She had worked for Tom for almost twenty years, and part of her responsibility was to go out on location before he arrived, find a place to stay in Morocco, get a driver, figure out the food, figure out what there was to see if there was any time, which usually there wasnt. She told me that part of the reason shed been hesitant to stay with us was that she didnt want to trade on Toms friendship with me. How it happened is told in the title story ofThese Precious Days, Patchetts second collection of essays. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year after we met. I could already see her tumbling down the street. Germline mutations in ATM, BRCA1, BRCA2, CKDN2A, PALB2, PRSS1, STK11 and TP53 are associated with increased risk of pancreatic cancer. To the best of my knowledge, she never quit. What became of them? Things can get very confused. You could sit with us and read if you wanted, answer emails. Our correspondence was less about bookstores and more about books. A forest sprung up in the middle of the street. There is Tom Hanks's deceased assistant, Sooki Raphael, protagonist of the title essay that went viral a few months ago when it was published by Harper's, who had gone to Nashville for her . In her last two and a half years, Sooki started painting. Where I was going was death. Please Scream Inside Your Heart:New book relives chaotic 2020 news cycle in a good way, She states it quite plainly in the introduction, Essays Dont Die, a short piece that describes the process she used to select the essays for this book, most of which appeared in slightly different form in other publications. These months of exercise would save me. Im dying, my friend had said to me. I met Sooki Raphael for a few minutes in Washington, D.C., around three years ago, and maybe even more than that now. I would leave again on Sunday for Virginia. Welcome to the last book event on earth, I said when I walked onstage. FOLFIRINOX had also given her a profound aversion to cold. She walked to the hospital for chemo and then walked home. Her father was in the hospital and she had driven down from Kentucky to take care of him. The power was out for four days, those rarest of days in Nashville when it was neither too hot nor too cold. Sookis a pilot! Karl said. Audience questions arrived on index cards, were read aloud and sorted through. She asked whether that was cheating and was told not to worry about it. And so she meets Sooki Raphael, Hanks' assistant. She has children. No events scheduled for January 19, 2023. There were pictures of her at twenty-two, beautiful and dark-eyed, standing on somebodys desk in little canvas tennis shoes, her gloved hands holding a bat and a net. As the co-owner of a bookstore, I do this sort of thing, and while I mostly do it in Nashville, where I live, there have certainly been requests interesting enough to get me on a plane. A hundred thousand people in this country had already died of the coronavirus. This wasnt out of the ordinary for me, as Im sure it wasnt for her. I had set my intention to help my friend, to hold her hand and go with her while she went to peer over the cliff, the cliff that, coincidentally, I fell off. lives. I am hopeful and feeling radical. Having lost his mom to breast cancer in 2018, he knew he wanted to be extra careful during the pandemic. Here she was an artist who lived with a writer. All the people who love me and how hard this has been for them, the cancer. Asked to endorse Hankss short story collection,Uncommon Type, and then to interview him on stage during his tour, Patchett first meets Sooki in the wings of a Washington theater. You can live here for the rest of your life, I said, and I meant it. These Precious Days is still on view at the gallery until May 10. It was over. I never cry, and yet I had plans to do nothing else for the rest of the day and maybe the rest of the week. Astonishing to come across such a friendship at this point in life. On the first Sunday in May, in the late afternoon, a storm kicked up, not expected but not a surprise either. Pay attention every minute. KELLY: Well, it's really, really true, so it was a pleasure to get to say it to you instead of just pining to my book club about how I wish you had another book coming out. Cuozzo was first diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma in 1994 at the age of 28. I have to know where Im going, otherwise I spend my days walking in circles. No events scheduled for January 22, 2023. Dont go anywhere you wouldnt want to get stuck, a doctor friend had told me. I would ask them at the end of the event, depending on how much time we had. The story has started without my realizing it. So there she was, stuck with us. It was a straight-line wind, a freak occurrence that came out of nowhere. And so I couldn't call