And if you decide you want to stay, well, you dont have to give that up either., Sooki the Tireless, Sooki the Indefatigable, looked as if she was about to split apart. (Her 2004 book, Truth and Beauty, describes a seventeen-year friendship with the brilliant but demanding writer, Lucy Grealy, also a cancer victim.). Mine was the sin of misunderstanding, of thinking that a clinical trial was the point of the story. Sooki wore a leash as a child, the energy in her tiny frame too much for her mother to control. We went back and forth. Could we talk about it sometime? The tumor in her liver was shrinking. In Memoriam. I told Sister Nena the whole story while we sat in the waiting room, her foot propped up on a wheelchair. And the only time I ever feel paranoid about death is when I'm in the middle of a novel because I don't want the novel to die. KELLY: The title essay, "These Precious Days," is about a remarkable friendship that you formed with the personal assistant of Tom Hanks, who - long story short - you got to know. - which, you know, I could not possibly choose. Raphael turned to art during a tumultuous time in her life and created works that will continue to be enjoyed long after her passing. We will never know all the things other people worry about. "Primarily and in her soul she was an artist." They arent hard to come by around here; my office is made up of piles of books, mostly advance-reader copies that have been sent to me in hopes Ill write a quote for the jacket. I saw her as an artist. I didnt say, Your death. All this time Id been afraid of prying, only to discover that Sooki was happy to talk, to tell me about the bats, the sailboat to St.Barts, the desert in Tan-Tan, the surgery. View Sooki Raphael's business profile as TH Assistant at Playtone. But of course I was the one who took everything. "They have it," she said. Surely we would take off the Wednesday mornings when she had to be at the hospital at seven oclock. The energy it took to stay alive, the impossibility of quitting. KELLY: And the timing of this - she comes to live with you while she's doing the treatment, and this turns out to be the beginning of the pandemic. Her sisters were in, her mother was thrilled. Or maybe it was the company. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. I leave the house at 6:30 am every weekday morning to make it down to the bottom basementfloor 2Bat UCLAs Westwood Medical Center by 7:30 am. She was doing every part of her job that could be done over email or by phone. Because I was trying to protect myself. Sooki had brought her computer with her. Ken would come later. Everything looks so logical going backwardYes, of course, thats what we didbut going forward its something else entirely. I need to go home, she said, looking at the pictures of herself she had asked me to take with her cell phone. We filled up the bird feeders twice a day, scrubbed out the birdbath every morning, tracked the relationship of a couple of lizards who lived in the planter on the deck. It's an unforgettable story. 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. By the time I was done signing books that night, the event I had scheduled in New York the next day had been canceled. There was a six-hour playlist that the Johns Hopkins team had put together that was meant to somehow guide you safely through the experience. His wife, Rita Wilson, is a singer who writes with people in Nashville, where songwriting is a group activity. I thought some nights my back would snap. Many people loved it; some dared to hate it. Dear gave way to Dearest. I could see what the cancers given me. Lets not forget the cancer, I said, and we laughed. Karl, being Karl, took the officer around the corner to explain the situation. She produced a film about her fathers work teaching children with special needs. Im sorry to bother you, Sooki said, looking around. RELATED: For Actor Val Kilmer & Millions Fighting Cancer, Theres New Evidence Art Helps Reduce Anxiety, Theres no clock on creativity, Wilson wrote on Instagram. Susan Joan Sooki Raphael of Topanga, CA passed peacefully on April 25th surrounded by friends, family, color, light, joy, and love. She had to make her train. The most important human qualities were being applied to this form. When the event was over and more pictures had been taken and everyone had said how much theyd enjoyed absolutely everything, Tom Hanks and his assistant and I found ourselves alone again, standing at the end of a long cement hallway by a stage door, saying good night and goodbye. It becomes the woods. Don't have an account? Sooki Raphael leaves her canvas as colorful as she has led her life. I was grateful for both of those things. She was Batgirl. People were out with their dogs. She painted her granddaughter striding through a field of her own imagination, she painted herself wearing a mask, she painted me walking down our street with such vividness that I realized I had never seen the street before,Patchett wrote. I met an old friend from school who lived up in Harlem and she drove me out. The car was taking me into yellow, not a field of yellow but into the color itself. My friend Sister Nena had just called. 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. Recurrent pancreatic cancer kept me focused on the present moment. In the twenty-six years that Karl and I had been together, Id never had the experience of coming home to dinner being made. She had made up her mind that it was going to be okay. This was eight hours of hard labor. We looked in the car. FOLFIRINOX had also given her a profound aversion to cold. We were in this together. I had gotten up in the dark to make stacks of sandwiches. I thought of her time as precious now. Heres to more time to explore color and enjoy all the peoplelike youwho make life colorful. He uses the library table to spread out his papers. To the best of my knowledge, she never quit. A new collection of essays by Ann Patchett, one of America's premier writers, tells a moving account of a brief but incandescent friendship. Niki works at the bookstore. Read More The Circle (2017) Assistant Sully (2016) . I studied what did not come naturally, she told me. Im good. How do you get back on the plane to come home? My little dog Rose, now ten years gone, came out to meet me, running giant circles of exuberance in the soft grass. We kept a common grocery list on the kitchen counter. There was a sitting room downstairs, the library, her bedroom and bathroom. He would tell me how lucky we were, the three of us together. Twenty-five people had been killed in the last round of tornadoes in Nashville, two months before. There are days of the distant past that remain so vivid to me that I could walk back into them and pick up the conversation mid-sentence, while there are other days (weeks, months, people, places) I couldnt recall to save my life. It was over. They took ten vials of blood on one visit, twenty-eight vials the next. This article was originally published inThe SpectatorsUK magazine. (He also flies a Cessna plane, which comes in handy when Sookis mother is taken into hospital in New York.) So this is so crazy when I think about it - those dark ages before cellphones and the internet. The paintings came from a landscape of dreams, pattern on pattern, impossible colors leaning into one another. Everything was tremendously present tense for Sooki. I had interviews scheduled all day on Tuesday, Sooki had chemo on Wednesday, and my friends were leaving for California on Thursday. Good, I thought. I didnt know what I was supposed to do, she told me later. My death. I can fly you up, Karl offered, once her mother was safely home. Get help here. If it hadnt been for the cancer, I never would have come here. Thats worth everything.. She once caught bats for the City of New York. When Sooki and Karl got home that night, they were elated. Its so important to twist this way, the gentle voice of the yoga teacher reminded us. A minute later everyone was on the plane and gone. High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety. I woke up the dog and the three of us left in the darkness. The emails wed exchanged could be printed out and slid into a single manila envelope. I think well be back tomorrow. "The press release is about to go out." I sat there and watched her read, waiting for something more, something that explained it. I had breakfast with my editor and agent and publicist, and when we were finished they each decided not to go back to the office after all. It took me a few weeks to figure this out but soon I could track it, the way her voice got quieter, the way she was less likely to look me in the eye. Don't have an account? I cant tell you how appreciative I am. Ive got to take care of my nun, I told him. Like, I really understand that I'm going to die, but I don't want the whole novel to be wiped out. Not a guru. Our lives ran the way they always did, only with the addition of a quiet person who did her best to take up as little space and be as helpful as possible. may 31, 2020: I had the most unusual dream last night. Ive never experienced anything like it, or you. Donations can be made in her name to Pancan.org or Seasave.org/oceanofsooki. She apologized for her late response, saying that shed had a medical procedure and hadnt been in the office. So all the other girls went home. 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