These Precious Days: Essays

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I’ve read all of her fiction and even though I’m not a huge nonfiction fan, I devoured her memoir and her previous essay collection. I was introduced to Tom Hanks’s editor, Tom Hanks’s agent, his publicist, his assistant, Tom Hanks himself. But my sixty-four-year-old houseguest with recurrent pancreatic cancer asked for absolutely nothing but this.

There were pictures of her at twenty-two, beautiful and dark-eyed, standing on somebody’s desk in little canvas tennis shoes, her gloved hands holding a bat and a net.

As with any collection, there were some essays I liked better than others, and I recommend reading (or listening) to one or two a day, not straight through. That night as my husband and I walked our dog around the block in the cold dark, I told him about Sooki. I did kundalini yoga in the morning, a practice that was built around a great deal of rapid breathing, and then I went on to other things. The plan was that she would go home to Los Angeles during her weeks off, and once UCLA started the trial, she could go home permanently.

This is indeed a precious life and Ann reminds us how very fragile life is and how we need to find the joy in our days. I made it a point not to tell Karl sad medical stories at the end of his long days of sad medical stories.

She is happily surprised to find they’re good and promptly sends off her endorsement to the publisher, flattered that she was asked to ‘help’ someone like him.

Delve deeper into the essays in These Precious Days and you will find that death is more than a pretence. I kept up with a great number of people, and I didn’t know to what extent I’d told Sooki’s story to Karl before, and if I had told him, I didn’t know whether he’d been listening, but now I had his full attention.I had pictured her going through this alone, a conclusion I reached on account of a lack of information and a florid imagination.

Karl said she should send him her records if she wanted to, and that he would talk to Johanna Bendell, an oncologist at the hospital where he works. It had been languishing in a pile by the dresser for a while, and I’d left it there because of an unarticulated belief that actors should stick to acting.

Implicit in the idea of everyone getting together was the reality that this could be the last time it would happen.