It was more like a magic trick than someone turning in for the evening. I tilt toward the overly familiar. More breath. She was supposed to lug this cooler with her to the hospital every week. You should have planned for the financial fallout of having pancreatic cancer twice?. Surely there was a piece of this story she was leaving out because the next thing I knew shed sailed off with them. The ones Tom Hanks approved of were handed to me. He was not one to miss a workout and neither was I. Id practiced kundalini devotedly for years and then drifted, picking up other things, and while Id stuck with the short class, I had amassed no end of DVDs. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year after we met. Theres a grain of truth in, Short term rentals have become a source of income for some property owners in the Santa Monica Mountains and a source of aggravation for others,, Theres a special place just a few miles up the coast, where whales, dolphins, and sea lions swim close to shore, where you can watch. Heres to more time to explore color and enjoy all the peoplelike youwho make life colorful. Tom Hanks was so completely absent from our conversations that I once asked her if he knew where she was. One of the last things I understand when Im putting a novel together is the structure of time. She seems very nice, Karl said once we were in the kitchen. Cause and effect are so much clearer in novels than they are in life. And then I found out that she had had pancreatic cancer, that she had had a Whipple, that she had gone through chemo and radiation, that she had been pronounced cancer free, that her cancer came back. I asked whether she was okay. I flew back to New York for two more events, the first one in Connecticut. Copyright 2023 SurvivorNet, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Raphael passed peacefully on April 25. We miss you. It took a while to get the mushrooms. There was no other reason for me to be going on the cancer patients journey. Sooki was making dinner. When Patchett connected with Tom Hanks, who is a fellow author and book lover (among other things! (Her 2004 book, Truth and Beauty, describes a seventeen-year friendship with the brilliant but demanding writer, Lucy Grealy, also a cancer victim.). This is what I need, she said, excited. He was in Nashville. Copyright 2023 SurvivorNet, Inc. All Rights Reserved. She kept saying she wanted to be the one to help me for a change. Dionne Warwick came in with her son. I presented him with the studies from Johns Hopkins. https://thespectator.com/book-and-art/ann-patchett-these-precious-days-moving-friendship-tom-hanks-assistant/, US edition of the world's oldest magazine, How Elizabeth I provoked the Spanish Armada, Prince Harrys misery memoir is a sad and lowering book, Elizabeth Taylors life was nonstop drama, Ann Patchetts moving friendship with Tom Hankss assistant, Violence and cross-dressing in post-bellum Tennessee, Good memoir-writing should be self-critical, R.B. She even dedicated the front cover of her new book to Raphaels lovely painting of her dog. After a series of emails, Sooki comes to live with Ann and her husband . The essays, even when they are nominally about something else, are about the weight and grief of relationships: with her father and two stepfathers, her best friend, her husband and, improbably, actor Tom Hanks' assistant, a woman named Sooki with whom Patchett develops a deep bond. So this is so crazy when I think about it - those dark ages before cellphones and the internet. My reading on this flight is a book called Radical Remission. The title piece in the autobiographical essay collection These Precious Days by Ann Patchett is about her unexpected friendship with Tom Hanks's personal assistant, Sooki Raphael, who ended up living with Patchett and her husband in Nashville while enrolled in a medical trial for pancreatic cancer. In a previous interview with SurvivorNet, Caleb Farley talked about his mothers battle with breast cancer and how heopted out of his position as a cornerbackfor the Virginia Tech Hokies due to COVID-19 concerns. Her true work, which had lingered for so many years in her imagination, emerged fully formed, because even if she hadnt been painting, she saw the world as a painter, not in terms of language and story but of color and shape. Wed stood together in the dark of a Washington theater for a matter of minutes a year and a half earlier. A transformer must have blown up somewhere close by. A man answered. I didnt know you had a husband!! The assistant was a tiny woman wearing a fitted black-velvet evening coat embroidered with saucer-size peonies. She had set up her life in the basement of our house, a place we never went. She had moved in before the pandemic. (I say this as someone who is spending my days trying to write about our