Free In Fond Remembrance of Me by Howard Norman Page A

diary:

    I lost out as a Buddhist, worse as a Christian.
Never mind; I ask, please, to see a harlequin duck.
It would best be quite soon. 1

    I have in my possession all 116 of Helen’s prayers to see birds; some she translated, some were translated, albeit
roughly, by a graduate student at the University of Michigan a few years after Helen’s death. Helen sent me the Japanese-language manuscript from Kyoto. It was typed on onionskin paper, which was what everyone used to type on. Each prayer has the title “Prayer One,” “Prayer Two,” and so on. The entire manuscript is titled “Prayers to See Birds,” practical enough, and I say “manuscript” because why else title it if you don’t see it to some extent as a work of literature? On the past page (in English and Japanese) is the sentence Typed by Remington Typewriter in Kyoto, Japan, July 6, 1978. Thirty-one days later Helen died in her brother and sister-in-law’s house in Kyoto. I like thinking of Helen alert and strong enough to type up those pages, no matter over what length of time.
    Later I wrote to Helen’s brother and sister-in-law asking if “Remington typewriter” referred solely to the one typed sentence in English on the last page of the manuscript. Arthur, Helen’s brother, wrote back saying that, yes, it did, because her Japanese typewriter was made by a different company. “I know that you and Helen spoke often about typewriters,” Arthur wrote in that same letter. “Helen told me as much. I suppose that last sentence of her manuscript was meant for your special bemusement.”
    In fact, a year or a little over a year after Helen passed away I wrote to Arthur offering to buy Helen’s Remington typewriter. I suddenly wanted it. It was a bout of acquisition fever, I suppose, and I am not pleased to be the person who asked for the typewriter, but I did. There was greed resident in my nostalgia. I wanted to own an object connected to my and Helen’s friendship. I do not know all that went into my
comporting myself so crudely; I cannot forgive myself for it. It was Susanne, Helen’s sister-in-law, who wrote back, a prompt one-paragraph reply which ended by saying, “As for Helen’s English typewriter, you might recognize the font on the very page you are now reading. Yes, Mr. Norman, I am afraid that Arthur and I wish to keep the typewriter. You’ll understand. We use it, actually.” When I read her letter I recalled that Helen said of Susanne that she had about her “an elegant restraint.”
    â€œI think I’d like to die quickly—I mean, at the very last,” Helen had said. “I wouldn’t want to be too aware of the moment.” It was about a week before we left Churchill. We were having dinner. Arctic char, potatoes, thawed green beans, as usual. “I mean, I don’t want to have to have all those tubes and such, in a cold hospital room.”
    â€œThat’s just not going to happen. Not from what you’ve told me about your family in Japan.”
    â€œNo, I suppose not. I shouldn’t be speaking of this. Two months knowing you, Howard Norman, I am speaking like this. Quite unfair, actually. You know what, though? I should do what this old woman I knew in Greenland did. I really should.”
    â€œWhich was?”
    â€œAbout five or six years ago, I stayed in Greenland all winter. I was taking life histories, and I was working with one very old woman. She had cancer. There was no question as to what it was. A visiting doctor—maybe from the World Health Organization or some such. There was a diagnosis. Well, one night, she went around and said good-bye,
she went right outside and disappeared. How cold—who knows, maybe minus fifty Fahrenheit, colder, probably. Out she went. All alone out she went, you know? Walked as far as strength allowed, I suppose, drank a bottle of whiskey top to bottom as my