***
Ever since she was first diagnosed with cancer Olive Ann had thought about one day writing a book called How to Be Sick, for people with terminal or chronic illness. Now she joked that she had been unwillingly gathering material for How to Be Sick all fall. “But,” she said, “it isn’t meant to be for people with intestinal bugs, mumps, vertigo, bronchitis (my latest ailment), or too much New York or New Orleans.” Reading her letters, one might be tempted to accuse Olive Ann of being a hypochondriac; there was always something wrong. In the fall of 1986, she had run a fever every day for a month. Standing up made her dizzy, and two days of watching work progress on the mountain house had landed her in bed with bronchitis. She didn’t complain; instead, she wrote about how much fun it had been to sit outside in a director’s chair and watch as the backhoes and front-end loaders felled trees and dug trenches for the drain field and septic tank. Norma said that no matter how bad she felt, Olive Ann could find something to enjoy in every day, and that was certainly true.
The day after she wrote to me that she had not been feeling well enough to work, I received another letter, titled “Chapter II—Dec. 7, 1986.” It read, in part: “Now as for the sequel, I think circumstances are giving me a chance to make my fiction-writing career repeat itself. Five weeks ago I had a bone marrow biopsy that showed some evidence of lymphoma (the first time in eight years!), but it didn’t seem worth mentioning since it might be months or years before chemo. But I’ve been running fever with the bronchitis that should have been long over. Trying to be sure of the situation, the doctor ordered a CAT scan that revealed a mass (probably of tumor-laden lymph nodes) at the back of the abdomen.” She was scheduled for a biopsy and surgery the week before Christmas, after which she was to undergo more chemotherapy and radiation. The day she got the news, Olive Ann said, she had been so busy cheering up relatives that the fact that her cancer had recurred didn’t even sink in. But later she realized that she was scared. “I admitted this to Andy,” she wrote, “and I haven’t felt scared since we talked about it. Hooray for an in-house therapist—one who can hold me.” But, in parentheses, she added, “He said he was a little scared, too.”
As one of their friends has observed, Olive Ann and Andy weren’t cheerful just by nature; they were cheerful by policy. Certainly Olive Ann summoned all her resources in an effort to view this new development in a positive light. “I’m really not much dismayed or upset right now,” she wrote, perhaps trying to convince herself, too. “I’ve had lots of practice living one day at a time and accepting the unacceptable. This is one more adventure in living—another challenge—and what a difference to know for sure that I can deal with it. It has not been easy to deal with feeling bad most of the time.”
As usual, Olive Ann knew that what she needed from her friends was not sympathy but encouragement. And after all those years of living next door to Olive Ann, Norma Duncan knew that the best thing she could do for her now was urge her to get back to work on her book. After making Olive Ann promise not to die, Norma said to her, “Well, maybe we’ll get another Cold Sassy Tree out of this.” Olive Ann had already had the same thought. “That is exactly my intention,” she wrote to me. “A few letters to do now, and Christmas presents to wrap and mail, and then I expect to get to work in earnest—before that biopsy next week. I really haven’t felt like getting at anything lately, but I had better.” Ferrol Sams liked to tease Olive Ann by saying, “Some writers need to get drunk in order to work. Olive Ann Burns needs to get cancer.” She thought this was a wonderful joke; I suspect she also believed that there was a grain of truth in it.
Unfortunately, cancer was not much of a help this time around. Olive Ann was out of the hospital for Christmas but was back within days. “I felt what dying must feel like,” she wrote. As it turned out, she was severely anemic and dehydrated. But worst of all, her abdomen had swollen up so much after the surgery that, as she joked in one letter, “it looked as if the surgeon did a caesarean and put the baby back in.” She was in the hospital for almost two months, sicker than ever before, and it was then, I think, that I realized that she was not indomitable after all. Always before she had done such a good job of coping with illness that I had come to see it as just another part of her life, something she accepted with good humor, but not something to worry about. Even now, she was referring to the hospital as her “health spa,” so extended was her stay turning out to be.
