Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon

I am reading the book, “The Best day/The Worst day” by Donald Hall. It is the story of the last year of Jane Kenyon’s life, her death from leukemia and also the story of their relationship and a marriage of two writers. It’s beautiful.

I am interested in writer’s lives and especially in how two writers lived together doing their work, making a life as freelance writers and teachers. But I am reading this because I have also known since attending Bennington that Donald’s story is also the story of losing Jane and grieving her. My first year at Bennington was the year after Jane’s death and Donald’s readings that year were of his poems/letters to Jane after her death. He was a grieving man.

I know that I am reading this book to look into the face of grief and death and losing a beloved. I realized that I am reading the book backwards. I started at the back with the postscript because I wanted to see right away what he said about her death. The postscript is Donald writing ten years after Jane’s death. So he has survived. Ok, he survived. That’s both a hope and a fear.

I read the Postscript over and over. Life after Jane dies. It is startling and sad and clear. I am doing something with this reading. Or trying to. Some self-inoculation? Some kind of research? Asking, “How bad is the pain going to be?”

Donald Hall cared for Jane for 15 months: chemo, bone marrow transplant, all the horrible side effects-some are familiar to me now: weakness and sore mouth and hair on the pillow and on the sink. Hall describes the process and real feelings of loving someone who is very sick and then dying. I can feel the howl when they are told leukemia is back and there is nothing more to do. Jane dies eleven days later. Hall is loving her so much but is clear about not trying to make her death harder by loving in a way that makes it harder for her to let go. The love in that!

In reading this book and reading it backwards from after death to dying to illness to symptoms to their life in New Hampshire and making their poems I am really staring at Donald Hall’s survival and I rail at that. That is it. I am afraid of John’s death but also I am afraid of my survival.

But I also make this note to myself: one of the reasons that Jane’s death is such a shock to Hall and Kenyon and feels so unfair is that Hall is 19 years older and he had colon cancer that metastasized to his liver years before. They had already been thru colon surgery, chemo, cancer recurring—all his. And the she gets leukemia and dies in a year!