I tried to enjoy it but it was difficult to breathe. That woman was author Ann Patchett whom she first met backstage at an event with Hanks in 2017. Sooki hadnt answered the question, but that was the day I felt as though we started talking. By showing her what her life might have looked like and then sending her home. By seeing what I wanted to see instead of what was actually in front of me. They took ten vials of blood on one visit, twenty-eight vials the next. Once she gets here and sees the way things are, shell be fine.. Sooki went downstairs to her room. Did Tom even know that Sooki and I were friends? ANN PATCHETT: Aw, Mary Louise. It was a shaggy dog of a story by a woman passionate about dogs, touching on a variety of subjects, including her friendship with Tom Hanks' assistant Sooki Raphael; Raphael's treatment. I was told that although not everyone wanted to commit to having the tattoos, it was the most accurate way to align the radiation field that had been so meticulously laid out by a team of physicists working alongside my radiation oncologist. Heres a universal truth: people are interested in helping Tom Hanks. My friends arrived and we waved at one another from a distance as they gathered Sooki up. Sookie paints and paints and paints. But the doctors say, as they expected, the cancer is back, and they are ready to start up chemo again. On the few mornings she didnt come up at her usual time, I imagined her sick, needing something, not telling me because she didnt want to bother me. It was Memorial Day, after all. We miss you. Whether all of this together was what helped, or whether she had made up her mind to see only the good, I couldnt say. They reviewed her records together. Im still hereat Playtone and in general. (Her 2004 book, Truth and Beauty, describes a seventeen-year friendship with the brilliant but demanding writer, Lucy Grealy, also a cancer victim.). When I asked her how she was feeling, she might admit to being a little tired or having a bit of a stomachache, nothing more than that. Small, flat islands of boiled wool were resolutely attached to her scalp by the 2percent of hair that had not fallen out. I lost her for a while, and then she was back again. I feel like I could pop into Trader Joes and have them replaced with those happy little stickers they hand out to well-behaved childrenit undermines my confidence in the sophisticated nature of the whole process just a bit. Then one day she told me she was starting to shed. To say that Patchett was impressed is an understatement. is the author, most recently, of The Dutch House. I knew how to do that. You can just concentrate on yourself., She shook her head. Later, she asked him if hed be willing to record the audiobook of her latest novel, The Dutch House. When he agreed, she began a protracted email exchange with Raphael to work out the details. Not to advance your cancer treatment? My intention was to help Sooki. I had liked her coat very much, those pink peonies as big as my hand. As the warning sirens kicked in at four in the morning, only Sooki was awake. Sooki Raphael is an artist. Raphael turned to art during a tumultuous time in her life and created works that will continue to be enjoyed long after her passing. There are suddenly people everywhere. What became of them? Karl went to talk to the pilots about the plane and Sooki and I sat in the little waiting area. Although his superhero mother will not get to see him play in the NFL, Farley will take many lessons he learned from her and apply them to whatever challenges he faces in life moving forward. Would he think to tell me if something had happened? assistant: Tom Hanks - as Sookie Raphael: Cloud Atlas: 2012: assistant: Mr. Hanks - as Susan 'Sooki' Raphael: Game Change: 2012: TV Movie assistant: Mr. Hanks: Larry Crowne: 2011: assistant: Mr. Hanks: Big Love: 2006-2011: TV Series assistant - 48 episodes: The Pacific: 2010: TV Mini-Series assistant - 7 episodes: Where the Wild Things Are: 2009: assistant: Tom Hanks: Angels & Demons: 2009: assistant: Mr. Hanks: City of Ember: 2008: assistant: Mr. Hanks We lit the gas stove with matches and made dinner. The producer of the audiobook sent me an article about Sooki from a 1978 issue of New York magazine. Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process. Then she went downstairs and went back to sleep. I knew that she worried about her ninety-four-year-old mother in Rye Brook, New York, and read to her grandchildren in San Diego over Zoom. Im self-conscious about being in the way, especially if Im not at my best through chemo. He walked me through the publishing process: being thrilled by acceptance, ignoring reviews and then having the dream of bestsellerdom dashed What mattered was that you knew how to love the job.. I looked up every anomaly online, settling on too much black tea, or maybe the wrong color shoes. In a recent post made to her official Instagram, the caption echoed this sentiment of Raphael sharing her unique perspective of the world through her art. I dont even know how to respond to such generosity. How it happened is told in the title story of These Precious Days, Patchett's second collection of essays. My cancer markerCA 19-9is nonspecific to pancreatic cancer (it can