A beautiful piece this week by Patty Dann. She recounts her husband's diagnosis of, and ultimate death from, a rare brain cancer. There is a deep sadness in the story, but an elegant wisdom as well. Dann does an extraordinary job carrying forward the life of her husband, Willem, in the clarity and love of her writing.
There are Taoist and Confucian resonances here, even if not of Dann's intention.
She found herself being very straightforward with the doctors and wondered about it afterward:
I don’t know why I was so blunt. Of course there are miracles. Of course there are exceptions. But I wanted to know the worst-case scenario. For me that made me feel more in control, even though I was acutely aware I was in control of nothing.
“Live in the moment.”
“All you have is the day.”
“We’re all terminal.”
These phrases ricocheted through my head....
Becoming aware of our lack of control: a Taoist notion. She does not say if she came to accept that lack of control. If "live in the moment" passed through her mind, was she then able to let go of her expectations and desires? There is a certain peace in the tone of her writing that suggests that somehow she did find a way to let go. And in that letting go, she has preserved her voice and, through her voice, Willem's spirit.
But there is something Confucian here as well. What strikes me is her loving work to maintain the social bonds of the family as she struggled with Willem's demise:
A week before his fourth birthday, Jake announced that he wanted a cake in the shape of a fire truck. I am not a baker. I have the urge to bake perhaps twice a year, and that usually results in an apple or pumpkin pie with, I confess, store-bought crust.
But my son wanted a cake in the shape of a fire truck, and in that way that mothers are able to lift cars off their children’s feet in an emergency, I somehow made one. I used practically a whole bottle of red dye in the frosting, which in earlier days would appall me. But now I reasoned that if Willem grew up on the purest whole-wheat bread and beet salad, perhaps junk food was the key to a long life.
I decorated the cake with care — licorice hoses, peppermint wheels, butterscotch headlights and a lattice of thin pretzels for ladders. It was my offering to my son on what I knew would be his last birthday with his father.
We had the party in Central Park. Friends helped push the party favors and food in carts. Willem was able to walk there slowly, but with elegance, holding my hand, wearing his navy blue Nike headband.
The children sat at a picnic table for cake. Jake blew out the candles on the fire truck cake and made a wish. During that period of our lives, he made wishes whenever candles were lighted, and on eyelashes and fluffy dandelions. “I always make the same wish, Mom,” he’d say, “and you can’t ever ask me what it is.”
She found ways to support her son and maintain her husband's dignity, all of which created and reproduced the identity and meaning of each member of the family. They all extended their humanity in that work and in those loving bonds. However hard it is for a child, I am sure that, as he looks back on his own life, he will remember his father with warm affection. And that is what a family is ideally supposed to be. Beautiful.
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