Sometimes Sooki would leave money on the kitchen counter, “For groceries,” she would say, “for gas, for the books. One morning Sooki had coffee with Sister Nena and me before she went to a yoga class across the street from the restaurant we went to for breakfast. Patchett’s meditations on death, mortality, family, friendship, and creativity definitely struck a chord with me. Looking at her book list, I realise this is going to have to become another reading odyssey for me to complete.

Hopefully it will give you a gentle nudge to think about what’s important and what truly matters most to you. There are the inevitable repetitions, as with any corpus of pieces originally written for newspapers and magazines; but sometimes the padding conceals the pearls. The months she’d lost not being in chemo while they struggled to locate the new tumor had put her perilously behind. They clearly didn’t understand she intended to walk, though knowing Sooki, she probably could have carried it. If I knew nothing about Sooki before she arrived, I knew very little more three weeks later when we were spending all of our days together.She had a son and a daughter-in-law with two children who lived south of her and a daughter and son-in-law who had recently moved north.

We’d stood together in the dark of a Washington theater for a matter of minutes a year and a half earlier.When I look back on those first few months of the pandemic, all I will remember is recurrent pancreatic cancer. Looks like we’re sitting on the edge of the apocalypse,” Marti said, leaving her french fries on her plate.