A real-world Jurassic Park scenario. The puzzle of immigration, and the immigration of puzzles. The Mapplethorpe x Doolittle collaboration you never imagined. Finding solace in poetry. The inner lives of farm animals. All that—and more—in this week’s edition.

1. What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception. —CLR

2. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Natan Last | The New Yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

So here’s something about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve done them since I was old enough to hold a pen. I’ve written about them. (More than once!) I don’t say this to establish any nerd bona fides, but to make clear that I know from good crossword stories. And in a week when multiple national magazines ran longform pieces about puzzles, Natan Last’s New Yorker feature—which ran in print under the far better headline “Rearrangements”—became one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. A longtime crossword constructor and writer, Last is currently working on a book about you-know-what. Still, this piece contains multitudes in the best way possible. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Ghogre, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords increased his English fluency and ultimately earned him a so-called Einstein visa to the U.S. On another, it uses Ghogre’s story to interrogate the cultural history and linguistic conventions of American-style crosswords—and on a third, it contends with the current movement trying to push those crosswords out of their Western rut and to be more expansive in both their clues and their fill. This conversation has been going on for years among constructors and editors, and the resulting sea change is evident everywhere from the iconic New York Times puzzle to outlets like The New Yorker and USA Today. Yet, Last wraps a human-interest story and a thorny bit of discourse into a bundle that’s accessible to non-solvers while also being sharp and nuanced enough to satisfy obsessives like me. If you didn’t have a clue, now you do. —PR

3. A Work of Love

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This utterly winning Q&A is about “the Noah’s ark you never heard about,” as Radiolab host Lulu Miller puts it in her introduction. Miller talks to John Megahan, an illustrator who spent years secretly drawing detailed pictures of animals engaging in queer behavior: “male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.” The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.” —SD

4. How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Cep profiles poet Christian Wiman who, nearly 20 years ago at age 39—newly married, his life before him—was diagnosed with a “rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” He imagined he had five years to live. As a child, his family’s anger and depression boiled over into violence in fits they referred to as “the sulls.” Wiman, so afflicted, used exercise to quell his feelings until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He made poetry his obsession, “swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes” and later John Milton, thinking that to write great poems, you first must consume them. Cep is nearly invisible in this piece; it’s so carefully researched and written, you feel as though you’re face to face with Wiman as he shares stories and what poetry has meant to him at various stages in his life. Poetry, he has written, is a salve “for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.” Despite that, as Cep notes, when Wiman was in “the cancer chair” undergoing treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to verse. “In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own,” she writes. Cep’s nuanced profile is a testament to dogged determination, coming to grips with faith—both in God and the power of poetry—and the feat of sheer will against despair. —KS

5. What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A couple of years ago, my downstairs neighbors kept chickens. (Finger, Tender, and Nugget. I take no responsibility for the names.) These sassy ladies realized that I was a soft touch, and every day merrily hopped up the stairs to my deck to peer in through the patio door, awaiting kitchen scraps. I soon noticed that when I got up and opened my bedroom curtains, the chickens peered up from the yard. Curtains open, they would race up the stairs: the café was in business. These girls were so on the ball that I have not eaten a chicken since we became acquainted. It’s little wonder, then, that I pounced on this investigation into research on the complexity of thinking in farm animals, an area I have mused on since the food-savvy chickens but that is often ignored by scientists. David Grimm bravely faces the “cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails” and “sour miasma of pig excrement” to enter the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) and learn about the questions being asked there, such as do cows have friends? (Considering that scientists have potty-trained cows here, I think they probably do.) Grimm keeps the tone light—sliding in a few quips between the science—but still provides a comprehensive overview of the work. With a staggering 78 billion farm animals on Earth, it is time we gave them more thought. —CW

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It seems to have worked: it’s difficult to square Wiman’s history of aggression and dysfunction with the man he is today. Still, he retains some of the intensity of his youth, especially in his sky-blue eyes, which he sometimes closes to think. His childhood wasn’t all violence, he feels the need to say—there was beauty, too. The beauty of language; dialects he pocketed like coins, then spent in poems about home like “Five Houses Down,” with a neighborhood junk collector whose “barklike earthquake curses / were not curses, for he could goddam / a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch.” And the beauty of mesquite trees, tumbleweeds, and dust devils, the last of which he re-creates in a narrow wisp of a poem:

of flourishing
vanishing

wherein to live
is to move

cohesion
illusion

wild untouchable toy
called by a boy

God’s top

“Sid thinks big and sees big,” says Atul Gawande, ’87, himself the author of four bestselling books on medicine, a surgeon, and a friend of Mukherjee’s. “He’s able to see the entire landscape of cancer, the gene, and then the cell, and then on and on. He’s driven by understanding at the molecular level what our lives are like as an organism, and even at the societal level. That’s how he makes sense of the world.”

It’s late afternoon, and the light in Mukherjee’s office begins to fade. But Mukherjee is still thinking and talking and making plans. He talks about the art scene in New York City, visiting museums on weekends. He admits, a bit sheepishly, that he also has artistic talents. In fact, some of his obsessive doodling of molecules appears in his books. He grins. Sure, he’s obsessive about his work, but he loves his life outside the office. He and Sze throw elaborate dinner parties in their Manhattan apartment, for which he cooks. Sze describes how, when her husband likes a dish at a restaurant, he dissects it, smelling it, tasting it, talking to the chef if he can’t figure out how it was made—and then re-creates it at home. “It’s a good metaphor for how he looks at life,” Sze says. “He’s always kind of sniffing out good ideas. Always on the prowl for things to be cracked open and solved.”

We lost my dad last year: the denouement in a courageously fought cancer battle that spanned more than two decades. I was 24 when he died—not as young as I could have been, but not old enough to negate a dull, almost-always-there sense of missing something. He was unpretentious, unfashionable, unfailingly reliable. He was corny and funny and sentimental. He was a rare combination of impossibly hard-working and deeply empathetic: a respiratory therapist for many years, he was an asthmatic who helped people breathe. We won’t ever be able to say for certain whether his lifelong lung issues, and lengthy scrimmage with the carcinomas, were caused by his exposure to harmful pollutants alone. But we’d be foolish to say that the environment he was raised in had no bearing on his wellbeing—or that of his dad, or brother, or niece and nephew, or those other 33.3 per cent of Bronx residents who die prematurely, a rate substantially higher than in New York City (26.2 per cent) or New York State (23.4 per cent).

Beyond being a daughter, I’m now a practising urban planner, and was trained by mentors with a keen eye on the link between public space and public health. Thanks to a slew of writers, scholars and activists—like Robert D Bullard, author of Dumping in Dixie (1990), Julie Sze, author of Noxious New York (2006) and Gregg Mitman, author of Breathing Space (2008), particularly Chapter 4, ‘Choking Cities’—it’s well documented that environmental issues have unequal human impacts. Certain populations, based on their location, demographic makeup, level of resources available and underlying political context, feel the effects of industrial pollution more than others. This often has to do with the fact that histories of social and economic disenfranchisement become mapped on to urban space through planning practices like redlining and zoning. Along with the South Bronx, neighbourhoods like Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Manhattan’s West Harlem today have higher geographic concentrations of polluting infrastructure, such as major highways, power plants, incinerators and waste transfer stations, than their wealthier counterparts do—predisposing some of the city’s poorest and most diverse communities to the worst health outcomes. Knowing this, on a professional and a personal level, has compounded the magnitude of my grief with the exasperation of having seen something coming for a long time.