She didn’t come home until March. “I had chemo on Tuesday,” she wrote, “a bigger dose than before, but as Andy pointed out, only the cat threw up that night.” She believed that she could beat lymphoma again as she had beat it before, so she set about choosing appliances, carpets, and cabinets for the mountain cabin. They were calling it the Write House in honor of all the writing that she and Andy intended to do there. Reading through Olive Ann’s letters from the spring of 1987 is in itself a lesson in living in the moment, for they are an odd juxtaposition of alarming health bulletins and lovely plans for the future. At the end of March, Andy had an enlarged lymph gland removed from his neck; it proved to be malignant. Now he and Olive Ann were both receiving chemotherapy, alternating treatments so that one of them would be well enough to cook and keep house while the other was sick from chemo.
Olive Ann described one night when Andy began throwing up and didn’t stop until four-thirty the next afternoon, at which point the Prednisone he was taking kicked in and produced such a high that he couldn’t sit down. “He tackled every project in the house and garden, both here and at the mountain house, and without sleep,” Olive Ann wrote. “By the time he finished the pills on Sunday he was getting a little tired but had had a good time. At one point I was afraid we’d give out of work to do and I’d have to hire him out.” Olive Ann herself was in and out of the hospital for blood transfusions and was confined to the house after each round of chemo until her white blood cell count rose to an acceptable level. Hearing all of this, I began to fear that if I didn’t make a trip to Atlanta soon, I might not get another chance to see either Olive Ann or Andy. Even though her letters were upbeat—she wrote about meeting a fan who had bought forty hardcover copies of Cold Sassy Tree, about Dell’s seventh printing of the paperback, about her cozy writing loft in the Write House—I also sensed a precariousness, as if either one of them might be snatched away at any moment.
So my fiancé and I planned a visit for May, timing it so that we would arrive just before one of Olive Ann’s chemotherapy treatments. “Just before treatment time,” she advised us, “the white count is always 5000 or 6000, and I can do wild things in public.” She didn’t do anything wild, but she and Andy did take us to the Write House for lunch. What I remember most about that trip to Skylake was how much life and laughter and vitality could emanate from someone who appeared so frail. Olive Ann covered her bald head with a colorful turban rather than a wig, but she wore it with style, complemented by long, swingy earrings. Her eyes were enormous in her thin face, magnified even more by her large glasses. She didn’t look healthy, but she certainly looked happy, so it was easy to forget how sick she was. We had a wonderful time. She joked and told stories and asked questions all the way to the mountains, and then she and Andy proudly showed us around their little house—including their bright red bathroom. There was no furniture yet, and the electricity hadn’t been hooked up, and just as we arrived the day darkened and it began to rain. We set up a makeshift table on the screened porch, covered it with an old cotton tablecloth, and sat down to a meal of fried chicken, Vidalia onions, and iced tea that Olive Ann had brought from home. The spring rain fell all around us, thunder rumbled in the distance, and we all agreed that it was a beautiful afternoon. Olive Ann and Andy knew how to make a rainy-day picnic into a festive occasion, just as they knew how to turn cancer into an adventure in living. I remember that meal, and that day, with great pleasure and with more than a little awe. We had come to Atlanta with the notion of perhaps saying farewell to two sick friends; instead, they orchestrated a
party in our honor and thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the process.
That summer Olive Ann did feel well enough to get back to work on the book. What’s more, after nearly a year of poor health and little or no progress on the novel, she was excited again. Just after our visit, she wrote, “Sunday morning I woke up at 3 o’clock and just suddenly I, who could once honestly say I didn’t understand what a theme meant, suddenly saw where I wanted to go with this book. I had everything before—setting, characters, incidents, scenes, conflicts—but I hadn’t decided what I wanted the book to say, so I just saw endless writing days ahead. Now it’s as clear as looking out a newly washed window.”
