Strange alchemy

The Future Is Like Pie #25

Lisa Maria Marquis
November 18, 2021

This newsletter is not going to be about grief. It wants to be, because that is how grief works: it becomes the current electrifying everything. But today is my birthday, which has nothing to do with grief, so we will not make this about that.

I didn’t mean to wait until my birthday to write this newsletter, but here we are. Schedules have been messy lately. Seasons have been changing. Books have been written and copyedited. Grief has been showing up in bits and pieces, in different ways, with different ripples.

But I’m not ready to talk about grief.

I’m forty today, or thirty-nine again, depending on how much you want to buy into the cultural joke. Becoming a forty-year-old woman feels like a condemnation, of sorts, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about it, exactly. Lament it? Wither up and tumbleweed away? Never appear in public again? (Don’t worry, the pandemic’s got that one covered.) Society seems think that age in itself is a reason to grieve, when, really, the opposite is true. Or truer.

But this isn’t about grief.

To be honest, I don’t have a lot of feelings about turning forty. I’ve spent the day like I spend most days: drinking coffee, walking dogs, hopping on Zoom calls. The number doesn’t much matter: I’ll do today what I did last year, and what I’ll do next year. If anything gives me pause, it’s not the accumulation, but the progression.

And that’s not because I’m vain (though I am), but because I’m just scared. Life is so stunningly, heartbreakingly brief. The binary before each of us—grow old or die—is so inescapable, so harsh, so human, that our brains can’t even parse it. We had to invent women’s magazines and wrinkle serum and birthday cards with coffins on them to cope.

But this isn’t about grief, is it.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the only link I have to share with you today—to cap off this existential rambling—is this emotional, sharply beautiful essay about friendship and illness and storytelling by Ann Patchett:

Before I can start writing a novel, I have to know how it ends. I have to know where I’m going, otherwise I spend my days walking in circles. Not everyone is like this. I’ve heard writers say that they write in order to discover how the story ends, and if they knew the ending in advance there wouldn’t be any point in writing. For them the mystery is solved by the act, and I understand that; it’s just not the way I work. I knew I would write about Sooki eventually, I had told her so, but I had no idea what I’d say. I didn’t know how the story would end.

“She’ll die,” Karl said. “People die of this.”

But wasn’t there also a scenario in which she didn’t die? The chemo, the clinical trial, the yoga and the vegetables, the prayers of nuns and all the time to paint—what if it added up to something? What if there was some strange alchemy in the proportions that could never be exactly measured and, as a result, she lived[?]

I’ll just be here, trying to work out how the story will end.

Today happens to be World Pancreatic Cancer Day, so here’s an idea: let’s celebrate my birthday by donating to PanCAN, the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.

Thanks, friends. I appreciate you all so much.

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