This profile of Luke Shephardson is full of joy, not just in his achievements—which include winning the most prestigious big wave competition in the world, the Eddie—but in the tender accounts of Luke’s family life. Gabriella Paiella does not shy away from reality: The family struggles to make ends meet on the expensive North Shore. But she also makes it clear just how happy Luke is with his lot. Sure, he’d like to own his own house, but he is not searching for the next big thing—he appreciates what he has. If only more of us could say that.
Luke has surfed waves in Tahiti and Fiji, chased swells in Japan and Chile. But he wants to stay on the North Shore forever. He wants his kids to be able to stay here, and maybe even their kids. “It’s better to struggle in paradise,” Luke tells me, “than to be unhappy and rich somewhere else.”
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Just in time for Father’s Day, A.W. Davis shares a beautiful tribute to her father, an artist who took every opportunity to encourage and nurture Davis in her own artistic and creative pursuits.
After having two boys, my mother says she prayed to God every night for a girl to be all hers, but she got me instead: a daughter, yes, but when I wasn’t climbing trees or sticking my nose in a book, I was with my father. We’d spend summer weekends hopping around the Smithsonian museums and artists’ studios in downtown D.C., and winter days building snow cities rather than snowmen. We made stop-motion movies with modeling clay, collaborated on murals using rolls of butcher paper spread the length of the garage floor, and sat on the covered porch during thunderstorms and drew the lightning bolts as they flashed. Dad taught high school during the day, and at night he’d hole up in his makeshift studio in the basement, sandwiched between the washing machine and sports equipment, painting to Miles or Coltrane. I’d be right there crouched on the floor, tinkering with pastels, pencils, paint—anything but coloring books, forbidden in our house, as they “stifled the imagination.” Every once in a while he’d ask me what color to use where, or for my interpretations of a theme he was exploring. It was the safest place in the whole world.
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Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.
Thoughts on finding feminist inspiration in Tennessee. An analysis of a controversial therapy treatment. A report on the complicated role of the library. A reflection on the bond between a mother and daughter. And musings on the ever-evolving nature of language.
Jessica Wilkerson | Oxford American | June 6, 2023 | 3,644 words
I don’t just love that Jessica Wilkerson* takes on tough topics in her work, including racism, feminism, and outdated female gender roles; I love how she does it. In her writing, she gets comfortable with being uncomfortable, which allows her to go deep, probe difficult questions, and most importantly, come to some sort of (sometimes uneasy) understanding of what it means to live in a world that’s flawed. This is one of the great gifts of powerful writing. In “Lady Vols Country,” Wilkerson examines outdated southern gender roles through portraits of two women who were very important to her: her grandmother and Pat Summitt, the former head coach of the University of Tennessee’s Lady Volunteers basketball team. In remembering two strong women and the change they stood for, Wilkerson finds the permission she didn’t know she was looking for—to be true to the life she wants for herself. —KS
*If you’d like to read more by Wilkerson, I heartily recommend her Longreads feature, “Living with Dolly Parton,” in which she turns her keen eye and strong heart to the life, legacy, and social power of the country music legend.