A month later, Olive Ann and Andy’s dream of a writing retreat finally came true. She got her computer set up at the Write House, and they spent a peaceful week there, returning to Atlanta for chemotherapy treatments and then heading right back to the mountains. “I wish you were here with us now,” she wrote, “the house fully furnished and the tree frogs outside an antiphone chorus so loud we have to raise our voices to be heard clearly....I got interrupted on the writing last week by a high fever (an infection)...but I’m still excited about what I’ve written and am writing, and I feel really good.” She and Andy were planning to come to Maine that September for my wedding, and they were confident that they could not only make the trip, but do some sightseeing and visiting as well. Olive Ann’s doctor had told her that the lymphoma appeared to be in remission again; she would need only one more chemotherapy treatment, three weeks before the wedding. “That should leave me in good shape,” she wrote. “Andy will have three more after the wedding, but the doctor will let him put one off for a week, for the occasion.” She added, “I expect my eyebrows to be in for the wedding. I have missed them.”
Olive Ann had beaten lymphoma, but a couple of days after she wrote this letter, it became clear that something else was terribly wrong. She was too weak to do anything but sit at the computer for a couple of hours, and when she went in for her weekly blood study, the doctor warned that her white blood cell count was low again. The next day she was weaker still and was having trouble getting her breath. The diagnosis was congestive heart failure. In a letter to a friend, Andy wrote, “I am not sure when she will be home, but soon I hope. It is awfully quiet around here at 4:30 A.M. which is about as late as the Prednisone will let me sleep, even with a sleeping pill.” To me he wrote, “September 12 on Bailey Island has been a dream for us just as it has for you and Steve. We even got a New England guidebook from the library and dug out our old camping road atlas. But we’ve had an unexpected change of plans.”
According to Olive Ann’s doctor, Andy wrote, the only cure for a weakened heart was rest. That meant no walking, no sitting, not even talking. Olive Ann always got a laugh in speeches when she told about the arthritis doctor who had advised her never to vacuum again. “Now,” she would say, “if I could only get one to say I shouldn’t cook...” She remembered that joke now, hearing her doctor’s orders for complete bed rest. “Be careful what you wish for,” she said to Andy. Still, she hoped that the bed-rest sentence would result in progress on the book, and she inscribed a copy of Cold Sassy Tree “to the doctor who says I can do nothing but write.” At the end of Andy’s letter to me, she added her own handwritten note: “I have to not think about all we will be missing in Maine...I learned long ago to accept what has to be and not waste energy on what cannot be changed. There are good things to everything. Since I’ve been in the hospital I figured out how to put Loma on page one, and I’m giving her a pet monkey and snake, the better to make her even more inconsiderate, and suddenly the whole book has a life and focus and excitement I didn’t feel when Will and Sanna were carrying it by themselves.”
From the first time I saw Olive Ann and Andy together, they had been an inspiration to me. Here were two people who had been married for over thirty years and who still got starry-eyed looking at each other. They were each other’s best audience, equally matched in their storytelling abilities and in their appreciation of a good joke. Even when Olive Ann was telling a story Andy had heard a hundred times before, he would listen with full, adoring attention, stopping whatever he was doing to gaze at his wife as she spoke. Sometimes Olive Ann would turn to him, and say, “Andy, tell the one about...”just because she wanted to hear his voice. The pleasure they took in each other’s company was unmistakable and absolute, and I often told them that I aspired to a marriage like theirs. Having discovered true love at the office herself, Olive Ann presided over my romance and my engagement to a Houghton Mifflin colleague in fine Amy Larkin style, sharing our happiness and dispensing romantic advice at the same time. She and Andy had looked forward to being at our wedding just as much as we had looked forward to having them there. Now, trying to put the best face on her having to spend September 12 in the hospital instead of on an island in Maine, Olive Ann suggested that we freeze some fish chowder for her and Andy. “If you were our daughter we wouldn’t love you more or be any happier for you and Steve,” she wrote. She hoped that she would be going home the day after she and Andy sent this letter. Instead, she took a sudden turn for the worse, and two days before the wedding she slipped into a coma. Just as I was packing my wedding gown into the car to head for Maine, Andy called to say that Olive Ann’s doctor didn’t expect her to live through the night. His voice breaking, he told me that he and Olive Ann would be there in spirit when we said our vows.