Here is the narrative on the atomic bomb: It was created out of urgency. The United States and our Allies were losing the war. Thousands of young American men had died. Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Intel reported that the Germans had discovered fission, the process used to break apart an atom’s nucleus and release its energy. Hitler could not win. Hanford’s B Reactor was built within a year and produced plutonium just a few months later. It was a secretive project. Most workers and the surrounding communities did not know the full extent of what they were working on or living by or exposed to. They were simply proud to be contributing to the war effort.

Before a person dies, you talk to them. They die, and you still want to talk to them. But their body is gone. When my sister would come home from college, I would sometimes go into her room and just sit there, hoping she would ask me about what felt at the time to me like the major dramas of my life (I would have been four­teen, fifteen). I was too shy to raise them with her. Now she was drifting away and I was in that same room, holding a book of hers from those same years, her notes inside, and all I could do was read to myself.

The touchingly literal conceit of the Olds poem is that death is like this: a problem of a body having gone missing. You face some­body when you talk to them; if their body is gone, and you wish to go on talking, you must search for a new way of facing them. The poem elaborates this hypothesis, testing it out. The speaker turns to a “new rose,” only to realize that at night we can’t see color, leav­ing the lawn “grey,” the rose “glowing white.” Has the poem found a new way of seeing in the dark, or has grief drained all color from the world?

The desire to talk to the dead requires the “as if” of figurative language: a descent from the world of the living to an underworld. As the poet addresses the absent grandmother, she conjures her into the poem, and yet what appears is a person who had already, even in life, turned toward the darkened state of death: not knitting, not reading. The only unbroken lines in the poem are its final ones, in which the speaker seems to have reconciled herself to having noth­ing more than the imperfect, residual knowledge that death allows.

At the heart of the poem, though, lies a terrible doubt. “Are the dead there / if we do not speak to them?” If our speech is what has seemed to grant others their presence in the first place, have we been fooling ourselves all along? Have we mistaken the projection of our own imagination, reflected back to us at night, for a dim impres­sion of the person whom we miss? “Why do I tell you these things?” John Ashbery asks at the end of one poem. “You are not even here.”

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Linda Button| Longreads | July 4, 2023 | 15 minutes (3,167 words)

Momo
She filled our lives with good food,
chutzpah, laughter, and love.

Enh. I could sense Momo looking over my shoulder as I typed, her head wrapped in a bright coral scarf. I was relieved she had put on weight since death. The final month her skin had hung on her, a size too big. She was back to her firm, long-legged self, her dark eyes bright with interest.

“Enh?!” I said.

I like where you’re going, but the words aren’t right.

This was what we had always done for each other—poked and questioned and haggled over art. Still, I felt the pressure of the deadline. “Your husband needs this in four days. I‘ve got to get the ball rolling.”

Momo shrugged. You’re the writer.

What did she know? Inside I harbored a delicious fantasy that my words would cause the audience—Momo’s friends and sisters, her husband, Marty, and their daughter—to ooooh at how I had captured her gusto on a tombstone. 

For most of my career I have written ad copy. The work suits me. Constraints. The single page of paper. Brevity. Choose as few words as possible. Let the visuals tell the story. Conjure emotion in compressed space and time. Here, then, was the perfect writing assignment for me. A three- by two-foot billboard. Thirty words, max. My business partner’s epitaph. 

But unlike advertising, lofted into the airwaves to evaporate, this project would be carved into granite for eternity. I yearned to create a gravestone that would sing through the ages, that would capture the joie de vivre that was my partner. One year later, Momo’s death still had me reeling. I had worked with her for two decades. I loved her. I considered Marty, her husband of only a few years, a latecomer to the Momo party. Now, for this assignment, he was also the client. He had final say, after all: When it comes to customs of death, spouses top all others. According to Jewish tradition, the time had come to inscribe the grave marker. A literal deadline. 

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Marty had procrastinated for months. So, at the request of friends, I was pitching in. The final words were due by the end of the week. Could I deliver genius in five days?

Momo was right. The copy was “enh.” I emailed the lines to Marty anyway—She filled our lives with good food, chutzpah, laughter, and love—and hoped he would embrace it.

Momo and I had run an ad agency together. She was a seize-the-day daughter of Holocaust survivors; I was bred from stoic Yankee stock. When our agency dwindled to two, we embraced our differences and renamed the business Tooth and Nail. She, the smile. Me, driving home the point. We spread out giant sheets of paper on her dining room floor for brainstorms, plotted campaigns on her sofa, pilfered images off the internet, fought, competed, stepped over each other’s words, slashed ideas, fretted over stubborn, uninspired clients, and laughed about our men. 

In the early days, on train rides home from New York to Boston, Momo would find a table for four and unfurl her coat onto the adjoining seat so no one would join us, while I tucked my backpack around my shoes, not wanting to take an inch more than I had paid for. The coastline scrolled by. She counseled me on my imploding marriage; I marveled over her athletic dating. “Who should I choose?” she asked. “The heart surgeon who’s analytical, or the brain expert who’s all heart?”

“Which one brings you joy?” I knew enough to ask that question. Momo chased pleasure, splurging on business class and nice hotels. She spent far more energy on my happiness than I did. She gifted me photographs of tulips exploding in red and orange, a painting of a woman treading a gray ocean, her nose barely above the surface, as if Momo saw beauty in me but also my struggles. She extended a life raft. She cooked homemade matzoh ball soup steaming with ginger and fennel, she listened deeply, as the best therapists do. I left our conversations feeling both filled and emptied, cleansed and heard. 

Finally, she chose Marty, the psychiatrist who strummed classical guitar and wrote her love letters from his neglected house near the shore. 

Then, the mammogram revealed a 2.2-centimeter lump. Cue the mastectomies, chemo and radiation, wigs and thinning eyebrows. Momo rejected that as her entire story. For seven years after her diagnosis, Momo made even cancer an adventure. She wrote a blog. 

Am I upset over the possibility of losing a breast? Not really. I’ve had a terrific pair for 48 years. My girls have given me and many boys great pleasure.

She treated loss as a punch line, no topic too intimate. 

On Monday I took a shower and quickly realized that I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.

In advertising we start with the audience and consider how we want to make them feel. Who would trudge the slope to visit Momo’s gravesite each year? Her loyal circle of friends, surely. Her three older sisters, each a variation of Momo: artistic, smart, empathetic. And, of course, her 13-year-old daughter and round-shouldered Marty, his AirPods filled with classical guitar. I imagined her quiet, sarcastic daughter cresting the hill and I wanted to reward her with a smile, to feel the warmth, sechel, and humor of her mom embracing her.

Amazingly, when I look back, I did not follow my own best practices. I did no research on tombstones, threw out no wide net. I suffered from tunnel vision—exactly what I warn young writers never to do—and got stuck on a single idea. Had I bothered, I would have discovered a wide field of possibilities; it turns out that epitaphs trace the arc of history with tales of society, legacies, and stories of power and love. 

From traditional Jewish blessings . . .

“May her soul be bound in the binding of life.”

and Japanese poetry . . .

Empty-handed I entered the world 
Barefoot I leave it.

. . . to good old sardonic American. 

