Making up Lies to See Schmitty

I have had a number of friends recently diagnosed - or having just passed - from cancer.  

So.

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Many years ago, I had this mentor in college, Gary Holthaus.  He started out as a Methodist minister in Smalltown, Montana and later became Director of the Alaska Humanities Forum.  I was lucky to catch Gary for his short window in Boulder where he taught Fiction and also Poetry of the American West.  I took both classes. Each were on the top floor of the library at a large walnut table surrounded by comfortable leather chairs.  We read AB Guthrie, Robinson Jeffers, Linda Hogan, Win Blevins, and Fred Manfred and he later introduced me to the poet Gary Snyder. The class was more discussion than discourse and from Gary Holthaus, I learned for the first time the power of silence.  

Gary Holthaus      Aug 21, 1933 - Jul 5, 2022

Gary published perhaps five collections of poetry and essays and numerous hand-hewn chapbooks of poems and other meditations.  In one of the essays from his time in Alaska, Gary wrote of his old friend Schmitty, who was spending his last few months of life in a hospital in Anchorage.  Schmitty had made his way north to Alaska as a salmon fisherman and was not inclined toward, or, in fact, rather detested, sentimentality.  Knowing this, Gary would then conjure up some excuse on why he had to drive up from Soldotna (on the Kenai Peninsula) to Anchorage to see Schmitty.  "I had to come to town to pick up some roofing material, Schmitty, the hospital was in the neighborhood."  Gary, the Methodist-turned-Unitarian minister, was a lousy liar, but it didn't matter.  

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Boy, we have such a short window on this Earth.  I plan to show up unannounced to see some friends these next few weeks.  I'll just happen to be in the neighborhood. 


Drew

The best short piece of writing on cancer, in my view, is by the author Brian Doyle.  "On Not 'Beating' Cancer". (The Oregonian, 2009).  (If you haven't read Doyle's Mink River, drop everything and go get a copy.)
Eight years after writing the piece, Doyle was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. I only learned of his passing two years after he was already gone.  For me, it was so disorienting and lonely to grieve for someone two years after the fact - that wave of immediate grief for most his family and friends had already passed.