have any more short stories kicking around that I could read sometime? My eyesight is quite erratic, so I’m trying to fit in what I can while I can …
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
“Short stories kicking around,” she had written, and because two, “Her Treasures” and “A Delicate Letter,” had appeared in a small New Brunswick literary journal, I sent those first, and then others over the next couple of weeks, stories that had been languishing in a desk drawer for want of finding a home. The two published stories were about women, the third (“Lions at Delos”) was about two men, and the fourth (“The Baptism”) about a five-year-old boy, baptized (“regenerated and born anew of water” so that he might “die from sin and rise again”) by a flushed priest with roving hands.
Dear A.,
I have only read your stories once so far, which is not enough for a decent evaluation. But I read them immediately after finishing Carol’s novel, and felt no sense of drop off— you are marvellous in this medium … Please send me more. I’ll return them, pay the postage, whatever. They’re exactly what I need right now. From a technical point of view also, since they’re short, in a good-sized type, lines well-spaced, well laid-out on the page—these are becoming major considerations if I am to be able to keep on reading. (And if I can’t read, I might as well not breathe!) The length doesn’t matter nearly so much as the other factors. Send more! I don’t care if they’re not what you think are your best efforts—I’ll love them anyway … (So far, I’m enjoying you more than the latest Alice Munro—and I love Alice.)
Elma asked if I was writing anything new, and I had told her I was doing another draft of What’s Remembered (a novel that was published aft
er her death) and I was working obsessively. The problem was that I was haunted by the biblical injunction not to pour new wine into old bottles. The process was tricky, I related to her, because “I create new characters and then wonder if they will fit into the old existing form.” But Elma assured me that Carol had once faced and overcome a similar problem when she had tried to fix and extend something she had written earlier.
I can imagine it must be hard to do what Carol called a sort of “darning job.” She had to perform this on one of her novels, which also needed extra characters, more developed situations etc. … I don’t think she ever tried that again, though it worked out OK—in fact, I thought it was one of her better ones, so take heart!
Elma had read only the first of twelve drafts of What’s Remembered, and I had taken her comments to heart. That fact made me deeply regret that she did not live long enough to see the work in print. No reason, of course, for Death to wait or pay attention to the heavy sound of “deadline,” even when that word comes from a publisher. I thought then of Emily Dickinson:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
THREE
Something has occurred to her—something
transparently simple, something she’s always
known, it seems, but never articulated. Which
is that the moment of death occurs while we
are still alive. Life marches right up to the wall
of that final darkness, one extreme state of
being butting against the other. Not even
a breath separates them. Not even a blink of
the eye. A person can go on and on tuned
in to the daily music of food and work
and weather and speech right up to the last
minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.
—From The Stone Diaries
ON THE LAST DAY of January 2002, Elma wrote that her “primary tumour had shrunk to virtually zero, with no activity at all. So no more chemo!” But as January turned into February, the signals grew darker.
Dear A.,
No more chemo is a lovely prospect, indeed, but I must remember that the brain is a whole different story, and it has always been the big problem. No one was really very concerned about the chest tumour, except to radiate it in order to keep it from becoming so large as to be painful. The chemo was to help stop its (lung tumour) metastasizing (say into the other lung), and thus decreasing my general well-being. However, I don’t want to sound negative here, and while I could still fly out of the world any time, day or night, without warning, I hope one can infer that the radiation worked reasonably well on the brain, since it did on the lung, and has thus bought me a bit of time. Too bad they can’t repeat the brain radiation (or won’t consider it before a year, anyway) as they could with the chest, but them’s the breaks, and I ain’t complaining!
Nor am I forgetting that I owe any reprieves as much to the love and support and prayers of my family and friends as I do to luck or good genes—probably way more. So thanks a trillion—and keep those positive thought-waves a-coming. To say nothing of the stories—whee! And I wish you continued high energy and inspiration for the novel, of course.
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
Ever the optimist, despite what she knew was coming, Elma continued to read and to think. Writing to me the next week, she told me she had read two more of my stories “with delight,” but “I always need at least two, better three, readings before I fit things together and know my own mind.” She had also seen the film version of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and had admired the characters, who were, she wrote,
exactly as I had pictured them. And the scenery was beautifully filmed. No wonder in that land of cloud, fog and mirages, that people have “the sight,” and the line between so-called truth and fiction almost ceases to exist.
I was also recently blessed by a young Aboriginal woman, someone with “the sight,” in an amazingly soothing laying-on-of-hands ceremony, which helps my acceptance a lot … There have been revered healers (usually, though not always, female) since pre-recorded history, in every country and culture, though the Christians certainly did their best to stamp them out in Europe and elsewhere.
