Women friends, dogs and death
By Julie Myerson |
August 22, 2010, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
EARLIER this year, I watched someone close to me die. A raw couple of weeks later, with the kind of timing that leaves you unsure whether to laugh or cry, our family dog suddenly had to be put down. In the days and weeks that followed, I heard myself trying to explain the awful, numbing collision of these two deaths, and I worried that I sounded at best ludicrous, at worst callous.
It says a lot for "Let's Take the Long Way Home," Gail Caldwell's ferociously anguished chronicle of her best friend's terminal cancer, that it manages to be, among many other things, a properly intelligent examination of the way in which dogs can help heal our past, enhance and challenge our knowledge of ourselves, even shed light on the mysterious workings of the human soul.
If female friendship is the beating heart of this book, then a bond with a dog is the vein of pure tenderness that runs through its pages. You feel that the women's friendship would never have existed in quite the same way without this crucial, balancing canine element.
Caldwell and her friend Caroline Knapp had more than dogs in common when they met in the 1990s. Though nine years apart in age, they shared alcoholic pasts, an almost obsessive love of water (Caldwell swam, Knapp rowed) and successful careers as writers. Caldwell was (and still is) a respected literary critic, Knapp a columnist and the author of "Drinking: A Love Story," a much-feted, daringly open memoir about her alcoholism.
They shared something else. While not exactly giving up on men (Knapp later married her on-again-off-again photographer boyfriend), these two strong, thoughtful, independent, middle-aged women were mainly concerned with regaining self-respect and taking control. It was appropriate that they took the first steps toward friendship while walking their dogs because the intensity and seriousness with which they loved, trained and exercised those animals had (for the time being) replaced some other possibilities and relationships.
Although there was nothing sexual about their friendship, it was in many crucial ways a love affair. Here were all the markers of lifelong passion: their initial wariness of each other (they'd met at a party a few years earlier but didn't hit it off); their shy, outdoor courtship ("Let's take the long way home," Knapp said after a walk, so they could chat more in the car); and finally Caldwell's touchingly naked declaration, not far into the friendship, of "Oh no -- I need you." When Caldwell eventually buys a house, it's both amusing and somehow inevitable that Knapp rushes up and hoists her "like a sack of grain" over the threshold.
All the best qualities of the happiest and most resilient marriages are here. The in-jokes that no one else will get.
The women's willingness to take each other's fears and neuroses seriously while at the same time gently demolishing them. The constant, fervent competition ("We named the cruel inner taskmaster we each possessed the Inner Marine") tempered with the kinder knowledge that "when it came to matters of the soul and the psyche, we each knew how to tend to the other." And both women ultimately shared and feared the "empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction."
But this was to be a romance without a happy ending. We learn right from the start that Knapp fell gravely ill with Stage IV lung cancer at 42, and that she had a sickeningly swift death. More startling, her dying doesn't even form the book's real dramatic climax. We're still well short of the end when Caldwell grapples with "the suck and force of death," sitting in Knapp's cold and empty living room: "Here, in all its subcomfort temperatures and museumlike stillness, was Caroline, gone."
This may be a book about death and loss, but Caldwell's greatest achievement is to rise above all that to describe both the very best that women can be together and the precious things they can, if they wish, give back to one another: power, humor, love and self-respect.
It says a lot for "Let's Take the Long Way Home," Gail Caldwell's ferociously anguished chronicle of her best friend's terminal cancer, that it manages to be, among many other things, a properly intelligent examination of the way in which dogs can help heal our past, enhance and challenge our knowledge of ourselves, even shed light on the mysterious workings of the human soul.
If female friendship is the beating heart of this book, then a bond with a dog is the vein of pure tenderness that runs through its pages. You feel that the women's friendship would never have existed in quite the same way without this crucial, balancing canine element.
Caldwell and her friend Caroline Knapp had more than dogs in common when they met in the 1990s. Though nine years apart in age, they shared alcoholic pasts, an almost obsessive love of water (Caldwell swam, Knapp rowed) and successful careers as writers. Caldwell was (and still is) a respected literary critic, Knapp a columnist and the author of "Drinking: A Love Story," a much-feted, daringly open memoir about her alcoholism.
They shared something else. While not exactly giving up on men (Knapp later married her on-again-off-again photographer boyfriend), these two strong, thoughtful, independent, middle-aged women were mainly concerned with regaining self-respect and taking control. It was appropriate that they took the first steps toward friendship while walking their dogs because the intensity and seriousness with which they loved, trained and exercised those animals had (for the time being) replaced some other possibilities and relationships.
Although there was nothing sexual about their friendship, it was in many crucial ways a love affair. Here were all the markers of lifelong passion: their initial wariness of each other (they'd met at a party a few years earlier but didn't hit it off); their shy, outdoor courtship ("Let's take the long way home," Knapp said after a walk, so they could chat more in the car); and finally Caldwell's touchingly naked declaration, not far into the friendship, of "Oh no -- I need you." When Caldwell eventually buys a house, it's both amusing and somehow inevitable that Knapp rushes up and hoists her "like a sack of grain" over the threshold.
All the best qualities of the happiest and most resilient marriages are here. The in-jokes that no one else will get.
The women's willingness to take each other's fears and neuroses seriously while at the same time gently demolishing them. The constant, fervent competition ("We named the cruel inner taskmaster we each possessed the Inner Marine") tempered with the kinder knowledge that "when it came to matters of the soul and the psyche, we each knew how to tend to the other." And both women ultimately shared and feared the "empty room in the heart that is the essence of addiction."
But this was to be a romance without a happy ending. We learn right from the start that Knapp fell gravely ill with Stage IV lung cancer at 42, and that she had a sickeningly swift death. More startling, her dying doesn't even form the book's real dramatic climax. We're still well short of the end when Caldwell grapples with "the suck and force of death," sitting in Knapp's cold and empty living room: "Here, in all its subcomfort temperatures and museumlike stillness, was Caroline, gone."
This may be a book about death and loss, but Caldwell's greatest achievement is to rise above all that to describe both the very best that women can be together and the precious things they can, if they wish, give back to one another: power, humor, love and self-respect.
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