I was thinking it would be useful, while asking you all to contribute to help save my friend Jo Carson’s life, if I could give you a sample of her writing.  And, lo and behold, she sent me a letter last night, which she has allowed me to post here.

Peter, there has been some silence on my end because I don’t know how to say thanks in a big enough way. No way is big enough to say thanks for this sort of effort and support. This is turning out to be the real lesson of this cancer trip, not an easy one for me because there has always been such a streak of cussed independence running right straight up the middle of my back. Or middle of my front. Or somewhere. I know it is there, I’m just not sure where it is. How to admit you truly need help and then, how to accept it?

Story, the sort of thing that is happening around here: An old college friend. Bob Gillooly (wonderful name, eh?) showed up, I hadn’t seen him in a long time, a mutual friend had told him I was sick and he showed up here. He said, “What can I do?” And I told him I needed help with food I could eat, food I could keep down, etc… So he’s been cooking. A couple or three times a week, and he cooks a couple of meals and some leftovers, and I have a wonderful selection of things I can maybe eat, thanks to him. He brought food yesterday, and I was really sick (radiation is turning my lower bowels, for the time being, into some less than pleasant version of crispy critters and they bite), so he was he was handing over his delivery and talking to Al, not me, and he said he’d been talking to another friend on the phone, said he told this other friend that for the first time since he retired, he felt like his skills were truly wanted and needed, and he was sure I had no idea what a service I was doing for him… This man is keeping me in food. A service I’m doing for him?

I am finding out in the most needful and urgent of ways what community might really be, and I am moved beyond words. I get that this is another version of the 100 dollar story, just so very, very much bigger. I know my job is to somehow give forward out of it, not necessarily now, not in the midst of a struggle for my life which is what a cancer fight is, but when I am able again to do so. I hope, by the time I am able, I will have some sense of what it might be and how such a wondrous obligation might work. But how do you speak of the arrival of such fierce grace without sounding like you’ve recently got religion? Now, there is a writerly problem for you. Or me. (I got it! An angel can come through the ceiling… no that’s been done.) Or back to a Wendell Barry quote you once used, about real freedom being the ability to move easy in harness: if some way with words is the harness…

So thank you. More than that. But I ain’t got all the words for it yet.

Jo

Please contribute what you can, and we’ll both try to find the words to thank you.

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