We kissed, we had a drink together, we promised to keep in touch.
A few months later Nancy was dead, of cancer, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
I sent the recital program to Nancy’s brother, to send on to her daughter.
I had my grandmother’s watercolor framed and sent it to the next oldest of her three granddaughters, my cousin Brenda, in Sacramento.
I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.
When my father died I kept moving. When my mother died I could not. The last time I saw her was eight weeks before she died. She had been in the hospital, my brother and I had gotten her home, we had arranged for oxygen and shifts of nurses, we had filled the prescriptions for morphine and Ativan. On the morning Quintana and I were to leave for New York, my mother insisted that we bring her a painted metal box that sat on a small table in her bedroom, a box in which she kept papers she thought might have importance, for example a copy of the deed to a gold mine in El Dorado County that she and her sister had inherited from their father and no longer owned. My brother said that she did not need the box, that he had already extracted any still operable papers and put them in safekeeping. She was insistent. She wanted the metal box. Quintana brought the box and set it on the bed. From it my mother took two pieces of silver flatware, a small ladle and a small serving spoon, each wrapped in smoothed scraps of used tissue paper. She gave the serving spoon to Quintana and the ladle to me. I protested: she had already given me all her silver, I had ladles, she had given me ladles. “Not this one,” she said. She pointed out the curve of the handle. It seemed that she had what she called “a special feeling” for the way the handle curved on this particular ladle. It seemed that she found this ladle so satisfying to touch that she had set it aside, kept it. I said that since it gave her pleasure she should continue to keep it. “Take it,” she said, her voice urgent. “I don’t want it lost.” I was still pretending that she would get through the Sierra before the snows fell. She was not.
About the Author
Joan Didion was born in California and lives in New York City. She is the author of five novels and seven previous books of nonfiction, including The Year of Magical Thinking. Her collected nonfiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, was published by Everyman’s Library in September 2006.