indicate other inflammation in the body), but its an indicator and is supposed to be at 35 U/L or less. One of them was shirtless and had a colorful parrot on his shoulder. I said I thought it would be easier to be bald. KELLY: (Laughter). Ive heard writers say that they write in order to discover how the story ends, and if they knew the ending in advance there wouldnt be any point in writing. She painted and slept and did her work; she had her Zoom meetings and her Zoom gatherings with friends. She seems very nice, Karl said once we were in the kitchen. All day long Sooki emailed me pictures of her family with the subject line Where is our other sister? Below is my story. Lets go back to the hotel. I had spent my professional life looking at my calendar, counting down the days I had left at home. Her California and Tennessee oncologists had conferred so that she could transfer from one hospital to the other without missing a treatment. And so I couldn't call my mom. I had thought this was a story about Tom Hanks, the friendly actor-writer who had recorded my book, but I was mistaken. What could have been a disastrous time becomes, for both of them, a cherished opportunity. Youre detoxifying all your inner organs.. We waited. lives. Marriage meant that he would hear out what on the surface may have appeared to be a spectacularly stupid idea. He shook his head. She liked herself again. And you will be surprised by how comforting it is to be very sick with an actual doctor upstairs. There was a sitting room downstairs, the library, her bedroom and bathroom. Sooki had strength and courage. The rain went on for another half an hour, and when it gave up I put Sparky on his leash and the three of us went outside to wander and gape with our neighbors. Karl came home and we sat on the couch and watched a storm tearing up the backyard. People are not composed entirely of their facts, after all. Really? I was impressed that first day when the therapists swarmed the table forming the mold around me and explaining about tattoos. I thought about how extraordinarily famous you would have to be to have someone like that working as your assistant. Patchett is so 100 percent a writer that you get the feeling that her life doesnt happen unless she writes about it. The title piece in the autobiographical essay collection These Precious Days by Ann Patchett is about her unexpected friendship with Tom Hanks's personal assistant, Sooki Raphael, who ended up living with Patchett and her husband in Nashville while enrolled in a medical trial for pancreatic cancer. I was packing boxes, writing cards, and making cheerful videos in which I extolled the virtues of the books I loved. She's allowed to live in the world, and not be one thing. It was just that we had piled up so much junk to keep from hearing it. What a good idea. we asked. Yoga and meditation for an hour in the morning was augmented with yoga and meditation for an hour at night. How was I going to say I was tired when she was never tired? There were pictures of her at twenty-two, beautiful and dark-eyed, standing on somebodys desk in little canvas tennis shoes, her gloved hands holding a bat and a net. Cause and effect are so much clearer in novels than they are in life. They clearly didnt understand she intended to walk, though knowing Sooki, she probably could have carried it. High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety. Heres to more time to explore color and enjoy all the peoplelike youwho make life colorful. The actor who starred in the romantic movie You've Got Mail sat down and wrote me a letter in his California office in Santa Monica. She worked for Tom Hanks. Simply put, Karl makes rain. The artist said that the painting was a respectable copy from 1899 and sold for 25 francs (about $2,574 today). No one had ever been so welcome. I chart your emotional life.. You think youre getting chemo three Wednesdays a month but really its a test to measure the effectiveness of kundalini yoga and kohlrabi. I had signed up for a farm-share box, and every week we were overwhelmed with pounds of mysterious vegetables. Subscribe to the World edition here. Sooki had downloaded it. RoseGallery is pleased to present These Precious Days, a solo exhibition of paintings by Sooki Raphael, on view from 10 April until 10 May, 2021. The second time they came because Rita was singing at the Grand Ole Opry. Sooki arrived in Nashville on Sunday, February 23, just after Kate left. Then this: june 21, 2019: As of last week, my six-month chemo run is done, and I had a follow up CT scan. It was over. I wanted Karls comfort and was glad he wasnt there. Some people stay for months. He was in Nashville. Those she won. That night as my husband and I walked our dog around the block in the cold dark, I told him about Sooki. Walking backward is an excellent means of remembering how little you know. Karl was sitting on the front porch and he called for me to come out. Shed fallen down some stairs outside of church the night before and twisted her foot and now that foot was swollen and sore. I couldnt stay upright, a hangover from the last eight hours in which I had been quite memorably deboned. We shined them into the beds of purple iris that stood tall and