GLOWWORMS

Moving through the cave was like riding a conveyor belt through time and loss.

- BY ANN PATCHETT

In 2024, I was scheduled to go on book tour in Australia and New Zealand. Flights had been purchased for me and my husband, Karl, and tickets to various literary-festival events at which I was to appear had been sold. But, as our May 9th departure inched closer, three things became increasingly clear: first, Karl's hundred-and-two-year-old mother, Jo VanDevender, was not going to make it to a hundred and three; second, my friend Jim Fox, who, at eighty-four, had been diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer that had metastasized to his lungs, wasn't going to beat the odds much longer; third, our little dog, Sparky, who looked at us with mounting panic through his bouts of hard panting, had developed an enlarged heart.

Karl and I had many long talks about whether to cancel the trip. Karl is a doctor, and he is able to be both kind and unsentimental where death is concerned, even the deaths of his mother and his dog. He said it was possible that all three would still be here when we returned, and it was also possible that they would die while we were gone and we wouldn't be able to get back in time, and, by the way, back in time for what? To be helpful?