Her next letter brought disquieting news, which accounted for Carol’s not having been directly included in recent exchanges.
Dear A.,
Rather than forwarding e-mails, or sending joint ones, I have been giving Carol brief news and notes about your stories, your and Alasdair’s musical activities, the possibility of your novel being published—when will you know, I wonder?—and other anecdotes. This is mostly because she has been in worsening shape, and not up to reading or writing much. Her e-mails to me have mostly been very brief medical reports. Her doctor had actually ordered her to go to Florida for a week between chemo treatments, and she was looking forward to sun and reading. I received the following last night: “We are back, earlier than we’d planned, and I’m not doing terribly well. Starting today, someone is coming to help me with letters and so on. I seem to be sleepy so much of the time.”
“Not doing terribly well” means awful. Increasing sleepiness is often a sign that someone has begun to slip away. I feel devastated, but I don’t think she is in pain, and going gently into that good night is very often no bad thing.
I, on the other hand, am feeling pretty well, apart from side effects of steroids, which are more of a nuisance than an affliction.
About the scan of my head, done on February 9th, the results should have been available to my doctor today, had she cared to phone … I have every intention of phoning somebody Thursday or Friday and saying (truthfully) that I really need to know something in terms of how heavy a dose of steroids I should now be on. Could the doctor contact me at least to say “swelling/re-growth not too bad” or “swelling markedly increasing” or whatever. I do not want to wait two weeks to find out this much, even if there is very little they can do about the results, apart from altering the steroid dose.
I must go, but I love you dearly.
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
P.S. I recently came across a poem by Stanley Kunitz, who was interviewed at the Dodge Poetry Festival in 1998, five years after Carol had won her Pulitzer Prize, and almost forty years after he had won his. He was ninety-three at the time of the interview, and still an avid gardener. This particular poem, “The Round,” conveys a writer’s need for two worlds, and the necessity of pulling down the blinds sometimes on an outer world in order to concentrate on an inner one. Try to find the poem somewhere, if you can; for while it may not be the greatest poem of our time, it resonates on a variety of levels. Kunitz walks about in the early-morning light of his garden, appreciating the flowers he has grown, taking unusual joy in everything around him, but then has to settle again to his work as a writer, where the hard task of shaping words to fit his vision brings him daily challenges and rewards.
Much later, after finding and reading the poem myself, I agreed with Elma on two counts. It may not have been “the greatest poem of our time,” but it did convey with a simple and direct beauty “a writer’s need for two worlds”—the private retreat, the public persona—how to keep one from intruding on the other, the everlasting challenge.
How often have I sat at my desk, as I do now, like Stanley Kunitz did at ninety-three, thinking myself young because I am only eighty-one, reading aloud my scribbled words, checking the rhythms, looking for sharper images, trying for coherence in a jumble of ideas, writing something down, crossing it out, putting it all into my computer, seeing next the detached formality of a printed page, which makes cruelly evident what still needs work. The other world breaks in—do the laundry, feed the cats, buy groceries for dinner, weed the garden, go to the bank, buy a book, read the newspaper, talk on the telephone, assure friends in letters, either
real or virtual, that I am still alive and functioning. The pendulum swings again, and it’s back to the messy page, full of corrections, and the new beginning of every day.
Elma’s letter was written on Valentine’s Day, though she made no reference to the date. While she surely hoped that a new life might also begin for her each day, uncertainty remained.
The lung cancer, which Martin believed came from heavy smoking, had developed independently of the polyps in her colon, and had then spread to her brain, where there were at least seven tumours in different areas. The symptoms had at first included giddiness and a loss of control in her right hand, which led to her being treated with steroids; but as the cancer progressed and the steroids no longer worked, she started to lose her short-term memory, and she would eventually become confused. When she visited her oncologist the following Monday, she had taken a tape recorder. She was trying to understand and be clear about everything.
Listening to the tape, I get the impression that the doctor hoped some of the brain tumours might have shrunk to nothing (as the lung tumour did) but had not definitely expected that. Mart confirmed my impression. But the neighbour who accompanied me and took notes said her impression was that the doctor got just what she was anticipating. So who knows? At least, there was an all-around improvement, and I could hardly ask for more.
At the time of this visit, and because the radiologist had not been able to clarify the results of a scan, Elma had left with the feeling that the information she had was too sketchy to be helpful. The following week, however, she saw her own doctor, and hope was reborn.
When I asked my doctor yesterday if she could do anything, she managed to obtain a fax of the scan report within less than an hour. It was quite a bit more informative and left me feeling more positive and reassured. “No new lesions are seen. Considerable improvement has occurred, with a substantial reduction in volume (i.e., tumour size) though the number of lesions has only slightly diminished.” At least the general tone is favourable.
The Staircase Letters Page 6