my mom. And that was that. Shell die, Karl said. She was Tom Hankss assistant and there was work to do. Here she was the person she had meant to be. Maybe its the trial, she said, but I think it could just as easily be the food and the yoga.. I crawled around her as carefully as I could and collapsed in the hallway. The first door opened and I walked through. By the time individuals walk into the clinic with symptoms like jaundice, weight loss, back pain or diabetes, its often very late in the stage of the disease., RELATED: Increased Thirst and Dark Urine: Researchers Reveal Two New Signs of Pancreatic Cancer As Cases Increase Over Last 18 Years, Detecting Pancreatic Cancer Early Is Crucial. In life, time runs together in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensedone action springboards into another, greater action. New book of essays tells story. Ive never seen a storm come up so fast. He leaned forward over the porch stairs. Go together. We were early, they were late. I dont take notes. I was also greatly occupied by the bookstore. When she came upstairs ready to go she was wearing the black-velvet coat with the peonies on it. The house smelled of chickpea stew and rice when I came in the door that night. Then this: june 21, 2019: As of last week, my six-month chemo run is done, and I had a follow up CT scan. Ill send photos from San Diego. But a few months later, I got an email from Tom Hanks early in the morning. How other people live is pretty much all I think about, she says. assistant (as Susan 'Sooki' Raphael, Mr. Hanks) 2012 Game Change assistant (Mr. Hanks) TV Movie 2012 Larry Crowne assistant (Mr. Hanks) 2011 Big Love assistant: Tom Hanks assistant: Mr. Hanks TV Series 2006-2011 48 episodes The Pacific assistant: Mr. Hanks (Mr. Hanks) TV Mini Series 2010 7 episodes Where the Wild Things Are assistant (Tom Hanks) To say that Patchett was impressed is an understatement. These precious days Ill spend with you, I sang in my head. Plant medicine, they called it now. For them the mystery is solved by the act, and I understand that; its just not the way I work. Where was Sooki? The grass was still brown and only a handful of the thousands of bulbs had opened. I've got mail today, from one of Hollywood's top stars - Tom Hanks. She couldnt be alone. She wrote home with vivid tales and photographs that demonstrated the color and beauty of her travels in the most unique ways. He figures out problems that other people have tried and failed to solve for years. Marriage also meant that I would listen if he tried to talk me out of it. She had set up her life in the basement of our house, a place we never went. I came and watched from the open door. But I cant just live with you and Karl for the rest of my life.. We kept a common grocery list on the kitchen counter. The assistant was a tiny woman wearing a fitted black-velvet evening coat embroidered with saucer-size peonies. There are no words here, I thought. Sooki was making dinner. Ours was an ephemeral connection common to the modern world, writes Patchett. I tried to find a place for this new fact in the equation but all I could come up with was the obviousI didnt know her. I couldnt stay upright, a hangover from the last eight hours in which I had been quite memorably deboned. A plane? She painted. Shes Catholic. Finally she went downstairs. No outfit ever showed up twice. Whats fascinating fails to translate. The producer of the audiobook sent me an article about Sooki from a 1978 issue of New York magazine. They were lucky to get up in the morning to fly across the country so Sooki could have a pancreaticoduodenectomy, also known as a Whipple procedure. God damn it, get inside, I said to my husband. A year and a half had passed since I had picked up his book in my office, and this was where it had taken me: Tom Hanks was willing to read The Dutch House. When she gave us the painting she had done of Sparky on the back of the couch, I felt as if Matisse had painted our dog. We will never know all the things other people worry about. If asked if she could go any place, that place would always be home. We went out to the street on that bright morning to see a fire high up in the distance. Still, she said, I cant help feeling like I should have done more with my life.. They were flying out at the end of May. I live fourteen minutes from the airport and five minutes from the hospital. The only other option was to go with stickers which could shift or come off in the shower. I wanted to say hello very quietly so as not to bother her. The next morning, we went to the bookstore early and picked out presents for everyone in her family. Do you even realize your life isnt normal? Niki said when I announced my trip. We left early, taking into account the traffic that turned out to be