Prompt 300. On Caregiving & Conjuring

& John Binkley on crossing spacetime

Portraits by Melissa Carroll from her 2013 show “Recurrence” (l to r: me, Max Ritvo, Melissa Carroll)

Hi friend,

In last week’s newsletter, I shared this video I made in February 2022 from my hospital room-turned-makeshift studio, and before I did, I watched it myself for the first time. I felt like I was time-traveling. That’s been a common experience the last two months, as I’ve been revisiting the studies I made from the transplant unit, reimagining them in large format. But watching a video of it was something altogether different. Suddenly things that were lost in the morphine haze sprang into focus, like how painful it was to return to this hospital without my beloved cancer comrades Melissa Carroll and Max Ritvo. I was overtaken by a kind of raw grief, even all these years later. In a sense, we’d been each other’s caregivers—accompanying each other to the chemo suite, answering phone calls when the anxiety attacks struck in the middle of the night, showing up at each other’s doorsteps when someone got bad news.

Melissa and Max had also experienced the terror of a recurrence—of several recurrences, rather—and I wanted so badly to see them and talk to them about this particular experience. I found myself resisting the idea of new friendships within the cancer world, because in my mind, they could never be what those first friendships were. There was a very unique chemistry at the heart of those friendships, not only in our twin fates of illness itself but in our creative work too. With Max, that connection was so direct, since we were both writers. He was often a first reader for me back then, and when I was starting to write my memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, he was my biggest cheerleader and champion.

As for Melissa, it was as if she opened a door into another creative dimension. Without her example, I don’t think I would have turned to watercolors when I reentered treatment. I never would have realized how watercolors mirror life—how much control you have to cede, how you have to surrender, how it’s full of happy accidents. At so many points in the last weeks, I’ve conjured Melissa here in my studio—for ideas, for advice, even in the playlists I’ve made for myself. Though she is not physically present with me (whatever that means), I’ve felt so close to her.

This brings me to today’s guest essay and prompt—and introducing it, it’s hard to even know where to begin. I’ll start with last summer, when I was at the Telluride Film Festival and met a woman named Liza Binkley. Here again, a happy accident: She had come to Telluride with her sister not for the festival, but to spend time in nature. Their mother had died the previous winter after more than three years in cancer treatment, and they were in the throes of grief. As it happened, Liza got a ticket to see the premiere of our documentary American Symphony, though she didn’t know whom or what it was about. Afterward, she came up to say hi and to tell me we had a mutual friend who had shared my book with her as a source of solace.

What Liza didn’t know at the time was that her father, John Binkley, had found his own source of solace—writing letters to his late wife. For what turned out to be his last nine months on earth, he wrote to her, and though he didn’t tell his daughters what he was doing, they could tell that, whatever it was, it was giving him such light and connection and purpose. In that time, his own health began to fail. And last fall, less than a week before John passed, he showed these letters to Liza and her sister.

After reading them, her sister said, “You wrote forty-six letters. Wasn’t that the number of years you knew Mom?”

“Oh,” he replied, “that wasn’t intentional. I just wrote until I felt like I had finished.”

Today, in honor of fathers loved and lost, I’m sharing the first of those forty-six letters, which Liza and her sister hope to publish as a book (tentatively entitled Instead of Death: Letters to Sherrie). For one of the most astonishing acts of conjuring I’ve ever witnessed, please read on.

Sending love across the gulf of space and time,

Suleika

Some items of note—

• Mark your calendar! We’ve scheduled our next meeting of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers. It’s happening Sunday, June 30 from 1-2pm ET and will be hosted by our beloved community manager,

  Holly Huitt
  . Hope to see you there!

• Each week in our Isolation Journals chat, we share a small joy that we want to hold onto—we call it our chorus of collective gratitude. This week I wrote about the utter delight of sharing a back fence with a baker-friend (think easy-access cinnamon rolls galore!). To be buoyed by the joys of others and to add yours too, click here!

• Just a reminder: If you didn’t get tickets to the opening events of “The Alchemy of Blood,” my joint art show with my mom, Anne Francey—don’t worry! The exhibit will be up from June 22-September 22, 2024, at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ. More info here!

Andō, Hiroshige, 1797-1858

Prompt 300. Across the Gulf of Spacetime by John Binkley

March 6, 2023

Dear Pook,

I’m still on this side. As you, safely ensconced on the other side, well know. At least that’s the way I picture you. Only two long months since we were in the same room. I’m still having difficulty accepting that I can’t communicate with you the same way.