Imagine for a moment a horrific trauma exists in your past, and it continues to wreak havoc on your life. In a cruel twist, talking about the issue remains so painful and triggering that multiple types of psychotherapy have brought you no relief. But then you hear about a process that doesn’t require deep excavation, yet promises near-magical results. That’s exactly what drew people to EMDR, a modality that allegedly processes traumatic memories and alleviates PTSD using rapid eye movements. Now, 30 years after EMDR first emerged, Meg Bernhard tackles its divisive and confounding legacy. Many claim it cured them, and hail its creator as a savior; others dismiss it as snake oil, pointing to its dearth of clinical validity. This is a fascinating story, one that contends with both sides of the conversation while also being informed by Bernhard’s own inconclusive experience with EMDR. “The business of healing is messy,” she writes. “People start and stop therapy, are triggered years after their traumatic event. They get better, and worse, and better. Or they don’t. Why should an eye-movement therapy work? Why should it not? Perhaps EMDR, with its loops and repetitions, its movements, its quiet, echoes this illogic. Perhaps, in doing so, it reminds us that healing doesn’t fit a single script.” Centuries of scientific progress have uncovered much, yet the human body remains unimaginably complex, especially where mind and muscle overlap. As we all stumble toward wellness, it’s helpful to remember how knotty that path can be. —PR
Nicholas Hune-Brown | The Walrus | June 12, 2023 | 5,333 words
The library in the town where I grew up was in an ugly, box-like, red brick building, starkly contrasting with the cobbled high street and medieval buildings surrounding it. But this location was key. Bang in the middle of town, it’s where my Mum would often drop me off while she did her shopping, leaving her free to peruse seventeen different types of bedsheets without a whinging child, and me to go ride dragons—in a fantasy book, tucked in a cozy nook of the children’s section. It was free babysitting. Libraries have always been about more than just the books. However, Nicholas Hune-Brown discovers in this thought-provoking essay that they are now being called upon to perform services far beyond their old remit. Spending months going from library to library across Canada, Hune-Brown finds that as “the last public space,” libraries have become a social services hub for their communities. A place to learn, apply for jobs, get warm, or use a washroom. Everyone is welcome through the doors, and librarians—who, as Hune-Brown writes, “probably chose the profession because of their passion for Victorian literature”—can now find themselves dealing with anything from a mental health crisis to opioid poisoning. The last safety net. I had not previously given much consideration to the current role of the library. Now I have. —CW
Jiayang Fan | The New Yorker | June 12, 2023 | 6,260 words
Early in the pandemic, I started going for runs through the empty streets of Brooklyn. These outings kept me sane, even as they took me past grim reminders of the crisis, including a refrigerated truck that our neighborhood hospital was using as a makeshift morgue. One day I listened to an episode of This American Life in which writer Jiayang Fan described the terror and grief she felt navigating COVID because her mother, who had advanced ALS, was in a medical facility that Jiayang couldn’t visit. Jiayang imagined what it would be like to lose her mother, her only family, at a time when the closest she could get to her physically was by standing in a park, looking up at the window of her room. The devastating segment literally stopped me in my tracks, and though I can’t say for sure, that may have been the day that I regularly started walking the last chunk of my running route so that I could call my own parents. Jiayang’s mom passed away last year, and now she’s written an essay that defies easy description. It’s about their bond, and it’s told through the lens of stories: stories Jiayang’s mother told her, stories she told her mother, stories she tells herself. I promise that it will stop you in your tracks. —SD
Alexander Wells | European Review of Books | April 19, 2023 | 3,551 words
Shared language is about communication, for sure, but as Alexander Wells notes in the European Review of Books, it’s also about identity and belonging. Sometimes, even understanding the latest slang makes you feel in-the-know, right!?!? (Not at all fond of how “right” has become the latest way to enthusiastically agree, but I digress.) As an editor of an English-language monthly published in Berlin, Wells is fascinated by ever-evolving common language usage in Germany, rife with combined English and German words cut like butter into flour to form something new and sometimes amusing, but always full of meaning. “German social media loves to mock awful Denglisch marketing attempts,” he writes. “But when the bilingual puns are good, they’re good—and enhanced by the thrill of belonging. I love this one billboard ad for classic indie radio that reads Everybody hörts (« everyone listens to it »), and I love it not only because I like the pun, but because I feel a surge of pride that I’m in on the joke, that maybe I do really speak German.” I came for the appreciation of evolving language and stayed for the pun of it. —KS
Audience Award
Congratulations to this week’s top choice from our readers!
Amelia Tate | The Guardian | June 10, 2023 | 3,645 words
Amelia Tate finds looking back at her teenage diaries an awkward experience. Who wouldn’t? But Tate finds more than cringe in these books—she finds an understanding of who she was as a teenager. It’s not someone she is proud of. —CW
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If the racket known as “SEO optimization” has ever felt like an affront to coherence and language—and who are we kidding, of course it has—then Mia Sato’s reporting for The Verge will send you screaming for the longest novel you can find. Why? AI. Of course AI. At least the story is as hilarious as it is dread-inducing.