Here lies Butch, we planted him raw, 
he was quick on the trigger, but slow on the draw.  

We could have honored Momo’s philosophy, She was bubbles in the champagne of life, or captured her perseverance: Grit and Grace, or something risqué, pulled from her own blog. “I won’t be scheduling any bikini waxes in the near future.”

I could have offered Marty an array of choices, mocked up what the stone would look like, handed him a scotch, and nudged him in the right direction. Instead, I worried and clung to one idea. Grief stuffed me into a small, hardened box.   

I was thinking of something more inspiring. 

Marty’s response waited for me the next morning. In advertising, where writing is a team sport, my ego had long ago shrunk to a chickpea. Still. Ouch. He sent examples of quotes he considered inspiring. 

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” —Dr. Seuss

“In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”  —Abraham Lincoln

“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir

My stomach curdled with disappointment. I hated when clients reached for clichés. Also, I was pretty sure Old Abe never said that. Momo leaned across and squinted at the text. She turned to me with a look between constipation and impatience: What do these dead white guys have to do with a hot, middle-aged diva?

“Right?!” I nodded even though I got where Marty was coming from. When a star collapses and sucks up light and life you need big mother constellations like Abe Lincoln and Dr. Seuss on your side. Marty was crazy in love with Momo. He proposed in her throes of dying and adopted her daughter. Not so crazy. 

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But he wasn’t there when Momo first brought her daughter home from China, the same year I gave birth to my youngest child. He hadn’t watched our kids grow up to be best friends. He wasn’t with us, looking down on giant sheets of paper, pulling ideas from the air, creating a company while taking turns with after-school pickup. Where was he when we got The History Channel clients snockered on vodka at a creative presentation on Russian tzars, or when Momo snored through a conference call, and we claimed it was a leaf blower? 

My hand hovered over the keyboard. Momo was still making that face. I marshaled my diplomacy and shot a note back to Marty. 

The Renoir quote is lovely—haven’t heard it before. How about this:

Momo

She filled our lives with chutzpah, laughter, and love.

“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir

Marty didn’t respond. The day ticked by. 

In her last month I had wheeled Momo around the block, past her front yard where a gardener friend had fashioned a river of smooth stones. Momo did not admire the curving white through her lawn, or the blaze of yellow leaves outside her windows. She curled inward with pain. Now that it was my turn to lavish her with support and comfort, I had no words. I spoke to her as if to a child. “Isn’t that tree beautiful!” 

“Take me home,” she said. 

Her office had been turned into a sickroom, a large bed and TV at one end. Her sisters had arrived from Israel, Dominica, and Maine and tightened around her. They filled the kitchen with music, took turns dressing her, served up platters of hummus and opinions. They, and her other friends, somehow understood the rituals of grief, care, and mitzvah. Their religion was seeped in loss and optimism. They practiced simple, concrete gestures. But I didn’t even know what to do with my hands. I felt useless, as if I had gone from insider to outsider. I’ve been here all along, I wanted to say to them. Momo and I, we helped each other. She offered me refuge from my unraveling marriage. I gave her purpose.

The night she passed, I left my phone in the living room. When I woke, messages from her friends and sisters spilled down my screen. Voice mails. Texts. “Come to the hospital!” “Hurry!” I had slept while my friend died. 

Another day, nothing.

“He hates it,” I said.

Oh, you know Marty. Momo waved her hand. He’s a BFD at the hospital. He’s probably curing ADHD and seasonal depression. 

“After years of pounding me on deadlines, you’re giving him a pass?”

He’s a genius, they need more time.

Ouch, I thought. Double whammy. 

The morning of the deadline, my email dinged.

This is what I woke up with at 4 AM:

Mother, wife, negotiator, artist, cook, adventurer.  

Forever bold, stylish, and brave.

“The pain passes. The beauty remains.” —Renoir

Thoughts? Marty. 

Lists. The final refuge of the desperate, the last gasp of clients when they’d run out of ideas or lacked imagination. Marty had reduced Momo to a string of nouns, adjectives, and commas, as if that defined her. Plus, Wife was the second word? 

Momo beamed. Stylish. Adventurer! Marty’s so good with words, isn’t he? 

That’s what love does, I muttered to myself. It infuses mediocre writing with sentiment. “He left off sister. Friend!” 

Momo frowned. Gotta include them. Maybe we need an extra tall slab. Fit everything in. 

I pounded a response on the keyboard. 

Oh, those 4am thoughts! 

I would add friend, sister, businesswoman . . . and the list gets long. Maybe focus on how she made us feel? xoxo 

How did Momo make me feel? She had taught me that moments live in the flickering gold light of a beech tree and a bowl of warm soup. That loss waits for all of us, so we’d better wring happiness from every second. Death had robbed me of my witness, my confidant, the most honest friend I ever had. She never lied to me about my situation. Or herself. How many lovers have you had? I had asked her when I started dating again. She looked off to the corner of the restaurant, counting. “Sixty? Eighty? I had fun.” Would I ever squeeze so much out of life? She left nothing on the table.

What did I give her? My doggedness. My drive. My craving for partnership, as if I was born incomplete. I gave her my standing in the industry. My fierce competitiveness. My soundless, grateful love.  

I went to make coffee. Marty’s response waited in my inbox.

It doesn’t work to say how she made us feel.  We need to convey who she was. Funny, I left off sister and friend as her middle sister thought that it would be unnecessary, but it’s a key part of who Momo was. I was hoping that negotiator and artist would cover who she was as a businessperson.

Off to the eye doctor.

Ah, he was pulling in Momo’s sisters. A classic zone defense move by the client. I poured contempt onto the page. 

New glasses? Hope you’re seeing more clearly now. Give me a call . . .

What do you think, Momo? I looked around the room and discovered her missing. Marty never responded either. But a tombstone deadline does not melt away like some canceled ad campaign. 

The morning of the unveiling broke crisp and bright, the kind of April day we long for after the gray length of winter. A brightly colored square, rippling in the sunlight, waited for us. Someone had swathed the tombstone in scarves. The wind lifted the corners, flirting and winking, to reveal edges of letters. What was written there? When I had asked Marty the night before at a gathering in their home, he shrugged and said, “Something like in the email.”  

Momo had handpicked her site. Even the year before, as we tipped clumps of earth onto her casket, weeping, we admired the location. It faced a protected edge of the graveyard. 

Now, a year later, grass had grown over the mound. The trees plumped with buds and sunlight flickered through new green leaves. The rabbi, a short, bearded man, gestured for us to draw close. Marty stood with their daughter, his arm around her. I expected Momo to leap out from behind the stone and join us. 

We each read something. I had to borrow a quote that morning, too overwhelmed to think. Words. All my life I have wrestled with, debated, and polished them. But how much had they ever mattered? Momo’s sisters approached the stone and unfastened the tape that secured the scarves. My shoulders tensed and my hand squeezed a damp Kleenex in my pocket. As the coral silks pulled away, the epitaph revealed itself from the bottom up. The words were indistinct, unreadable, and I cursed the stonecutter. Then I pushed the tears from my eyes and read the final, stubborn, unfixable inscription. 

