elizabethlevett

We’ve almost finished your book.

After two years of reading through all those journals.

I remember sitting with you so many times in your beautiful dining room, the sun came in so warm through the filmy curtains, feeding the orchids that always seemed to be in bloom and shining on the jar of honey for your tea. We would sit on Sunday mornings to eat and talk and sometimes cry.

There on the tall shelves they were all lined up, mostly the lovely, plain notebooks we used to buy together in the Kinokuniya bookshop in Japan Center. You used to write every day for at least twenty minutes, your little fountain pen dancing obediently over the soft paper. You and I wrote together sometimes, or you’d read me pieces you’d worked on in class. I was always floored at your skill with words, your rich descriptions, your courageous honesty about life, loss, and even the disease that claimed you.

You told me you wanted us to collect it all up and do something with it. You’d meant to do it, and in fact you did publish a couple of pieces. But as you got weaker and more fatigued it was difficult to find the motivation. I guess you always knew we’d take care of it, just as we promised we would.

It was a solemn and scary thought at first. We would get together, the small group of us, and divide up your notebooks so we could take turns reading through them, deciding which pieces we should type up. We’d make careful notes to each other on post-its and then trade piles, confident of your silent intervention in our decisions. It was quite an undertaking. But we all loved you so much.

There is something I have to confess though. It was a deep pleasure for me. Reading your work, the fruit of your practice, meant hearing your voice again, being with you again. Rather than bringing me sadness, I found myself looking forward to those times alone on the couch with pages and pages of you. It was like curling up with you and talking again. Sometimes when you were worn out I’d crawl under your big down comforter next to you and we’d watch Colbert or Trevor Noah together. It was like the middle-aged version of a slumber party. I loved too getting to enjoy your exquisite penmanship – so obviously rushed at times that nobody else can decipher it but me. I noticed too that you almost never erased or crossed things out! You were something else, darling girl.

Now it’s finally almost done. I’ve been so eager to finish it, but sometimes it feels we will have finished another part of knowing you, completed something we always knew you to be working on in some way. Ready for release. Ready to be let go.