But for the online store, AI-generated text weaves in and out of shoppers’ perception. Recently, she demonstrated updating the page for a cannabis-themed apron and using the Shopify AI text generator for help. She added keywords like “pot lover,” “funny gift,” “men or women,” and “smoking marijuana gift” to the prompt. She then instructed the AI tool to use a “supportive” tone of voice and to add a few emoji into the description.
“Gift the pot lover in your life this funny cooking and BBQ apron,” the resulting text read. “The perfect gift for the chef who loves a good smoke sesh, this apron comes in sizes for both men and women and will make them laugh every time they grill or cook! 🤣🤪” Dziura tweaked an error inserted by the AI system — the apron is one size — and pushed it live to the site. It was good enough to do the trick.
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Katy Vine gives her first-person account of five weeks spent suffering a bout of vestibular neuritis: an inflammation of the inner ear’s vestibular nerve, thought to be caused by a virus. The condition came on spontaneously and not only incapacitated her, it brought on bizarre almost out-of-body spiritual experiences and left feelings of—surprisingly—bliss.
That’s when the pulses began, emanating from some quiet location, independent of the chaos surrounding me. These weren’t physical sensations. Some carried messages—distinct from thoughts, as they occurred repeatedly, without variation, and did not feel invited, encouraged, or scripted by me. One message was, “Everyone I love alive and dead lives inside of me.” Another was, “I am the result of millions of years of evolution.”
Other pulses brought perceptions that unseen others were with me. The presence of a hundred-year-old version of me lingered nearby. I didn’t visualize any figure, and she didn’t offer advice, but I had an unmistakable feeling of a guard keeping a protective watch over me. On other days, I experienced recurring visits from my grandmother, my namesake aunt, and a close friend—all of whom had died. Sometimes they came together, sometimes separately. Their vibe was encouraging and sympathetic and affectionate, like relatives entertaining a bored toddler in church.
What happened to me, exactly? Look up the symptoms of vertigo or vestibular neuritis and you’d be hard-pressed to find an explanation for all of what I experienced. Every so often, in the intervening years, a friend of a friend suffering a bout of vertigo has called, complaining of spinning, and asked me how I got over it. I’ve had to refrain from telling them that it was one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had.
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What happens when the only way to ensure the survival of the people you love the most is to leave them behind?
That’s a choice no one should have to make, and yet it is the dilemma of overseas workers everywhere, no less so than in the Philippines, which exports about a fourth of the world’s 11.5 million migrant domestic workers, a predominantly female army of nannies, maids, and cooks. A significant percentage of these women are mothers separated from their own kids while caring for the children of others, sending home remittances and boxes of chocolate, Spam, and other treats, and wondering if their husbands are faithful and how many years will pass before they can see their families again.
“In the eyes of many employers, Filipinas were at the top of the ethnic hierarchy for domestic workers,” Rachel Aviv writes in one of the powerful stories below, “as if their nationality had become synonymous with family duty and deference.” Such sought-after traits have been a blessing and a curse, giving Filipinas access to the lives of elite families in cities like Hong Kong, Dubai, and New York City, but also subjecting them to highly exploitative and even dangerous situations.
Adding to their burdens, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have been called on to be “modern-day heroes” and uber-patriots. “Now, more than ever, we need you, the OFWs and your families, to take part in our nation-building efforts,” former President Rodrigo Duterte once said. “I thus call on you … to make our country proud.”
Laborers who remain in the Philippines, meanwhile, face their own dismal work prospects, such as foraging for discarded valuables in Payatas, a former dumpsite outside of Manila. Whether at home or abroad, Filipino laborers struggle valiantly to preserve their humanity amid hellish work demands.
You might not think that emotionally and physically arduous labor would be an inviting subject for longform writing, but it is. That’s because the writers featured in this collection portray the subjects of their stories not as victims but instead as three-dimensional people. As a journalism professor who has also reported on labor, occupational safety, and immigrant health issues, I turn to these compelling and well-researched narratives to illustrate how to report with empathy and care.
My Filipino American students in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, appear to connect to the stories in this collection at an almost cellular level.