eerily absent. Subscribers can find additional help here. Sooki Raphael, Mesa Tree, Topanga, from 'Vivid Series' 16 x 20 inches. You cant go home, and we dont want you to go home.. I did a Pilates DVD we never got around to. You all did a book event. Sooki Raphael leaves her canvas as colorful as she has led her life. On the porch, Sparky joined in. And painting and painting. She learned to solo an airplane before she learned to drive. My doctor paired up some words I never thought I would hear together: pancreatic cancer and youre in remission! It seems like an early declaration, but Ill take it! Doug Wendt also lost a loved one to cancer. She painted her granddaughter striding through a field of her own imagination, she painted herself wearing a mask, she painted me walking down our street with such vividness that I realized I had never seen the street before. Register, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilsons Assistant Died of Pancreatic Cancer. He would bring us with his own two small girls, and the four of us would sit in the coils of snaking power cords backstage and fall asleep in dressing rooms, in this very dressing room. Almost from the moment we finished that first practice, she identified it as part of her recovery, the thing she needed to stay alive. Thats an important distinction and I encourage anybody who goes through this journey as a caregiver and then has to face loss, to think very carefully about how to move forward.. Are you sick?. Ive got to take care of my nun, I told him. No doubt if Tom Hanks and Ann Patchett believe their friend to possess such wonderful qualities, she probably is a saint. What will happen? . She had to make her train. Do you ever miss being alone in your house? she asked me once. Whenever I came to an intersection I would look to the right, the left, then up and down.. When she gave us the painting she had done of Sparky on the back of the couch, I felt as if Matisse had painted our dog.. I didnt worry about her embarrassing herself. Back before she came, when she was still insisting on finding a hotel, I asked her if we could talk for just a minute on the phone. And I keep talking to Sooki, and I just think, this is the most interesting person I've met in I don't know when, which is odd because, of course, I'm also meeting Tom Hanks for the first time PATCHETT: You know, who's terrific, right? She told me that over the course of her life, each time she went back to Germany she found her fluency had mysteriously improved, as if the language had continued to work its way into her brain regardless of whether she was speaking it. There was my grandmother, my father. We filled up the bird feeders twice a day, scrubbed out the birdbath every morning, tracked the relationship of a couple of lizards who lived in the planter on the deck. I said I thought it would be easier to be bald. View Sooki Raphael's business profile as TH Assistant at Playtone. The plan was that she would go home to Los Angeles during her weeks off, and once UCLA started the trial, she could go home permanently. The other partners in his clinic asked him to stay home and practice telemedicine until there was a better sense of how the pandemic would be resolved. He's really interesting. Its there for us at all times. Then one day she told me she was starting to shed. In a previous interview with SurvivorNet,Dr. Anirban Maitra, the co-leader of the Pancreatic Cancer Moon Shot at MD Anderson Cancer Center, explains what he typically sees when patients develop this disease. You all did a book event. Forgot your password? This is the way novelists think: beginning, middle, and end. But she could. We took turns cooking or cooked together. You yourself are heartfelt, and all the love in the world has been expressed. I could see what the cancers given me. How is it possible? I said as I complimented her again and again. My friend told us we should wear eye masks and cover ourselves with blankets. I didnt understand what it was, but something was in the air. We hope you enjoy reading another article this month! I should have thought of that one myself. My goal was to maintain neutrality. I had to listen to what she was telling me. I met the hosts of the event and a few people who worked for them. Twenty-five people had been killed in the last round of tornadoes in Nashville, two months before. A month later, I still hadnt seen all the clothes she had brought with her, and I never saw the cold caps. I cant always be the one whos taking everything.. This was what I knew about Sooki: She lived in Los Angeles. Should I have woken them up and made them come down to the basement? How it happened is told in the title story of These Precious Days, Patchett's second collection of essays. 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