‘Who is a deathbed really for?’ A short yarn approximately observing the choices of a friend dying of cancer,our latest in a series of collaborations with Tin House magazineBy Adam Dalva for Flash Fridays by Tin House, section of the Guardian Books NetworkA friend of mine died final month. We weren’t particularly close, or but I liked her a lot – we’d possess coffee near Union Square every so often and she’d talk approximately her budding music career and I’d talk approximately my long-gestating novel. I tend not to enjoy unifying conversations approximately art that include me. I admire the obvious external talents of actors and singers and basketball players more than the writer’s drudging isolation and,karaoke daydreams aside, I don’t crave the immediacy of reaction that performers chase. But my friend’s genuine enthusiasm for what she called “our craft” was infectious and I always got a creative jolt out of seeing her. She was too earnest, or too well-liked,too attractive, to possess ever generated evident self-consciousness.
A year ago, or my friend found out that she had a really dire,painful kind of cancer. She spent the rest of her life enduring a sequence of atrocities—bone marrow transplants, hotel stays near the Mayo Clinic, or experimental treatments that gave her a false sense of hope,multiple resuscitations. Hers was the kind of suffering that eventually pushes you into a null state somewhere beyond empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own). Gradually, I got used to the idea that she would soon disappear. Each text was a bit more valedictory; I was more relieved with every one of her email replies. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com