friendship and what happened here. Sooki went with him every day. "Let's go back to the hotel. We started looking up articles on the Johns Hopkins website. When I was very nearly at the end, I came to a beautiful lake, the kind youd see on a Japanese postcard, or my imagined picture of a Japanese postcard. There was a bottle of water, a blue glass by the sink. That was my reward. Someone wound the clock and suddenly the second hand, so long suspended, began to tick again, pushing us forward. Sparky Walks the Neighborhood with Ann, Nashville 2020. Raphael turned to art during a tumultuous time in her life and created works that will continue to be enjoyed long after her passing. Then one day she told me she was starting to shed. Shed gone to an Indian restaurant and bought bread stuffed with apricots and dates. Sooki Raphael leaves her canvas as colorful as she has led her life. Karl is a doctor, but Sooki had been treated at UCLA, Stanford, Duke, and Memorial Sloan Kettering. I get asked sometimes, who's your favorite author? Were they awake and choosing not to come to the basement? She wanted to know what constituted being a good houseguest during a tornado. The greenroom crowd was then escorted to their seats, and we were ushered to the dark place behind the curtainTom Hanks, his assistant, and I. He had a single-engine Cirrus that he kept at the small hobby airport not far from where we lived. Hanks, by way of reciprocation, agrees to do the audio recording of Patchetts eighth novel, The Dutch House, and a sporadic email exchange between Patchett and Sooki develops into a friendship. Although his superhero mother will not get to see him play in the NFL, Farley will take many lessons he learned from her and apply them to whatever challenges he faces in life moving forward. You all did a book event. That had been one of her greatest fears about coming to stay with us in the first place, that she would be unable to take care of herself, that she would be a burden, that she would embarrass herself. Gingerly we picked our way forward. The idea of the considerably longer trip to New York was good news. I should have thought of that one myself. We headed upstairs to lie side by side on our yoga mats, deciding to disregard my friends advice about staying on separate floors. She was indefatigably pleasant and warm while maintaining her distance. You think youre getting chemo three Wednesdays a month but really its a test to measure the effectiveness of kundalini yoga and kohlrabi. I had signed up for a farm-share box, and every week we were overwhelmed with pounds of mysterious vegetables. Its why I dont like to go to other peoples houses for dinner: I never want to tell people Im a vegetarian. And we were. Im dying, my friend had said to me. Had it been a bad book or just a good-enough book, I would have put it down, but page after page it surprised me. Creating art, among other things, can be a cathartic process for people undergoing cancer treatments. I couldnt. Somehow I imagined that she had mentioned she was in a clinical trial in Nashville but not that she was living with us, which didnt feel like too much of an evasion, seeing as how she managed to live with us in the quietest way imaginable. Out on the tarmac, I could see her again exactly as she was, resplendent in her velvet coat, her black beret. Every childhood is strange in its own way. I was going to tell Karl what was happening but he was looking at his own phone. . Not to advance your cancer treatment? Lucy said she didnt have time for this. I could see what they needed and what theyd given me. I was introduced to Tom Hankss editor, Tom Hankss agent, his publicist, his assistant, Tom Hanks himself. We tried to be jolly and failed and cried again. I paid the check. They would flow on in papery layers, in a creation act. Will time be linear or can it stutter and skip? I was overcome by a sense of order in the world: if I hadnt picked up that book, if I hadnt gone to D.C., if we hadnt stayed in just enough contact for her to tell me a year after the fact that she had cancer, and if I hadnt mentioned it to Karl, she wouldnt have found her way to the only clinical trial in the country that both matched her cancer and could take her immediately. She had transferred her life into brushwork, impossible colors overlapping, the composition precariously and perfectly balanced. I was no longer sick or well. When she gave us the painting she had done of Sparky on the back of the couch, I felt as if Matisse had painted our dog.. He's really interesting. Moving Forward after Losing a Loved One to Cancer. $23.99. She had been in the house for only a few minutes; there hadnt been enough time to lose anything. He read several articles while I waited. All the messages were about Tom and Rita. PATCHETT: I really, really appreciate