Momo 
Mother. Wife. Sister. Friend.
Negotiator. Artist. Cook. Adventurer.
Forever Bold, Stylish, and Brave.
“The pain passes. The Beauty remains” —Renoir.
November 4, 1958–October 25, 2013

Every word rang true, but they read like a catalog. Writing, I have realized, reflects the writer, not the subject. The tombstone embodied Marty: conflict-averse, hoping to placate everyone. The list did not add up to Momo. I had yearned for bolder art, and my failure said something about me too. I deferred to Marty instead of seizing the moment and creating art worthy of this woman, if that was even possible. 

Loss had yawned over me the past year with daily reminders of my friend. The plants she had bequeathed to me, now gasping for water, hung from my ceiling; my phone became a minefield of photos and buried emails. I would rifle through contracts or sort through our old projects and feel fresh pinpricks of grief. I turned funny tales from our partnership over until they became smooth, comforting stones in my palm. 

I had tried to find another business partner. I needed someone else, I knew that, to keep me from spinning tighter into self-criticism, to slow down and let my feelings catch up, to find happiness for myself, as she had taught me. I even met with a consultant who listened carefully over bad hotel coffee and said “You’re lucky if you get one or two partners like that in a lifetime. Don’t try to replace her—go out and seek many people.” So I found designers, producers, and accountants to help me run the business. I began a relationship with a kind man. Each person filled a hole in my life but, like the litany on the tombstone, couldn’t capture what I had lost. Death had rubbed its heel squarely on what vibrated and flourished between us, ending the world Momo lived in, of possibility, her quicksilver wit, the warmth that rose from her, her push to seek out new adventures.

I closed my eyes and imagined going home and calling Momo and telling her about this day, where we sang songs and prayed and grieved both privately and as a chorus. The group murmured on either side of me. The edge of a cold breeze snuck down my collar. I folded my arms and held myself tighter.

Ach!

“Momo?”

What’s with the waterworks? Life is waiting for you down the hill, my dear.

I never visit Momo’s gravesite, nor do I want to. She sits next to me when I labor over a script or edit a commercial, and even now, as I try to craft this memory of her. I did not have the right words to say to her in her final weeks. I could not conjure poetry for her at her service. My words failed me then, they fail me still, and I keep trying. I want to breathe life back into the shining energy that filled my days. I want to make Momo alive for you on this simple piece of paper. 

Do words matter? I visit Momo’s blog and linger over her final post, written weeks before she died. The stamp of that last date floats farther away from me, but the words still leave fresh yearning. 

Seven years of debilitating treatments, anxious scan results, and the occasional self-diagnosis. It’s a lot to go through to drop a few pounds. Seven very precious years spent with my magnificent husband, my daughter and stellar friends. Seven years going on eight years with nine years in reach and ten years hardly a stretch.

Knowing all that and still, I live like there is no tomorrow.

Linda Button is a storyteller and writer for a large non-profit. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Magazine, PBS, and elsewhere. Her memoir-in-progress, Fight Song, explores mental illness, martial arts and learning to let go, despite love. 

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Adam Reiner | Longreads | June 13, 2023 | 4,992 words (17 minutes)

The hospital room is full of strangers. I do my best not to look worried and take a deep breath, inhaling the antiseptic odor that permeates the air—a sterile cologne of surgical masks, latex gloves, and industrial-grade cleaning solvents. Worry is the enemy of hope, and cancer spreads faster in the crevices where hope slips through.

My uncle Robert is propped upright in the hospital bed in the center of the room, leaning limply to one side like a resting marionette, awake, but looking like he hasn’t slept in days. Malignant tumors are blooming along his spine like mushrooms on a log, which makes lying on his back incredibly painful.

A square-shaped cake studded with plump, bright strawberries rests atop a tray stand at the foot of the bed. The generous layer of vanilla frosting reflects the fluorescent light above like a moonlit snowdrift. The longer I stare at it, the more the cake’s soft edges blend into the stark whiteness of the hospital walls. A tangle of shiny helium balloons sways on the nightstand.

It’s my uncle’s birthday. We’re all standing in a semicircle around him wearing adhesive identification tags from security. It feels awkward, like a company mixer. One of the strangers passes me a Styrofoam cup filled with tart sparkling cider. I wish there was alcohol in it.

A plush doll of Pope Francis lies on the blanket next to my uncle. The pontiff had recently traveled through Philadelphia—where the hospital is located—only the second papal visit in the city’s history. Robert was too weak to attend the procession but had wanted to go, a surprise given he wasn’t a particularly religious person, nor a Catholic. The souvenir was meant as a joke, but the doll never wandered from his bedside.

Robert’s cancer is rare, a soft tissue sarcoma that formed on the crown of his left ankle three years earlier. Doctors amputated his leg from the thigh down to stem the tide. He’d been in remission for months, but now the cancer is everywhere. Over the summer, he consulted sarcoma specialists at the Abramson Cancer Center, and after weeks of commuting from New York City for radiation treatment, he and my aunt Terri took refuge at the nearby Kimpton Hotel Monaco. 

The strangers in the hospital with us are hotel employees. They brought the cake and all the party favors. Kayla, the hotel’s front office director, flashes a cherubic smile. She has soft, bronze skin and round cheeks that dimple slightly like those of a mischievous toddler. Her voice is raspy with the deep timbre of a jazz singer. “Don’t worry, we take very good care of your uncle whenever he’s down in Philly,” Kayla says, winking at Robert. Terri gently adjusts the pillows behind Robert’s back, maneuvering his frail body into a more comfortable position. He winces a little then goes back to reading the pile of birthday cards that are strewn about the bed. 

I introduce myself to Roshid, the portly and affable concierge, and the bellman, Maurice, who they affectionately call Coach. Roshid puts his arm around Robert and sings a few bars of one of his favorite pick-me-up songs, “Games People Play” by The Spinners:

Roshid presents Robert with a special mixtape of his favorite soul and jazz music, along with a custom-printed photo book. Coach pulls a leather football out of his long black trench coat, signed by all the members of the bell staff. “I doubt I’d be much of a force on the gridiron in my current condition,” Robert says, catching the shovel pass from Coach and looking down at his missing appendage. “Definitely not the kicker.”

Before his illness, Robert had a full head of black curly hair, wound in tight, springy coils like a poodle. He’d lost all of it during chemo, but it had begun to grow back in sporadic, directionless threads like matted shag carpet. His face was gaunt and his cheeks sunken, but his smile still had the same paternal warmth. 

When I was a kid, my uncle’s visits were like holidays. My sisters and I would climb up on the green velvet couch by the bay window in the living room overlooking the driveway. As soon as we’d see him pull up, we’d run outside and bum-rush the car before he could turn the engine off. In the mornings, we’d barge into the guest room where he slept and violently wake him up by jumping all over his bed. He didn’t visit often, so we savored every moment. Seeing him lying there in the hospital, I felt the urge to vault onto his bed again, wishing I could somehow wake him up from this nightmare.

Kayla had arranged for the chef of the hotel’s restaurant to prepare a strip steak, one of Robert’s favorite items on the dinner menu. He devours it out of a cardboard takeout container while Kayla neatly divides the birthday cake into even slices. After an hour or so, we share warm hugs and say our goodbyes. Although the thought lingered in the back of all our minds that day, none of us knew that it would be my uncle’s last birthday.

The Hotel Monaco opened in 2012, an opulent 268-room hotel located in the historic Lafayette Building overlooking Independence Hall, a stone’s throw from the Liberty Bell in the heart of Philadelphia’s Old City. The 11-story Greek Revival-inspired tower was built in 1907 by the estate of the late financier and philanthropist Stephen Girard and named after his friend Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette.

