Free The Staircase Letters by Arthur Motyer

hard to do what Carol called a sort of “darning job.” She hadto perform this on one of her novels, which also needed extra characters, more developed situations etc. … I don’t think she ever tried that again, though it worked out OK—in fact, I thought it was one of her better ones, so take heart!
    Elma had read only the first of twelve drafts of
What’s Remembered
, and I had taken her comments to heart. That fact made me deeply regret that she did not live long enough to see the work in print. No reason, of course, for Death to wait or pay attention to the heavy sound of “deadline,” even when that word comes from a publisher. I thought then of Emily Dickinson:
    Because I could not stop for Death
,
    He kindly stopped for me
    The carriage held but just ourselves
    And Immortality
.

THREE
    Something has occurred to her—something
transparently simple, something she’s always
known, it seems, but never articulated. Which
is that the moment of death occurs while we
are still alive. Life marches right up to the wall
of that final darkness, one extreme state of
being butting against the other. Not even
a breath separates them. Not even a blink of
the eye. A person can go on and on tuned
in to the daily music of food and work
and weather and speech right up to the last
minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.
    —From
The Stone Diaries
     
    ON THE LAST DAY of January 2002, Elma wrote that her “primary tumour had shrunk to virtually zero, with no activity at all. So no more chemo!” But as January turned into February, the signals grew darker.
    Dear A.,
    No more chemo is a lovely prospect, indeed, but I must remember that the brain is a whole different story, and it has always been the big problem. No one was really very concerned about the chest tumour, except to radiate it inorder to keep it from becoming so large as to be painful. The chemo was to help stop its (lung tumour) metastasizing (say into the other lung), and thus decreasing my general well-being. However, I don’t want to sound negative here, and while I could still fly out of the world any time, day or night, without warning, I
hope
one can infer that the radiation worked reasonably well on the brain, since it did on the lung, and has thus bought me a bit of time. Too bad they can’t repeat the brain radiation (or won’t consider it before a year, anyway) as they could with the chest, but them’s the breaks, and I ain’t complaining!
    Nor am I forgetting that I owe any reprieves as much to the love and support and prayers of my family and friends as I do to luck or good genes—probably way more. So thanks a trillion—and keep those positive thought-waves a-coming. To say nothing of the stories—whee! And I wish you continued high energy and inspiration for the novel, of course.
    Ever … ever … ever …
    E.
    Ever the optimist, despite what she knew was coming, Elma continued to read and to think. Writing to me the next week, she told me she had read two more of my stories “with delight,” but “I always need at least two, better three, readings before I fit things together and know my own mind.” She had also seen the film version of Annie Proulx’s
The Shipping News
, and had admired the characters, who were, she wrote,
    exactly as I had pictured them. And the scenery was beautifully filmed. No wonder in that land of cloud, fog and mirages, that people have “the sight,” and the line between so-called truth and fiction almost ceases to exist.
    I was also recently blessed by a young Aboriginal woman, someone with “the sight,” in an amazingly soothing laying-on-of-hands ceremony, which helps my acceptance a lot … There have been revered healers (usually, though not always, female) since pre-recorded history, in every country and culture, though the Christians certainly did their best to stamp them out in Europe and elsewhere.
    Her next letter brought disquieting news, which accounted for Carol’s not having been directly