A note to Reynolds Price

Dear friend of many happy hours:

I have loved you for some years now, since the time by happenstance, I picked up your Good Priest’s Son at the makeshift bookstore at clergy conference.  Just about three hundred pages later, I knew I’d found a lifelong friend.  From then on, you were often, tangentially in my consciousness, as I spent time seeking your old novels in beach bookstores and on the tree-lined avenues in Savannah, where I thought they would most likely be.  I built up a pile of them, ladies in waiting, for stolen hours on my Monday days-off: first Kate Vaiden, then Blue Calhoun, and The Tongues Of Angels. Others languished on my Amazon wish list so that I would not forget the ones outstanding and  would remember to use Aunt Jody’s annual Christmas gift certificate to treat myself to another few days with you. 

It was not until news of your death reached me in early January, 2011 that I allowed myself to purchase the pricey hardback version of your most recent self-revelation, Ardent Spirits. …two years of waiting for the cheaper paperback version seemed enough.  Several pages into it, I knew I had to start somewhere else.  Several days after that, I opened the homemade package received by mail at a discount from some Mom and Pop mail-order bookshop, to begin the story of your greatest challenge and victory, A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing

It soon became clear why I had so often and instinctively felt a bond with you for so long: an older, gay, bachelor, “story man”, whose writing has inspired and discouraged me all at the same time.  “If only I could write like that…” I breathe with desperate longing to myself at every chapter ending.   Sixteen years ago, a tumor in my cervix announced itself in much a similar way as did your slimy spinal eel.  I, too, had known at some level, of its existence – clues veiled in the erratic, sporadic arrival of my no-longer monthly visits of blood and cramps, that strange sloughing off of tissue, almost also missed,  but occasionally found in the shower drain…

Words like malignant, hysterectomy, radiation, terminal, and oncology became personal rather than conceptualized.  By necessity, I, too, had to find a new incarnation… no longer could I know myself as a single, self-contained mistress of my own destiny, long resigned and capable of self-sufficiency; competent, complete in her independence.  I was now forced to recognize that stance for what it was … a delusion based on need for control. Now, the self-less care giver had to ask others for time and food and transportation – for an emergency trip to replace a catheter, for God’s sake…oh, the humanity!  But thanks be to God and to faithful family, co-workers and friends, those needs were met – pressed down and overflowing, again and again.  

I found you, a friend, again, in a deeper way, in your account of those first months after surgery, radiation, and of those terrifying predictions realized.  You lived for twenty-six years after the initial diagnosis. Oh, yes, those years lived in a wheel chair, but mind and heart somehow escaping the paralysis that captured your legs and feet.  If our stories continue to be so similar I, too, can count on at least ten more years. That’s the same prediction, I realized with eerie mindfulness, which the Church Pension Fund made about me, using their omniscient formula that claims to take into account all the things that limit or extend a human life and put them neatly into a mathematical calculation. .

I wept at the story of your mystical visit to the sea of Galilee, loving the Jesus who  bathed your gentian tattoo and placed his cooling hand on your hot wound and reassured you.  “Cured?” you asked.  “That, too, that, too”  He promised.  My visitation,  not half so clear or dramatic, came in the words and music of an old spiritual issued over the radio one desperate, lonely night  – I don’t remember where or when:  “His eye is on the sparrow, and … I know he watches me.” 

I walked with you into the cancer unit on the way to the radiation suite each day.  I saw those same people: flamboyant scarves hiding those same bald heads, dark glasses protecting those too familiar sunken black-rimmed  eyes.  My heart ached with yours at the sight of those tiny valiant children with their bandaged foreheads and the look of dull terror in the eyes of their parents.  I had my own heroes in that place, as did you in yours: caring nurses, a humorous and kind radiologist, and my favorite, the funny old man who had the appointment time right after mine. This was his third round with cancer, this time all through his “pelvic region.” (This man was too polite to say the word “groin” to a younger woman who was no kin or relation).  His impeccable manners allowed us only veiled references to our deep and abiding gratitude to the makers of Imodium and Pepto-Bismol, our deliverers from the side effects of being radiated in the abdominal area. I treasure the memory of one sweetly shared moment of intimacy, of complete and amused understanding, as we found a coupon for one of those wonder drugs  - buy one get one free – on the end table next to our chairs in the waiting room. “I’ll flip you for it” I said with a grin…and we both laughed until we cried.

I remember the day I understood what it truly meant to have a terminal illness.  I was back at work, at the large United Way where I was a senior staff person.  I was assigned some light duties for a time, in the near aftermath of my radical hysterectomy, five weeks of external radiation and three days of internal radiation (a live piece of radioactive plutonium inserted into the appropriate cavity). One of my jobs was to deal with folks who walked in with miscellaneous requests or information.  An older couple arrived. They appeared to be around the ages of my own parents, had my Dad lived beyond his 51 years.  Their only daughter, who had turned 40 the year before (just like me) had only recently died of cervical cancer. Their friends had taken up a collection at the funeral, and they wanted to share it with an organization that helped cancer patients.  “It’s not much” they demurred “but we hope it might help someone like us.”   I barely heard them, because as I stared into their faces, their eyes still swollen from 12 months of tears, I saw the faces of my own mother and father – and imagined them coming to give a contribution in memory of me.   For what seemed a life time, but I know only lasted a moment, I was plunged down the dark, desperate tunnel of what might have been.  And, as I feel again and again when I recall that moment, I was brought to a sensation of profound gratitude, of thankfulness for skillful doctors, incredible advances in medical science, and the providential care of a God who, does, I know for a fact, keep an eye on me and all the defenseless sparrows of this careworn and wondrous world.

You shared a lot about yourself and your new world after illness in that book, and I found much to delight and inspire me, once again.  The last lines are my favorite, though … as you describe the many ways life had become enriched, albeit different, in  the wake of your life-changing challenge.  “Even my handwriting looks very little like the script of the man I was in June ’84.  Cranky as it is, it’s taller, more legible, with more air and stride.  It comes down the arm of a grateful man.”  Thanks be to you, dear friend of many happy hours, and thanks be to the God who protects and preserves us both.