The facility served as office space for over a century, but after sitting vacant for several years, Kimpton transformed the building into a luxury hotel. The interior is accented with nautical elements—a giant crystal galleon in the entrance, compass-themed carpeting, and porthole-shaped mirrors inside the elevators—an homage to Girard’s seafaring days. The hotel painstakingly restored the façade, preserving many of the building’s original architectural elements, like the towering Corinthian columns that guard the entrance and the stone gargoyles ensconced in the cornices.

Terri and Robert discovered the Monaco after visiting several other hotels in the area on foot, my uncle hobbling on crutches in the scorching late summer heat. With medical bills piling up, the hotel was more extravagant than they could afford, but they needed accommodation for two weeks while he started a new round of radiation. When they arrived, Kayla welcomed them graciously from behind the front desk and checked them into a handicap-accessible room.

The next morning, Terri took the elevator down to the lobby for the complimentary coffee service. The urns had already been dismantled, so she approached the front desk to see if it was possible to have someone deliver coffee to the room. Kayla recognized Terri from check-in and said she would send someone up right away.

As she did with many new guests, Kayla asked why they were visiting Philadelphia. “My husband has cancer,” Terri said. “We came here to start radiation treatment.” After a long silence, they locked eyes. “Is he going to be all right?” Kayla asked. “I don’t know,” Terri said, with a tear in her eye. “I really don’t know.”

Terri explained their commute to consult with specialists at the Abramson Center and the arduous schedule of medical appointments ahead. The travel was taking its toll on Robert. Their room was comfortable, but he hadn’t slept at all the night before because of debilitating back pain.

When they returned later that day, the bed was covered with brand-new pillows. Kayla had been to a local department store and purchased a variety of head and neck pillows with her own money. She had also arranged for room service to deliver a basket of wine and cheeses. A valet left a selection of relaxing bath products for Terri and installed a coffee machine, so they wouldn’t have to worry about missing the morning coffee downstairs again. Personalized notes from staff were scattered around the desk wishing Robert a restful stay and a speedy recovery.

As word of my uncle’s tragic circumstances spread, everyone who worked in the hotel knew their story. The doormen greeted them with hugs every time they returned from doctor’s appointments, always inquiring with genuine concern about my uncle’s health. “Those hugs from the doormen gave me the inspiration to get through the next day,” Terri told me recently.

When they returned in mid-September for another round of radiation, checking back into the hotel felt like a family reunion. Kayla upgraded them to room 601, a much more spacious suite. They only expected to be in town for a few days, but an MRI revealed the source of his excruciating back pain—new tumors on Robert’s thoracic spine—forcing them to extend their stay.

Roshid, the concierge, caught wind that they were running out of clean clothes and snuck a pair of my uncle’s pants out of his closet to check his size. He bought three extra pairs of khakis from a nearby Old Navy store—again with his own money—and had the pants hemmed and altered to remove the left leg to suit Robert’s amputation. Before they returned to the hotel, and without a word to anyone, Roshid hung the altered pants in his closet.

“At that point, I didn’t even see him as a hotel guest anymore. I saw him as my friend, somebody who needed help,” Roshid says of my uncle. “It humbled me to know that someone like him was walking the earth. He was a genuinely good man.” Robert and Terri returned to the room later that day, flabbergasted to find the closet filled with the new tailored pants. 

In late October, after the staff threw Robert’s hospital birthday party, Terri asked to meet with James, the hotel’s general manager. James is a man of very few words, but he chooses them carefully. As a point of pride, he prefers to operate in the background, mindful not to upstage his team. Terri was concerned that she wasn’t doing enough to show the staff appreciation. She hoped that James might have some insight into how she could reciprocate their generosity. Should she be tipping them more? James listened intently, nodding along without answering until Terri finished speaking.

“How do you like your room?” James asked with a sheepish smile. “I love it,” Terri said. “It’s bigger than our apartment in New York City.” It wasn’t true, but she wanted James to know how much she appreciated being upgraded to a larger suite. As Robert’s condition deteriorated, Terri hadn’t been able to teach as many yoga classes, so financing their trips to Philadelphia was becoming burdensome.

“It’s yours for as long as you need it,” James said. The next day, he notified Kayla that the hotel would stop billing room 601, effective immediately. The Monaco would also extend heavily discounted room rates to family members so that Robert would be surrounded by loved ones whenever support was needed.

Kayla couldn’t wait to share the news with Terri. “I started crying,” Kayla says. “I called Terri, and we both started crying.”

I questioned James about his decision over the phone recently, wondering if it caused any controversy. “The financial piece didn’t matter anymore, so why should they have to worry about it?” he said, not wasting any words. “We decided to just make that go away.” From that day on, Robert and Terri never received another bill from the Monaco. The hotel established a standing reservation for room 601 under their name to ensure that the suite would be available to them at a moment’s notice.

The joy of staying in a hotel lies in absolving yourself of the responsibility for maintaining order and cleanliness. Every time you return to your room, your messes are untangled by an invisible hand like sorcery. Linens are always fresh. Hand soap and tiny shampoo bottles regenerate like magic.

All humans are born with a deep, primal anxiety about self-care that begins the moment we’re jettisoned from the womb and detached from the umbilical cord. The world’s finest hotels quell these anxieties effortlessly. They dote on us like devoted mothers, with staff that anticipates our needs and makes everyone feel at home.

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Truly great service demands profound selflessness and integrity. That isn’t teachable. Money affords luxury, but even the most obsequious service rarely makes guests feel seen. That’s because transcendent hospitality is a more profound connection, earned through mutual respect and an equitable exchange of sacrifice for appreciation. 

The etymology of the word hospitality is the Latin hospitalitas—or the English hospital. Checking into a hospital is, obviously, far less luxurious than an overnight stay in a five-star hotel, but it can be 10 times more expensive. According to a 2022 report by The Commonwealth Fund—which conducts independent research on health policy—the United States spends more than twice as much on medical care compared with 38 other high-income nations. Meanwhile, we boast the worst outcomes, the highest rate of citizens with multiple chronic diseases, and the greatest likelihood of dying prematurely from avoidable causes.

The prohibitive cost of health care leads Americans to routinely neglect preventative care and leave grave illnesses untreated. Extended hospital stays are one of the most common causes of bankruptcy. Yet, despite the cost, service in medical facilities can be perfunctory, rote at best. The choice between dying in a foreboding hospital room or a luxury hotel suite is an easy one, but, of course, most never have that luxury. 

Robert spent Thanksgiving confined to an inpatient rehab facility. A life-threatening surgery to remove spinal tumors—requiring hours on the operating table and multiple blood transfusions—meant weeks of physical therapy to regain his strength. 

The day after Thanksgiving, Roshid’s mother sent him with a care package of leftovers: turkey, mac and cheese, and other holiday trimmings. “She told me: ‘Now, you tell that man that we season our food here,’” Roshid says, adding, “Unless he was a good liar, he tore that food up.”

By December, their trips to Philadelphia grew longer. Terri and Kayla would often convalesce in the hotel bar over a glass of wine and a cocktail at the end of a long day. Kayla was managing personal trauma of her own, shuttling back and forth to Delaware to care for her ailing father, a military veteran living on a modest pension, who was battling alcoholism and early-onset dementia. 