The next day, we heard nothing from Atlanta. And so, first thing on the morning of our wedding, I called the hospital, not knowing whether Olive Ann was alive or dead. Andy answered the phone in her room, and his voice held the answer. She had opened her eyes that morning and asked if she could have her hair washed. Hours later, as sun broke through the clouds on Bailey Island, the first glass of champagne was raised to Olive Ann Burns.
***
Olive Ann remained in the hospital until just before Thanksgiving, and there were many more days when the doctor summoned the family to her bedside, as her blood pressure dipped dangerously low. When she finally did come home, she was so weak that she could barely talk. She couldn’t leave the hospital bed that they set up for her downstairs, and she couldn’t have company. As Norma said, “For someone as gregarious as Olive Ann, that was hard.” Of course, “company” didn’t include Norma, who was almost part of the household, always there to do a load of laundry, drop off a casserole, or share in the daily reading of the fan mail and get-well cards. Olive Ann often said that God must have put Norma Duncan in the house next to hers, so grateful was she for Norma’s presence in their lives. But Norma herself takes no such mystical view. “I was just their neighbor,” she says simply.
Surely, if there was ever a time when Olive Ann needed Norma’s love and encouragement, it was that fall, when even holding a pen was too much effort for her, and when day after day went by with no improvement. Though he was just finishing his own chemotherapy and not feeling well, Andy was determined to take care of Olive Ann himself, and he did. Olive Ann knew how hard it was for him. And feeling that she was a burden on Andy was more difficult for her to handle than being sick. Later, she recalled that shortly before she went to the hospital, Andy had said, “If I had to prepare three meals a day, I’d eat out.” “Now,” Olive Ann quipped, “he cooks three meals a day.”
Olive Ann was never one to waste much time or energy worrying about her health, but that fall she did worry about money, and with good reason. Her hospital and medical bills had been astronomical, and she had run through her insurance. From now on, she and Andy would have to pay all her expenses themselves, a frightening prospect. Royalty checks came twice a year and were earmarked for medical bills, but it still wasn’t enough. Even the day-to-day cost of home care was staggering, because Olive Ann couldn’t leave her bed, and the doctors made house calls. She required a hospital bed, a wheelchair, and a variety of expensive medications; the daily cost of the oxygen alone was nearly a hundred dollars.
Olive Ann and Norma
and Andy often talked about Time, Dirt, and Money, and about how she would get back to it when she was feeling better, but, recalls Norma, “it seemed to be taking an awfully long time.” Late that fall, Norma went over to check on Olive Ann one afternoon and found her reading a pamphlet on congestive heart failure. “I guess I had just had enough,” Norma says. “I asked her if she would be willing to try dictating the sequel, because I thought that would be a lot more fun than reading about heart failure.”
At first, Olive Ann didn’t think she could do it; she was accustomed to typing, to having the words come through her fingers, not out of her mouth. Norma suggested that Olive Ann just pretend she was talking to her; then Norma would transcribe the tape and give the typed page to Olive Ann to revise by hand. They arranged to try a dictating machine for a month, and, Norma says, “We started off, not with the novel, but by answering fan mail.”
“I wish now that I had kept one of those early tapes,” she says. “Olive Ann’s voice was so weak and the sound of the oxygen so grim that I would have to type a little bit and then cry a little bit. But as she got stronger and started having fun with what she called ‘the dictator,’ I could type and laugh, not only at what she was writing in letters, but at the asides she would make to me, sometimes complete with punctuation.”
When she began to dictate in January, Olive Ann had five months’ worth of fan letters to answer, not to mention correspondence to resume with countless friends and relatives. She composed what Andy called “a generic letter” to her “Dear Loved Ones,” explaining that, although she was once again in remission from cancer, she was also bedridden, and the end of that was not in sight. “I did have a period of despair about it,” she admitted, “but I’ve accepted future limitations and am aware of an inner joy and peace that a low-salt diet and backaches can’t alter.”