Letters from Max. Sarah Ruhl
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saturating my lungs and perhaps the rest of my bloodstream. Systemic treatments are the only things that would give me a long-term chance of remission. And it doesn’t look like the systemic therapies (chemo) are doing what they ought.
It is more likely that I will embark upon a clinical trial, hoping that an experimental vaccine therapy treatment at the NIH will be able to give me a clean scan.
These trials are trials because they are promising, and they are trials because they are not proven science. I will be on the periphery of medicine. Empiricists (like Dad) love the sentiment that man’s reach should always exceed his grasp. My body is being fanned and fumbled by the gloved fingertips. I hope they can get a grip on me, but I can’t say the odds are very good.
Should the trial fail, my tumors will probably start growing again very quickly. We will try to find another trial, or we will consider nursing more chemo. I honestly can’t tell you.
That spring, Max underwent chemotherapy while trying to graduate from Yale. He had lung surgery at Sloan Kettering. I visited him after, in New York. We took a walk around the block. We took a selfie. Here it is:
I always liked that picture. I have Bell’s palsy, so half of my face is crooked when I smile. But in this picture half of my face is cut off, so I look legitimately happy. Funny that Max and I both look happy when he was in so much pain.
MARCH 27
Dear Sarah:
I am very sad—Good Friday closed my New Haven chemo hospital and I will have to trek up to New York for Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Will you be in New York any of those days? I am waiting for the arrival of the book I wanted to give you.
You are the best gift to have delivered in person. I have been struggling to adjust to jet lag and chemo.
I have good news: I got into the Columbia MFA! Whee!
My mother has even discussed the prospect of me doing chemo alone in New York and giving me some salvaged autonomy even if I’m on these demon drugs.
MARCH 27
Dear Max,
Hooray about Columbia!!!
All the kiddos are sick with high fevers. So we’ve been hanging out watching Scooby-Doo. Here’s an old poem for you.
xo,
Sarah
I wanted music yes
but I also wanted the music
of every day things
a plate an arm some dirt a chair
how a plant is related to a window
how a window is related to a chair
small words with purpose
correspondences
of every day things
the music of objects
one day ending
not tracking for posterity
but loosening like a fig
MAY 3
Sarah dear,
The “small words with purpose” of your last poem have stuck in me. I think it goes along with the meditation I ought to be doing. That whole poem does. And maybe on a different level is a way to get away from some of the aggrandizing camp in my own work.
Will you be around come graduation? Could we have a phone call soon—I would like to talk with you and hear your wisdom on things that have been rotating around my mind. The use of apolitical art. Camp and its relationship to my work. Building a coherent understanding of my personality. Developing a healthier relationship with consistency in the way my mind applies itself.
Love,
Max
MAY 3
Max:
The only way I can think of to develop a healthier relationship with the way the mind applies itself are:
1) writing routines
and
2) meditation
Camp . . . longer conversation.
Building a coherent understanding of your personality . . . maybe there is no need?
Live your way into the questions (in Rilkean fashion).
Or back to:
2) meditate . . .
Also I wish I were there to watch you march at graduation!
You deserve a triumphant graduation, and great joy!
I just finished a draft of my play about reincarnation and I wanted to send it to you for your reading pleasure.
See you on Tuesday and talk soon.
xo,
Sarah
The play I sent Max was called The Oldest Boy. It is about a couple (a Tibetan man, and an American woman) who are told that their child is the reincarnation of a high Buddhist lama (or teacher), and that, according to tradition, they must give their child to be educated from an early age at a monastery in India. They spend the play trying to figure out what to do, how to let their boy go.
I thought of Max a good deal while writing the play. Even the title in some ways refers to Max—because I always found him to be the oldest youngest person. In the acknowledgments, I thank him for his teachings. The play is ultimately about teachers and students, and the cyclical transmissions that pass between them.
In traditional Tibetan Buddhism, after a high lama dies, his student actually looks for the teacher as a reincarnated child. Once the child is found, the student becomes the teacher of his old teacher. I read a lot of books while doing research for the play, and the books changed me. While reincarnation seemed like a fairy tale before my reading a suitcase full of books, I came to feel it as a real possibility, as likely as any other version of the afterlife that I’d been exposed to—the heaven of my Catholic childhood, or the void of my atheist teens.
JULY 21
Sarah,
First of all, thank you for the play: now I know what to do with myself for the next few days. My God. Sarah. I cannot begin to tell you how moved I am by your acknowledgment. No words.
I miss you. I owe you a call: it surfaces in my mind every day but I’m usually only lucid enough to follow through with something like that at night, and you’re a mom who needs her sleep. I will try to steal a reasonable hour from myself at which to call you.
Crisising on a lot of fronts. Chemo over: no change in tumors. This means—what the hell is going to happen to me with this experimental cocktail they’re going to inject into me? General feelings of anxiety have disconnected me a lot from art: starting to worry that my poetry work is indulgent and insulated. I’ve been living with my parents all summer and all of last year: I’m terrified of getting back on the horse of living alone, especially considering how supportive my parents have been emotionally and psychologically. I also really really want to live alone. I don’t think I’m capable of functioning properly without a Not-Mom-Woman in my life. (“Not-Mom-Woman” is a blues hit, by