Early the next morning, Kayla met with James in his office to discuss a contingency plan—installing a hospital bed inside room 601, so that Robert could spend his final days in the hotel. No one dared say the quiet part out loud: What would happen if he died in the room? But they all knew it was a possibility.

The engineering team removed the king-size mattress and box spring from their bedroom and replaced it with a rented hospital bed. The adjacent common area had a fold-out couch that could accommodate attending medical staff. By the time Robert returned to the hotel, the suite had been transformed into a hospital room. Terri hired nurse practitioners to monitor Robert’s health during off hours when she needed to rest. 

I took the train down from New York that week to visit him. He’d lost so much weight that his body seemed hollow, like paper-mache. He didn’t speak much, and his gaze was dull. At times, I couldn’t tell if he recognized me. He had a tube threaded through his nostrils to a nearby oxygen tank and was heavily sedated on morphine. Some days I would sit in silence for hours while he slept. If he was awake in the evening, he watched episodes of The Voice. I wondered how a frivolous reality show competition could matter to someone so close to death, but I suppose he welcomed the distraction.

One night, near the end, Robert and Terri watched a movie together in the bedroom. Terri lay down next to him on a rolling cot pushed flush against the edge of his hospital bed. She was happy that there were no machines creating distance between them. They watched in silence, holding hands in the dark. When the movie ended, Robert told her he didn’t want to eat anymore. “It’s okay,” Terri said, “you don’t have to eat.” The next day, his condition severely worsened, and Terri called an ambulance to transfer him back to the hospital.

Kayla remembers seeing their hands clasped through the rails of his hospital bed. “I saw what I felt was the purest form of love that I had ever seen,” she tells me. “Watching them in that moment, it was like nothing else mattered.” She remembered Terri telling her about meeting Robert on the beach. How their love affair was kismet. Fate brought them together, and fate tore them apart. Though their relationship was fleeting, everyone around them could feel the deep spiritual energy they shared and were drawn to it. Robert privately described their relationship as his version of Eat Pray Love. The kind of romance you only read about in novels.

Back in 2010, Robert was healthy and practiced yoga regularly. He had never been to Tulum, never even heard of it, in fact—but a friend suggested it as a tranquil getaway where he could refresh and clear his head during a contentious divorce (that was costing him his sanity and thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees every month). He’d given up on the idea until, sitting in a coffee shop, he overheard a random couple mention how much they loved the Tulum beaches. It must be a sign, he thought. He booked a last-minute flight, driving miles out of state to renew his expired passport.

Terri adored Tulum. She’d attended yoga teacher training seminars there but never alone, always with work colleagues or friends. Her family typically gathered in Florida for the holidays, but this year they celebrated early. So she decided to spend a week in Tulum by herself to focus on her yoga practice.

They both arrived at the yoga studio at dawn, unsure which room the class was being held in that day. After a brief conversation outside, they went in and set down their belongings next to each other. Robert laid out his mat and assumed a headstand, a pose he’d recently mastered. Terri assumed he was showing off, but she still thought he was cute.

After class, they continued the conversation. Robert was staying at a hotel nearby, and Terri mentioned how much she loved the restaurant there. “Would you like to join me for lunch?” he asked. “Okay, what time?” Terri said. Robert looked at an imaginary watch on his wrist. “How about noon?” They ate lunch overlooking the beach, chatting the day away as the frothy waves disappeared into the parched sand, exhaling a briny mist into the air. As the tide ebbed, the sun hovered above the shoreline, casting a blanket of warm shimmering topaz across the horizon. They met again for dinner and spent the night walking along the ocean under the stars. Terri likes to say that the lunch never ended. 

While they soaked in Tulum’s majesty, a massive snowstorm shut down all the airports along the Eastern seaboard, rendering air travel nearly impossible. When Robert was notified that his flight was canceled, he immediately texted Terri that he needed to stay in Mexico for a few more days. It was late, so she texted back her room number and said she’d leave the light on for him. They spent the remaining days and nights together as though their time had never been interrupted until Robert was finally able to book a return flight home. 

When they said farewell, Terri doubted she’d ever see him again. Robert was still anxious about his divorce. But they continued to talk over the phone every day. Robert flew to Cleveland to see Terri just two weeks after leaving Tulum. They traveled back and forth to each others’ cities over the ensuing months before Terri eventually moved to New York to be with Robert permanently. They found an apartment in a quiet neighborhood in Brooklyn, and she found a job teaching yoga in Tribeca.

His cancer diagnosis interrupted the fairy tale two years later, but by then their bond had grown stronger. In March 2015, between debilitating rounds of chemo, Robert married Terri in a quiet ceremony inside the office of the city clerk in lower Manhattan. He looked handsome in a black tuxedo with a red rose boutonniere and a backward black Kangol hat concealing his hair loss. Terri looked angelic in a flowing silk wedding gown with a white faux-fur shawl she borrowed from her sister and strappy blue suede heels. For a moment, when they kissed, the cancer disappeared. As sick as he was, it was one of the happiest days of his life.

On Christmas Eve, my cell phone rang. I was on my way to my restaurant job and didn’t even need to look at the screen to know who it was. Terri had warned me that Robert might not make it through the night. The sidewalks were icy, and the coarse salt scattered on the sidewalk was crunching under the soles of my shoes.

“He can hear you,” Terri said softly. “But he can’t answer.” It was hard to concentrate over the rumbling garbage trucks and police sirens wailing in the distance. Terri’s voice wavered a bit, but the cadence of her words was soothing. “I’ll put the phone up to his ear in case there’s anything you’d like to say,” Terri said. I could hear his oxygen tank wheezing in the background.

I cobbled together a few sentences but struggled to find the right words. My uncle was my hero, my rock, my brother. After my mother died when I was 17, he became a surrogate parent. My sisters and I nicknamed him “LG”—short for legal guardian. “I love you, LG,” I told him, covering my other ear to drown out the traffic.

I hung up feeling like I’d failed an audition. I broke down crying on the street corner, wishing I could transport myself to his bedside. There was so much more to say. I never told him how scared I was of losing him because I didn’t want to burden him with my fear. He never wanted to burden me with his either.

Robert passed away quietly in his hospital bed later that evening, leaving behind his wife and 10-year-old daughter from his previous marriage. He was 57 years old.

We often mischaracterize cancer as a test of will—a battle with tangible wins and losses. Before his illness, Robert was much physically fitter than me, even though he was 16 years my senior. Unlike most life-threatening diseases, cancer doesn’t need to exploit a person’s deficient health. It destroys life indiscriminately.

“I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time,” the late comedian Norm Macdonald once famously noted. “That’s not a loss, that’s a draw.” Macdonald, who would eventually succumb to cancer himself in 2021, understood how naïve it is to assume that living or dying of cancer is determined by one’s will to live. Cancer’s violence lies in its willingness to leverage its own survival to destroy its host. It isn’t a fair fight.

Millions of people across the world quietly suffer from cancer every day, their families and their doctors befuddled and powerless to cure them. From the sidelines, we goad victims to fight harder. We tell them: You got this! But then we remand them to sterilized, underfunded medical facilities that provide little comfort to the sick, nor empathy for their survivors. My uncle was one of the lucky ones who, in a new city, found community and love from people outside the medical complex—people who had no reason to provide it other than the purity of their hearts.