straight, untouched. Register, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilsons Assistant Died of Pancreatic Cancer. She apologized for her late response, saying that shed had a medical procedure and hadnt been in the office. Precision seemed like a good decision here. But after years of infections, she decided to remove her implants and go flat. Her artwork reflects a deeply personal exploration of body image and sexuality. I dont take notes. Can empty houses help solve homelessness? It was a science experiment that could never be replicated. The title essay focuses on Patchett's friendship with Sooki Raphael, Tom Hanks' personal assistant, who spent the early months of quarantine in Patchett's Nashville home while receiving. Are you serious? This was what we did at the end of the day. Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built.". Ive written plenty of jacket quotes in my day, mostly for first-time writers of fiction whom I believed could benefit from the assistance. The essays, even when they are nominally about something else, are about the weight and grief of relationships: with her father and two stepfathers, her best friend, her husband and, improbably, actor Tom Hanks' assistant, a woman named Sooki with whom Patchett develops a deep bond. Id been in touch with Sooki once or twice when there was talk of a bookstore in Santa Monica, and now I pinned my hopes on her as she dug into Toms schedule at Playtone, his production company. Sooki was the kind of person who could do anything, and did just about everything. I was overcome by a sense of order in the world: if I hadnt picked up that book, if I hadnt gone to D.C., if we hadnt stayed in just enough contact for her to tell me a year after the fact that she had cancer, and if I hadnt mentioned it to Karl, she wouldnt have found her way to the only clinical trial in the country that both matched her cancer and could take her immediately. It wasnt that I could kill someone; it was that I could kill her. That was what we had to hold on to, and so we held on. Death, I said. The main character I was certain of starts to drift, and someone Id barely noticed moves in to fill the space. I tried to imagine chemo while living in a hotel. We both wrote for the New York Times. Just think, I would say to her on Wednesdays. FOLFIRINOX had also given her a profound aversion to cold. I could have said I was busy writing a novel, and that would have been both ridiculous and true. Its so important to twist this way, the gentle voice of the yoga teacher reminded us. She painted as fast as she could get her canvases prepped, berating herself for falling asleep in the afternoons. Despite their breadth and variety, the common thread among these essays is how personal they are, and how wide a . The phone hadnt been run over, nothing in the wallet was missing. We danced. We went back and forth. We had just passed Stuyvesant Park when the first tower fell. Theyve been exposed to it?. She brought her paintings upstairs to show us: a person who was too shy to say good night most nights was happy for us to see her work. But the clinical trial she needed was here in Nashville at the hospital where my husband worked. Come on, Sooki, he said, his voice gone grand. Or maybe it wasnt as bad as that. In some ways its not unlike putting together my own life. This is what its like to write a novel: I come up with a shred of an idea. Thought-provoking commentary and opinion on politics, books and the arts. Once I start writing things down, I feel like Im nailing the story in place. My goal was to maintain neutrality. I told her I would pick her up at the airport. If she missed a session, would her hair fall out anyway? RELATED:Tom Hanks and Rita Wilsons Friend and Assistant Dies from Pancreatic Cancer; See Their Heartfelt Tribute to the Artist, A post shared by Rita Wilson (@ritawilson), Throughout her illness she painted, she saw beauty, she created and she never wavered, Wilson said. He already knew. Finally she went downstairs. Again it would appear this story had reached its conclusion. Sooki had been a marathoner, though her best event was a 10K trail run. 2023 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Satellite Information Network, LLC. There was a little kitchen in the dorm, and I got a book, and I made Thanksgiving dinner. Sooki, in her eye mask, was lying so serenely beneath the furry blanket she had brought us from California that I wondered if she was dead. Tell me the news of the great world, Karl would say when he got home from work, and since many were the days I didnt leave the house, I relied on books and phone calls and emails in order to have something to contribute. And this led to you meeting Sooki. After a series of emails, Sooki comes to live with Ann and her husband . I didnt know you had a husband!! Or its supposed to slow it down. She hadnt lost her hair on FOLFIRINOX, though shed lost her sense of taste and smell, the feeling in her feet and hands, and twenty pounds. I made it a point not to tell Karl sad medical stories at the end of his long days of sad medical stories. Im just wondering if you got in the habit of not talking about yourself because of the work you do. 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