A typical Patchett piece is a eulogy, suitably warm and affectionate, respectful to those who have died, or are about to die. “I wonder if we could just pretend to move,” she asked her husband: “I could have said: ‘I wonder if we could just pretend to die?’”ĭelve deeper into the essays in These Precious Days and you will find that death is more than a pretence. Patchett thought about the boxes in her own basement, all the gifts and possessions she had forgotten about over the years. It took Patchett’s friend the entire summer to tidy up her father’s house for an estate sale: one man living alone had left behind too much. She intends from now on to travel light, to empty her house in Nashville of the residues of adulthood: the boxes of clothes and dishes and jewellery that she has accumulated over five decades of living, things that she now believes prevented her from “thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now”.Ĭall it a pandemic house clearance, if you will, for she first had the idea of sorting out her drawers and closets following the death of a friend’s father last year. She isn’t terminally ill, and her decision isn’t as morbid as it sounds at first. A t 57, the novelist Ann Patchett is already preparing for death.
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