A month after Robert died, we held a memorial service at a local church in Brooklyn. He’d befriended the church’s pastor, finding comfort in her counsel. On sunny afternoons, he lounged in the gardens of the church’s courtyard for hours. 

Kayla, Roshid, and Sean—one of the hotel’s doormen—took Amtrak up from Philadelphia together to pay their respects. In front of the congregants and mourners, I shared a passage from one of my uncle’s favorite books, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. In it, a young Siddhartha stands along the banks of a flowing river, contemplating its secrets: “[Siddhartha] saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.”

Even without the physical presence of our loved ones, I told those assembled, life’s current pulls us forward like a rushing river, always the same and always new. When I finished speaking, I looked over to see Kayla wiping away tears.

Robert asked for his body to be cremated. He wanted his ashes spread in three places: The first set in an urn at a gravesite in a cemetery upstate where his parents were buried; the second in the flower beds around the courtyard of the church where the sun soothed him. Terri promised to return to Tulum to scatter the rest of Robert’s ashes in the infinite, crystal-blue waters of the Caribbean, along the beaches where they first met—his final dying wish.

To show her appreciation for the hotel’s generosity, Terri developed a mindfulness and meditation workshop for the Hotel Monaco staff, that she could offer for free to all who wanted to attend. The following spring, she returned to Philadelphia for the first time since Robert died.

Addressing a room full of Kimpton employees, Terri recounted her emotional story. She spoke about the stages of grief. How suffering begins as a gaping wound. “According to Rumi, the wound is the place that light enters you,” Terri said. “Our light-infused wounds can become beacons for helping others to heal.” When we let love and light into these wounds, she told them, they become scabs and then, eventually, scars. “In Sanskrit, a remnant of unliberated past experiences is called samskara, an impression or imprint. We carry these scars with us until we learn to liberate their foundation.”

She peered out at the faces of all the maintenance workers, housekeepers, restaurant staff, and management who’d offered strength in her darkest moments and helped assuage her suffering. She was grateful for the opportunity to replenish their strength and resilience as they had done for her. “I’ve learned that part of the healing process is that even though the scar remains, the wound can heal,” Terri said. “I carry that scar with me like a proud warrior.”

Years have passed, but the Monaco staff, both past and present, still hold my uncle’s memory near to their hearts. Kayla keeps a framed picture of her and Robert on her bookshelf at home, a reminder of life’s fragility. “It was a part of my mission to make sure the end of this chapter was peaceful for them,” Kayla says. “If these were his last moments, the only thing that mattered was helping them find the peace that they both deserved.” She works as a general manager for Equinox fitness clubs now and frequently shares the story with new team members to remind them about the power of hospitality.

James tells me that Robert’s passing felt like a death in the family, but the experience fundamentally changed how the hotel cares for guests with special needs. “Whenever a situation like this arises and we’re made aware of it, I always immediately think back to Terri and Robert’s time with us,” James says. “We certainly learned from that situation and utilize that in every decision we make for every family that comes here with these types of struggles.”

Roshid puts this knowledge into practice regularly. “There’s a 3-year-old staying in the hotel right now who has eye cancer that’s breaking my heart,” he says. When Roshid found out the boy’s favorite superhero is Spider-Man, he immediately sprang into action. “He and I have something in common because I love Spider-Man too,” Roshid says. “So, every time this kid comes in with his eye patch on, I have a tent waiting for him in the room with some Spider-Man goodies in there.”

He forwarded me an email Kayla sent to the Monaco staff in 2017, recounting my uncle’s heartbreaking story, almost two years after he passed away. She stressed how every guest interaction is not only an opportunity to improve someone’s day but also how those interactions can profoundly alter the trajectory of people’s lives. She changed Robert’s and Terri’s, and they changed hers. “Remember,” Kayla wrote, “there are a million Robert and Terri Barnetts walking around out there. You never know when one of them will walk through that door. So, keep making those moments.”

Adam Reiner is a food writer and editor of The Restaurant Manifesto. He is currently writing a book about dining culture for LSU Press and lives in New York City.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copy–editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Anna Altman| The Atavist Magazine |May 2023 | 2,008 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 139, “The Quality of Mercy.” 

“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

—William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

It was February 2019, and Mary Price had rarely seen her office so busy. A wiry woman in her sixties with shoulder-length straight hair, Price is general counsel at FAMM, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. FAMM is an acronym for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and in addition to opposing severe sentencing, the group broadly advocates for the fair treatment of people in prisons across the United States. FAMM had recently sent out an edition of its newsletter, which supporters knew as the “FAMM Gram.” The response from readers began as a trickle, then became overwhelming, and for good reason: The newsletter outlined historic changes to the U.S. government’s compassionate release process.

Since the mid-1980s, federal prisoners have been able to seek compassionate release for what the law deems “extraordinary and compelling reasons”—including old age, terminal illness, and severe disability—by requesting that the Bureau of Prisons file a motion on their behalf in court. The BOP, however, rejects almost every request it receives. In January 2018, the Department of Justice reported that the BOP had approved less than 10 percent of the compassionate release applications it received over the previous four years, allowing just 306 people to go home. (Within the same time frame, 81 prisoners died waiting for the BOP to respond at all.) The DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General called the process “poorly managed,” with “inconsistent and ad hoc implementation [that] has likely resulted in potentially eligible inmates not being considered for release.”

For a long time, when the BOP denied a request, a prisoner had no recourse; the bureau’s decision was the final word. That changed in December 2018, following years of advocacy by FAMM and other groups, when Congress passed the First Step Act. Among other criminal-justice reforms, the law allowed a prisoner to file a motion for compassionate release directly with a federal judge if the BOP denied their request or didn’t respond to it within 30 days of receipt. FAMM was eager to share the news and connect eligible individuals with lawyers who could help them. Price knew the organization had to move quickly. “We were very concerned that people who were nearing the end of their lives or very sick would be going before judges without any help,” she said. “We couldn’t just leave these people on their own.”

FAMM’s newsletter was delivered to 40,000 incarcerated individuals via CorrLinks, the federal prison system’s email service. Price felt a thrill of anticipation—“a sense of stepping off into something that was unknown,” as she put it. She knew that sometimes a recipient would print a copy of the newsletter and pass it around the cellblock. Over days, then weeks, Price and her colleagues were inundated with hundreds of phone calls and emails from people seeking compassionate release or inquiring about the process for loved ones behind bars.

Amid the deluge, one inquiry stood out: It was written by a prisoner on behalf of someone else. The sender did not disclose his name. “I am writing this from the ‘Cancer’ floor of FMC Butner,” he wrote, referring to the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. The five-story facility provides health care to some of America’s sickest male prisoners; it includes a psychiatric unit, a unit devoted to orthopedic surgery, and a cancer ward. “This is directed at the situation of another patient,” the sender wrote. “He is terminal and is unable to contact you directly.”

The sick man, R. Smith, had lung cancer. As Price later wrote in an article for the American Bar Association, he was in persistent pain and dependent on a feeding tube. With a prognosis of less than 12 months to live, and a sentence lasting much longer for distributing drugs, Smith applied to the BOP for compassionate release. But instead of going home, he was bound for FMC Butner’s hospice ward.