It must be synchronistic that I’m reminded of my neuro-oncologist friend Paul reading me the letter he’d received from a ten-year-old patient.

Dear Dr. F.,

If you are reading this note, it means that the tumor won, and I am now in heaven… I appreciate how well you take care of me. You seem to really care, and you have sad eyes. I think you are a “real” person… Please never feel like you failed if a child dies… You will go to heaven some day and all your cancer kids will have hugs waiting.

Pet your dog for me!

Your friend,

S.

How did that little boy transport himself through spacetime and imagine himself speaking to his doctor from the other side? If he can do it, I can. Right? The way he moves from present to past tense and then back to present and future exposes his ambiguity about where he is in time and what is real. I experience the same fluidity of time with you. Past, present, who knows—future? Where I am spatially when I encounter the energy you created during your lifetime is irrelevant. Am I courageous enough to embrace it, whatever the form, or am I afraid that I may be ridiculed for engaging with a force that no one understands? I have never been afraid to be contrarian in the past. Why start now?

I’m writing to keep you alive. Perhaps that’s presumptuous. Maybe I’m only believing in the possible. I’ve spent a lifetime pushing that dream. You gave me so much love for forty-six years that it has fueled my recovery from the loss of your companionship. You changed my life. From the start. And these past three years, we drew even closer to each other as the insatiable cancer attempted without success to consume the best in each of us. We defeated it. We two became an inseparable team, determined to beat back the disease and preserve your indomitable spirit for every instant possible. Over time, two distinctly different personages melded from my perspective into one seamless identity. Two became one. We fought as one. Love required no words. Hope and all of love’s dividends appeared as needed and crossed tired boundaries with unfamiliar ease.

Now we need that child’s confidence that we can continue to communicate across the ultimate divide. Picture that ten-year-old child imagining himself to the other side and conjuring up what he wanted to say to his doctor. I don’t even know how to label such a feat. But he’s thrown down the gauntlet to me.

If a child can transport himself across the gulf of spacetime, surely I can. Rational thinkers define spacetime as any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. I want a spiritual variation on the same phenomenon: a dimension which permits a party on one side or the other to transcend whatever boundaries might obstruct the commingling of two spiritual entities. What is refreshing about children is that they don’t bother with justifying or reasoning; they just leap from one reality to another and expect adults to follow them without questioning. Children possess the ability to create new reality where there was none before.

Damn the skeptics. Crush the fences. Transcend the static, whatever the interferences, to enable us to carry on the teamwork. The oneness. I don’t need to understand it to embrace it. To live by it. To profit from it. There are no rules. No barriers. No tracks in the snow on this one.

Be patient, Sherrie, with my learning how to do this. Show me once more that tolerance that has marked our forty-six years together, from the beginning.

I love you.

Pook

Your prompt for the week:

Damn the skeptics. Crush the fences. Transcend the static. Transport yourself across the gulf of spacetime. 

Write a letter to someone you love who is no longer on this side. Communicate across the ultimate divide.

If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.

Today’s Contributor—

A graduate of Philip Exeter Academy and Stanford University, John Binkley was a playwright, political activist, and television producer, writer, and director. He summited the Matterhorn at age seventeen and continued blazing trails for the rest of his life. In 1977, he moved from California to Houston, Texas, where he met Sherrie Matthews; they were married six months later. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Sherrie spent time in New York studying opera (her lifelong nickname was Songbird, because of her youthful habit of practicing arias nestled in a tree at her childhood home) and sang in various choirs throughout her life, including a visiting performance at Westminster Abbey. She was also involved in political campaigning and nature conservation, especially planting trees. John and Sherrie eventually settled in San Antonio, where they raised their daughters, Mollie and Liza. They are planning to publish a book of the letters John penned to Sherrie after her death in December 2022, before he followed her to the other side in October 2023.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• Love in a Time of Cancer (Part 1), an installment of Dear Susu where my mom and I talk about caregiving, surrender, and wisdom gained through experience

• A Creative Heart-to-Heart, a raw, unfiltered conversation about life and the creative process with my beloved Jon Batiste

• On Writing as Conjuring, our Notes from the Hatch, our virtual creative hour, where we read a piece by the poet Cam Awkward-Rich and meditated on how a creative practice allows us to conjure anything—even “a room/ where everything you’ve lost is washed ashore”

Our Isolation Journal No. 1—

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