Keeping Loved Ones Close Always

In this season of life, I receive news of the passing of many of the friends' parents, and siblings. How you wish to remember the passing of your loved ones is entirely up to you, but if there's a discrepancy in how the family would wish to remember a deceased member, then there would be unhappiness about the annual ritual, certainly.

David Gilbert writes a heartwarmingly sweet story of death, remembrance and love in 'Come Softly To Me', published in The New Yorker on October 10, 2022.

Three sisters come together every summer in The Berkshires, from the time they were teenagers to now when they're grandmothers . The extended family and Louise, Lily and Eleanor honor their dead eldest sister, K.K in a little memorial pantomime/play. They wear flower girl dresses mended and patched over the years, and crowns of flowers made by their grandchildren. 

The childhood home that they grew up in had been sold, since maintenance and the high estate taxes were too heavy to manage. The couple who bought it bulldozed it and built a new mansion and a six-hole golf course in its place. But they spied it on now and then. Their gatherings now take place elsewhere in an unnamed sister's home and yard. I assumed it's Eleanor's since most of the story seems to also mention her ex-husband Mickey whom she still cares for, and likely lives with. It also talks a fair bit about his recent recovery from cancer, and the feeding tube that's still required, and how the family perceives him.  

To the bystanders these women were grandmothers and aunts and mothers and great-aunts and wives and stepmothers and ex-wives and in some cases old friends, but right now, to themselves, they were just sisters. An ethereal spirit seemed to carve a path through all that was familiar, the air getting closer, as if the past and the future were pressure systems meeting over seven acres in the Berkshires.

The author painted vivid details of the sisters' lives, and their current lives. We get a glimpse into the relationships between the sisters and their husbands, and their grandchildren. They have all remained close and don't seem to be a toxic family, at least not during this annual gathering.

In an interview with Cressida Leyshon, the 55-year-old author explained why he took the story's title from a 1959 song by the Fleetwoods. I confess I've never heard of that song till this story. Mickey thinks of it as “this otherworldly song,” 

I wish I could claim that I’ve always been obsessed with that song, because it’s a song worthy of obsession—it’s so odd and lovely, as though sung by heartsick teens with a secret suicide pact. But in reality I needed to find a song from that period, and so went to good old Google and looked up the Top Forty from 1959, and there were the Fleetwoods with this killer track—I had heard it before, but not in a long time. (“Mr. Blue” is also awesome.) This is where writing can be fun: those moments when the universe seems to be sitting on your shoulder. “Come Softly to Me” was perfect (though for a second I considered naming the story “In Heaven Everything Is Fine,” from the Lady in the Radiator song in “Eraserhead”).