These Precious Days: Essays

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And then one night, for reasons I cannot imagine, we decided to do it all again before we went to sleep. What if you come to Nashville to take part in a clinical trial for recurrent pancreatic cancer only to be killed by a tornado? So, I was surprised on my first scheduled day of radiation to have another technician pop in with a red sharpie to make three large x ’s near the tattoos as additional points of reference and stick clear round stickers over them.

My doctor paired up some words I never thought I would hear together: “pancreatic cancer” and “you’re in remission! What I have read is the title story, a novella, really, from Patchett’s book which is expected to be published in November 2021. At a certain point the reader comes across the mention of the painting and realizes that the painting she's reading about is the painting on the cover. I can never quite hear what the person making the introduction is saying, and for a moment I wouldn’t be able to tell you the name of the theater or even the city I was in. I had interviews scheduled all day on Tuesday, Sooki had chemo on Wednesday, and my friends were leaving for California on Thursday.Patchett ponders this as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and what it all means. They were lucky to get up in the morning to fly across the country so Sooki could have a pancreaticoduodenectomy, also known as a Whipple procedure. This book of essays is very personal, many of them appearing in some form previously in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, as she talks about the relationships with her three fathers. What if there was some strange alchemy in the proportions that could never be exactly measured and, as a result, she lived, only to die at some later point from the thing no one saw coming: a pandemic, tornadoes, a straight-line wind. She married her second husband, Karl, after 11 years of dating; he is 16 years her senior and a medical doctor who earned a master’s in philosophy and theology at Oxford.

I lit the candles on the table and served the cauliflower cake and tomato soup I’d made that afternoon. Patchett’s meditations on death, mortality, family, friendship, and creativity definitely struck a chord with me.

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.