Jon's wife Christy got pancreatic cancer ten years ago, but Jon still carries the fear of losing her. It's a long hallway from diagnostics to recovery, but Jon's found the right doctor.
Host Todd Boss helps Jon stop over-intellectualizing, cutting through the voices in his head, until only sweet remission (from the Latin "to relax,") colors the horizon. Revealed to Jon on the eve of Thanksgiving, 2023, Todd's tongue-in-cheek poem is written in the talky après-dinner-party style of poet Tony Hoagland, and features candid, ad-libbed cameos by Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Czesław Miłosz, and Raymond Carver, who, like all of us, just wants to be loved. From sorrow to joy and back again, this story lets Christy have the final word, and has Jon breathing a sigh of relief. Todd's poem for Jon, "Thanksgiving," quotes a stanza of Tony Hoagland's "Among the Intellectuals," from his posthumous collection, Turn Up The Ocean (Graywolf Press). Used with permission.
The poem
Thanksgiving
Inevitably, you find out
you are lost, really lost;
blind, really blind;
stupid, really stupid;
dry, really dry;
hungry, really hungry;
and you go on from there,
says Tony. Flan says,
where you came from
is gone, where you
thought you were going
was never there, and
where you are is no
good unless you can
get away from it.
Tom says, I tried
following God, but
following somebody
who’s everywhere and
nowhere at once is just
humiliating. Milo
stops kissing the
stem of his pipe long
enough to say, A few
of me followed God, a
few went crazy, a
few got day jobs, and
at least one of me is
upstairs right now,
agonizing over the
tense of a verb. A bird
trapped in a barn, says
McCarthy from the couch
where we thought he’d
been asleep, passes
through the slats of
daylight bird by bird.
I just want to be loved,
says Ray, is that
lost, blind, stupid, and
hungry enough for you
screwballs? And now
Christy, cancer free,
is rounding the corner
with a tray of fresh
drinks. Shut up, she says,
all of you, and
pay attention. You don’t
get too many more
sunsets like this one.
Todd reflects:
Our Zoom meetings find Jon in his study surrounded by his books. He wants to sort out his feelings, but when I ask him about them, he intellectualizes instead, quoting Aristotle, Flannery O’Connor, the book of Job…
I keep after him. Offline, I give him focused writing assignments and ask him to leave me voice mail messages, reflecting on various aspects of his story … but again and again he reverts to quoting others.
After talking with Jon one afternoon, I look around the Santa Monica apartment I share with my girlfriend Hila, taking notice of all the books, read and unread, that crowd my own mind on a daily basis. On our coffee table is a copy of Tony Hoagland’s posthumous poetry collection Turn Down the Ocean (Graywolf Press). Opening it to a random page, I discover the lines that will open Jon’s poem ("Inevitably, you find out you are lost, really lost ..."). The other voices, arranged as if spoken at a cocktail party Jon might enjoy, are adapted from other books on my shelves, or from passages he quoted to me.
A conversation between Jon and Cristy about the experience:
Jon: “I just thought, ‘Why would I be talking to someone about his, to document this experience I’d had? I thought there’d be a dramatic twist, like my life is a story.’ […] I thought it was going be […] really dark, and was actually grateful that it wasn’t.”
Christy: “I thought that it brought a lot of things together. […] I guess I didn’t know exactly what you were talking about, the whole time you’d come and tell me different conversations. I just let that kind of be your thing, from your perspective. I thought it was a really fun poem. It made me giggle, and it was not what I expected. I thought it was going to be really sad, just sort of twist the knife kind of feeling. […] I’m super grateful for the process, and the poem was really fun and beautiful.”
Jon's favorite books:
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Big thanks to Jon, whose vulnerability and willingness were the catalysts for a truly transformative conversation.