“I didn’t realize we could be in these stories or write these stories,” a student told me after reading the work of Filipino American author Alex Tizon, whose essay is featured in this collection.
Representation matters.
Fortunately, the U.S. media has broadened its coverage of Filipino and Filipino American narratives in recent years, and we now read about Filipino American entertainers, food culture, and political leaders. But it’s important not to forget the cost—borne by so many Filipino laborers—of toiling at the hardest jobs imaginable to provide for the people they love.
The following five excellent pieces reveal the endless work ethic of Filipino workers— those who leave and those who stay.
With deft sentences and restrained prose, Alex Tizon recounts the story of Lola (Eudocia Tomas Polido), a servant who accompanied his family when they moved from the Philippines to the U.S. in 1964. Tizon exposes the horrors of modern-day servitude in a deeply personal and indelible way. Sadly, he died a few months before the piece was published as The Atlantic’s cover story, which went viral and generated both praise and criticism.
The story begins for Tizon at birth, when Lola served as a maid, cook, and nanny to his family while his parents worked to establish themselves in the U.S. By the age of 11, Tizon had come to understand that his beloved caretaker—who was “given” to his mother, then a child living in the Philippines—received no salary. Lola slept in random spaces of Tizon’s home, such as on the couch or in the laundry room. Lacking documentation, she could never leave the U.S. to return home; she also suffered physical abuse and cruelty at the hands of Tizon’s parents.
No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.
What strikes me each time I reread this piece is Tizon’s anguish over his family’s treatment of Lola. He also wrestles mightily with his own complicity, despite having provided Lola a pampered life when he became an adult. But as this story reminds us, good deeds don’t wipe away the sins of the past. Tizon’s final published piece is a testament to how difficult it is to forgive our family and how it’s even harder to forgive ourselves.
After Lola’s death at 86, Tizon hand-carried Lola’s ashes back to her remaining family in the Philippines, in a beautifully rendered scene of pure grief among the now-aged people who knew her as a youngster. En route to this encounter, Tizon draws on the islands’ fortitude—surprising, given their fragile formation—to suggest a metaphor for the spirit of Lola and the enduring work ethic of her beleaguered yet resilient people.
Life here is routinely visited by cataclysm. Killer typhoons that strike several times a year. Bandit insurgencies that never end. Somnolent mountains that one day decide to wake up. The Philippines isn’t like China or Brazil, whose mass might absorb the trauma. This is a nation of scattered rocks in the sea. When disaster hits, the place goes under for a while. Then it resurfaces and life proceeds … and the simple fact that it’s still there makes it beautiful.
Lola is only one face of the Philippines’ massive overseas workforce. In this New Yorker piece, Rachel Aviv portrays another laborer, Emma, who leaves her nine children behind and becomes a nanny to wealthy families in the U.S. In a heartbreaking moment before her departure, Emma faces doubts too enormous to ignore.
She said, “My conscience was telling me, ‘Don’t leave your kids. Don’t leave your kids. They are young and need you.’”
But like all working mothers, she chooses work over her children. Or, more accurately, she chooses work to provide for her children. I strongly connect to Aviv’s writing—which is as elegant as her research is exhaustive—and the piece’s theme of anguished working motherhood. I hated leaving my firstborn with strangers even though his babysitters provided loving care. My plight is of course trivial in comparison to mothers like Emma, who live apart from their children for years and even decades while they channel their maternal instincts toward the children of others. I wonder: Is this rerouted maternal love a form of consolation, or a source of bitter pain?
