Letters from Max. Sarah Ruhl
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than moving into the abstract at the very end.
Something about the ordinary scene of washing dishes with one’s mother . . . it’s very beautiful, Max.
With your round of chemo done are you still immunosuppressed? Wonder if you’d like to see the kids or if they would still be too germy. Could be fun to go to the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica or something. Or Tony’s old kid playground.
I wrote a poem the other day that reminds me slightly of some of the questions you are posing. It’s funny how mundane the impulse for a poem can be. In my case, I got a bad burn making cheesy grits, of all things! Pathetic kitchen accident!
Consider the beauty of a horse.
Consider the beauty of a foot.
Then:
Consider a blister. From a burn.
How it covers the skin while it heals.
Consider its ugliness and how it
Hides the promise of new skin.
Then:
Consider the fact of considering.
Considerate children, and considerate beasts.
And then:
How can one want to leave this earth?
With its horses, feet, ugliness, and thought—
all of its terrible regeneration?
JULY 26
Dear Sarah,
More on your poem in a little bit. I want to ask you about your process—you produce things that are so alive and flexible and bamboo-like.
JULY 29
Dear Max,
I don’t know much about my process except that it involves tea.
Love,
Sarah
Max, at this point, had left New Haven, and was shuttling between his mother’s home in Los Angeles and treatments in New York at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Summers often have me visiting my in-laws in Los Angeles. On my family trip to California that summer, we all went to have sushi in the Valley. My husband, Tony; my three kids; Max; and me. Max joked that the only way to get him to drive to the Valley was to see my family.
My oldest daughter, Anna, who was about seven at the time, adored Max. Children were drawn to Max because he was playful and empathetic, and didn’t care about grown-up social mores.
At lunch, Max looked very skinny. Frightened. We did not go to a Ferris wheel. It seemed like too much.
I remember that summer my twins were three years old. It was the summer they learned to swim.
AUGUST 6
Dear Max,
I was so happy to see you. Even though the happiness was tempered by what you’re going through.
I wrote a poem for you while I was filling the bathtub up with water tonight and when I finished the water had almost overflowed but didn’t. It is attached. (The poem, not the bathwater.)
Take heart, take courage, you’re very brave.
xo,
Sarah
FOR MAX
With thanks to Maurice Sendak
Death no wild thing
and you a boy,
Max.
One night in your room
(or body)
a forest grew
and the walls
(or cells) became
transparent
because brightness
invites
transparency, I guess.
Then a little boat
to hospital smells.
Doctors called
the forest cancer,
not obscuring leaves.
and you a boy.
You say:
“Why can’t people use the word
courage?
instead of something
vulgar and idiomatic
about manhood?”
Courage, I say,
is you,
Max.
In your wild suit
your small boat
and terrible forest
a man overnight
no boy
could ever scale those walls.
You come home
and dinner is waiting,
still waiting, I hope, still warm.
*
And today my small boy
learned to swim.
He said: the water held me, Mama.
It held me.
AUGUST 8
Speechless.
Love,
Max
AUGUST 8
Dear Max,
I hope it was not too intrusive.
Speechless can mean one of two things . . . but I trust you divined my intention.
I’m thinking of you as you go into a difficult week.
Just back from thirty-six hours in Disneyland.
Oy.
Tony sends his best and enjoyed meeting you.
Please put us on your list to let us know how the surgery went, even if it’s a one-sentence email.
xoxo,
Sarah
AUGUST 8
No no no! Speechless only in the direction that it is one of the more moving things to happen to me in a while. You discern me, honor me—I just can’t . . .—just have to hold the poem up.
Disneyland is very disorienting, isn’t it?
I loved meeting your family, all of your children have a kind of calm joy in them that I think you put there. Or maybe Tony. Tony’s a doll.
Hell starts on Monday: it’ll be three days of pretty constant scanning (and I’m a little afraid of MRI machines) and that’ll transition immediately into surgery. Then I’ll get to rest and probably lose some weight.
X
Max