The anonymous person who contacted FAMM said that he had heard Smith crying to his family during a call on the ward pay phone. A longtime recipient of FAMM’s newsletter, the man knew that Smith might now have another way to seek compassionate release. With Smith’s permission, he was using Smith’s CorrLinks account. BOP policy forbade prisoners from using one another’s accounts, and the sender knew he risked punishment for doing so, which is why he left the message unsigned. He asked: Would FAMM consider helping Smith?

Smith’s case was exactly the kind Price had in mind when she drafted FAMM’s newsletter. FAMM connected Smith with an attorney, who began to prepare a legal motion. Meanwhile, according to Price, Smith got sicker. One of his lungs collapsed, and the man communicating with FAMM from inside Butner reported that Smith had been moved to an outside hospital better equipped to treat him. Smith’s lawyer couldn’t get updated information about his condition, but this wasn’t unusual: The BOP can be especially evasive about medical details near the end of a person’s life. “There’s no more cruel part of the BOP than this,” said a former federal defense attorney who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Smith’s lawyer filed an emergency motion in federal court for his release. The court then ordered the BOP to provide an account of Smith’s medical condition by that afternoon. The BOP didn’t meet the deadline, so the judge contacted Smith’s doctor directly. Upon learning how poorly Smith was doing, the judge ordered his release within ten days, as soon as appropriate transport could be arranged. No one could reach Smith in the hospital to deliver the news, so Price sent a message to the person at Butner working on his behalf. She hoped that he would find a way to tell Smith that he didn’t have to die behind bars.

Smith’s case was a turning point for FAMM’s work on compassionate release because it offered a blueprint for helping qualifying individuals. FAMM worked with the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to expand the capacity of the Compassionate Release Clearinghouse, a newly created entity that recruited, trained, and supported lawyers representing sick or elderly prisoners requesting early release. In its first year, the Clearinghouse screened some 500 inquiries and placed more than 125 cases with lawyers.

Smith’s case also marked the start of a unique relationship. “Mr. Smith and his family are very lucky to have you in his corner,” Price wrote to the man who’d helped Smith. “We should all have friends like you.”

By then, Price knew the man’s name: Gary Settle. He was slow to tell her much about himself, but he continued to send CorrLinks messages to FAMM as he recruited more people at Butner for the Clearinghouse. In emails he sometimes used the moniker “P/H,” for “patient/helper,” in part to protect himself from BOP censure, and in part because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. He felt that his personal story—including why he was serving 177 years in prison, along with his own cancer diagnosis—was beside the point.

Settle was born in 1966 in Hawthorne, California, a small city adjacent to South Central Los Angeles. His childhood had what he considered “storybook” elements: loving parents, a brother to horse around with, Little League games, family camping trips. In the summer his mother, Kay, took time off her waitressing job to drive the boys to the beach. Settle was bright—“so smart I could smack him,” Kay said. At age ten, he asked his mom for copies of Shakespeare’s plays, then named his cat Ophelia. “We weren’t rich in money, but we were happy, we had friends, there were always people over,” Settle wrote in a document he calls his “life story,” which he shared with me.

In time, Settle developed a rebellious streak. If Kay told him to stay within a few blocks of the house on his skateboard, he’d ride to busy areas downtown instead. When Settle was 13, his parents bought a farm in Ohio; his father thought the fresh air and country life would be good for the family. “We all had to learn on the fly all the farming tasks—feeding the cows, milking them and shoveling the other substances they produced by the wheelbarrow load,” Settle wrote. “If Green Acres hadn’t already been made, we would have had a great pilot.” It was a major transition for Settle: the unrelenting responsibility of farm work, the unfamiliarity of the local culture. His puka-shell necklace and faded Levi’s didn’t vibe with the rural Ohio style of bib overalls and John Deere hats.

Even so, he quickly made friends. He got into the habit of enlisting his buddies to help with household tasks. “Once, I told him he couldn’t go to a baseball game because he had to help with the chores,” Kay recalled, “and all of a sudden the whole team was weeding.” The town closest to his family’s farm had a single traffic light, two police officers, a barber shop, and “at least ten bars,” according to Settle. There was little to do, so he and his friends drank. Settle recalled being a happy drunk, outgoing and enthusiastic; he boasted that his charm was infectious.

Settle also liked to showboat—driving recklessly, hood surfing, doing motorcycle stunts. “I was not breaking any laws other than traffic ones,” he wrote. “Those I was shattering.” In fact, a juvenile court found him guilty of an offense when he was 17; the case records are sealed, but Settle said that the conviction stemmed from a fistfight he had with a man in his twenties. Looking back, he wondered whether spending his teenage years in a small town with few opportunities contributed to the course his life took.

In 1985, Settle got his high school sweetheart pregnant, and soon they married. At age 20, Settle had expenses and responsibilities, and he grew restless. When he heard about a gig with a construction company in Florida, he decided to move there with $400, two buddies, and no plan—he left his family behind for the time being. He and his friends arrived in time for spring break and blew all their money at Daytona. When Settle got a job, he had to sleep on a picnic table behind a church for a week, until he got his first paycheck.

Despite an inauspicious beginning in his new home, Settle worked hard, and he advanced from laborer to finisher and then to foreman. The construction company had contracts all over the Southeast, so Settle traveled, staying in motels. When the workday was over, he and his crew headed to strip clubs or hung out in bars.

Settle found a house big enough for his family; his wife gave birth to their son, Nathan, back in Ohio, then moved down to join him. In time Settle’s parents decided to relocate to Florida, too. Settle started his own construction company in Orange City, just north of Orlando. But for all that was changing, Settle still liked to spend his free time drinking with friends.

One day, after a few beers, he went to the drive-through window at a bank to deposit a check. He recognized the teller—she was a woman he knew from the local bar scene. “What do you want?” she asked with a smile. He replied, as a joke, “Give me all your money.” The woman bent out of sight and then reappeared holding a plastic container full of neatly stacked bills. “You mean this?” she asked, laughing.

A few weeks later, Settle ran into the woman at a bar, and she brought up their exchange at the bank, saying there had been $35,000 in the box. After their conversation, Settle couldn’t get the number out of his head. All that money, and so close he could have grabbed it.

I gave my all to sustaining my donor hearts despite daunting odds, and the hearts rewarded me with extraordinary years. I have been so lucky.

But now I lower my chin and whisper the words malignant … metastatic … lungs … terminal. It is the end of the road for my heart and me — not because we didn’t achieve and maintain sparkling cardiac health. But because the sorry state of transplant medicine took us down.

Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors. And I understand the irony of an incredibly successful and fortunate two-time heart transplant recipient making this case, but my longevity also provides me with a unique vantage point. Standing on the edge of death now, I feel compelled to use my experience in the transplant trenches to illuminate and challenge the status quo.

Over the last almost four decades a toxic triad of immunosuppressive medicines — calcineurin inhibitors, antimetabolites, steroids — has remained essentially the same with limited exceptions. These transplant drugs (which must be taken once or twice daily for life, since rejection is an ongoing risk and the immune system will always regard a donor organ as a foreign invader) cause secondary diseases and dangerous conditions, including diabetes, uncontrollable high blood pressure, kidney damage and failure, serious infections and cancers. The negative impact on recipients is not offset by effectiveness: the current transplant medicine regimen does not work well over time to protect donor organs from immune attack and destruction.