Either way, it’s clear that Emma’s children never stopped yearning for their mother’s return during her 16-plus-year absence, during which she mainly talked to her daughters through Facebook and brief telephone conversations (five minutes for each child). And while her girls gained opportunities from Emma’s sacrifice, these advantages didn’t seem to take them far enough. We learn at the end of Aviv’s story that their economic prospects in the Philippines have not improved much in their mother’s absence—one daughter has already emigrated to Abu Dhabi to work as a secretary—which is a stunning revelation given everything that Emma sacrificed to provide for a better future. And so the arduous toil of hardworking Filipina caregivers continues:
Emma’s daughters and their friends wished to go abroad, too, if not to America then to Japan or Hong Kong or New Zealand. “I think there’s no end to the cycle,” Emma told me. She found it hard to resist the idea of her daughters joining her in New York. She hasn’t seen them in sixteen years and still can’t discuss the separation without quietly crying. Over time, the tone of her children’s letters has evolved; there is less rivalry and more resignation. In the early years, the children kept guessing which holidays might be the occasion for Emma’s return. Gradually, they stopped asking about her plans. “I believe someday, if God permits, you can be with us once again,” her daughter Roxanne recently wrote.
Departures (Tan Tuck Ming, TheKenyon Review, October 2022)
Working for an employment recruitment agency in international domestic work, Tan Tuck Ming brings a unique vantage point to this essay about Filipina housekeepers in Hong Kong. But for him the issue is also personal: He was cared for by a beloved Filipina housekeeper as a child, and it’s clear that her kindness left an imprint on his soul. Ming’s piece mines some of the same material as Aviv’s, but the essay form allows for more rumination and ties together personal narrative with historical and theoretical frameworks. Here, for example, he discusses migrant caregiving as the fuel powering the economic engine of international commerce:
[T]he way I understand an economy is as vertical motion, people either moving up or down but never staying still. This is how cities like Hong Kong or Singapore—these dense, vertiginous centers for global capital and its circulation … are made possible by tracing the fissures of nation, empire, and debt; by the subdivision of labor charted as unskilled within the topographies of capitalism to a secondary class of migrant workers. “We need to protect domestic workers with all our might,” a member of the legislative council says, at an antitrafficking fundraising event. “After all, without them, Hong Kong cannot unleash its economic power. We must be grateful to them for releasing our workforce.”
This politician’s statement is of course vexing. I wonder if a low-earning Filipina maid in Hong Kong actually aspires to unleash the power of the wealth-gathering class. And yet the comment suggests a key truth, which is that the center of Hong Kong’s economic juggernaut is not a technology or financial infrastructure so much as a beating heart—that of the industrious, loving Filipina caretaker.
Of course, Filipino labor doesn’t only occur overseas. In fact, the Philippines is one of America’s leading outsourcing destinations for customer service, technical support, and other industries.
Adrian Chen explores the highly stressful labor of content moderators, whose job is to evaluate questionable uploads to social media and to remove offensive, harmful, and inappropriate material. And this profession takes a toll, as Chen documents in interviews with workers in the Philippines who spend all day looking at the beheadings, sexual assaults, animal abuse, and other horrendous content that users attempt to post on Facebook and other platforms. Chen shows us an invisible workforce taking on the worst of humanity to make our reading and viewing online more benign. But as always, it’s the laborer—and in this case, the Filipino/a worker—who makes a massive sacrifice to enable our scrolling pleasure.
In a shopping mall, I meet a young woman who I’ll call Maria. She’s on her lunch break from an outsourcing firm, where she works on a team that moderates photos and videos for the cloud storage service of a major US technology company….“I get really affected by bestiality with children,” she says. “I have to stop. I have to stop for a moment and loosen up, maybe go to Starbucks and have a coffee.” She laughs at the absurd juxtaposition of a horrific sex crime and an overpriced latte.
Constant exposure to videos like this has turned some of Maria’s coworkers intensely paranoid. Every day they see proof of the infinite variety of human depravity. They begin to suspect the worst of people they meet in real life, wondering what secrets their hard drives might hold. Two of Maria’s female coworkers have become so suspicious that they no longer leave their children with babysitters. They sometimes miss work because they can’t find someone they trust to take care of their kids.
In this final selection, the late great adventure writer Matthew Power explores one of the world’s notorious trash dumps at the time in Payatas, a barangay outside of Manila.
In this literally toxic workplace, enterprising foragers dig for buried trash items they can sell: copper wires, old cell phones, even a frozen swordfish thrown out by a restaurant. It’s grubby and exhausting work, and some of the foragers live on the site (at least at the time of Power’s visit). The descriptions are as precise as the site filthy:
The ground underneath our boots is spongy, and as we climb, black rivulets of leachate flow down the access road. A black puddle releases methane, bubbles like a primordial swamp, and the ground itself shakes when a loaded truck rumbles by.