that. But she could. Or its supposed to slow it down. She hadnt lost her hair on FOLFIRINOX, though shed lost her sense of taste and smell, the feeling in her feet and hands, and twenty pounds. In bed the night before, I asked Karl, How do you think this is going?, He put down his crossword puzzle. On Thursday morning I started to cry while walking Sparky. A minute later everyone was on the plane and gone. Because then, it won't just be me; it will be the entire world of people in my head. She was painting. Like, I really understand that I'm going to die, but I don't want the whole novel to be wiped out. The chemical tide that rose in Sookis blood had not only caused her hair to fall out; it caused that hair to mat into a solid surface. He watched as she went through multiple rounds of chemotherapy while still working and taking care of her family. You know that you dont talk about yourself, right? We were living together. He wanted to know why I hadnt told him this. I was happy, even thrilled, to stop traveling. Suffice to say the car I was strapped into followed a tunnel down into dark and darker colors, narrower spaces. Patchetts good intentions to help a stranger she took a liking to cant be separated from her self-promoting instincts to make a story worth writing about. She said we could expect to be in the thick of things for an hour and a half, maybe two hours, with some residual effects for another three or four hours after that. People were out with their dogs. I really could call once, and I wanted to call her after dinner. I didnt see how it could hurt to ask. I couldnt stay upright, a hangover from the last eight hours in which I had been quite memorably deboned. Information; Artists; Auctions; Exhibitions; Magazine; Services; Market Analysis . Seventy percent of participants rated it among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives. He rolled his eyes, but he kept reading. Its important to think about your intentions before you start, my friend told us. Or I would have forgotten about it, except that I got a call from Tom Hankss publicist a few weeks later, asking whether I would fly to Washington in October to interview the actor onstage as part of his book tour. But over time the idea drifted to the back burner. I had thought I was writing a novel about a woman who had left her family to go serve the poor in India. You must have Mary Poppinss suitcase.. Sooki let my friends with the plane know that she would be there on Thursday. I wonder, I said to her one night while we walked Sparky around the block, do you think youre a good assistant because youre a private person, or did you become a private person because youve been an assistant for a long time?. Shes Now Memorialized in Author Ann Patchetts Latest Book; Moving Forward after the Loss of a Loved One to Cancer, Raphael first met Patchett backstage at an event with Hanks in 2017. And I roll them all up. The house smelled of chickpea stew and rice when I came in the door that night. Lets try the car.. And I found maybe five other kids who had done the same thing and decided that I was going to make Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe its the trial, she said, but I think it could just as easily be the food and the yoga.. feb. 8, 2020: I have wanted to writeevery dayfor forever. The more literary essays include an introduction to the stories of Eudora Welty (No writer I know of tells the truth of the landscape like Welty); pieces on book covers (I finally knew how to ask for what I wanted I would send my books into the world wearing the best suit of clothes I could find); childrens stories; sitting next to John Updike at a lunch at the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and perhaps my favorite, To the Doghouse, on literary influences. I was trying to read her lips. His wife, Rita Wilson, is a singer who writes with people in Nashville, where songwriting is a group activity. As it turned out, Sooki and I needed the same thing: to find someone who could see us as our best and most complete selves. Now I look like an improvised elementary school art project, and in addition to owning my permanent tattoos, I have to nurture my three little stickers and hand-drawn sharpie marks so they last six weeks. I would love to stay with you for my first night or two in Nashvilleit would be wonderful to spend some time with you. Just think, I would say to her on Wednesdays. I had gotten up in the dark to make stacks of sandwiches. Sooki had had a toucan in college. She was the magnet in the compass. The price of living with a writer was that eventually she would write about you. I never cry, and yet I had plans to do nothing else for the rest of the day and maybe the rest of the week. The story has started without my realizing it. 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