Yes, the description is memorably graphic, but the story goes well beyond capturing the gross-out factor. Power instead brings the workers on this trash mountain to life, not only showing Filipino foragers in action but also in rare moments of leisure: singing karaoke, enjoying the cockfights, even planting gardens. The piece is ultimately a paean to work ethic and labor even in supposedly menial jobs that appear simple and straightforward. The work, like the people who perform it, is complex and worthy of our admiration:
A kalahig slits open a bag as if it were a fish, garbage entrails spilling out, and with a series of rapid, economical movements, anything useful is speared and flicked into a sack to be sorted later. The ability to discern value at a glimpse, to sift the useful out of the rejected with as little expenditure of energy as possible, is the great talent of the scavenger.
I appreciate that Power goes beyond “studying” his subjects through the lens of first-world superiority and instead gives us reason to respect their immense work ethic and love of family. Sadly, like Tizon, Power died long before his time, in 2014.
Amy DePaul is a college journalism instructor at the University of California, Irvine. She reports on public health, immigrant communities, and labor. You can find her boogie-boarding at Crystal Cove.
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Lara Logan rose to broadcast stardom as a hungry reporter who capitalized on both her fearlessness and her telegenic appearance. That was before she drifted into a nest of conspiracy theories that would get her ousted from numerous TV gigs; now, she travels a far-right lecture circuit, fearmongering for profit. But Elaina Plott Calabro’s profile doesn’t relish in the gory spectacle—it’s a dispassionate, empathic look at how someone so talented can lose their way so completely.
Logan’s success at events like this—she now features at many—turns on her ability to shrink the distance between her past and present selves. She needs the people in this auditorium to believe that the woman on the projector screen is the same one who now anticipates their fears of woke indoctrination. She needs them to trust that when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids,” it is with the precise rigor and dispassion she once displayed on the front lines of America’s wars.
Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides.
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This essay defies easy description. It is about love. It is about perseverance. It is also about many cruelties—the cruelty of poverty, of terminal illness, of grief, of generational trauma:
What you know of your mother’s childhood can be summarized in a single story that is about not her childhood but her father’s:
There once lived a little boy, the son of impoverished tenant farmers. One day, he was invited to the village fair by the child of his richer neighbor. The neighbor gave the boy a few coins to spend at the fair. Ecstatic, he bought himself the first toy of his life, a wooden pencil, which he hung proudly around his neck the whole day. When he returned home, his parents beat him within an inch of his life. Those coins could have bought rice and grains! Enough to feed the family for a week!
This was the only story your grandfather told your mother of his childhood, and the first time she told it to you, you recognized the echo of every hero tale you were taught as a child. A Communist cadre till the end, your grandfather had run away at age sixteen to join the Party, which had given him the first full belly he had known. Just as important, the Party had taught him how to read, inspired the avidity with which he had marked up Mao’s Little Red Book: his cramped, inky annotations marching up and down the page like so many ants trooping through mountains.
The second time your mother told you the story, you were ten or eleven and she didn’t have to tell it at all. The two of you were at Staples, shopping for school supplies. “back-to-school sale,” the posters all over the store screamed. Four notebooks, four mechanical pencils, your mother had stipulated, but you wanted more. You always wanted more. When you persisted, she had only to look at you and utter the words “You have more than anyone” for you to know exactly whom she was referring to.
The story was growing inside you, just as it had grown in your mother: a cactus whose spines pierced their way through your thoughts.
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The Rim Fire in Tuolumne County, Florida, ate over 250,000 acres and cost nearly $130 million to put out. One man confessed to starting it—accidentally—but the case against him fell through. What really happened back in 2013? For Rolling Stone, Joseph Bien-Kahn attempts to find the truth.
It’s admirable for Skalski to be so unbothered by the criticism. Still, I press on. She, more than anyone, embodies the feds to the locals of Tuolumne County. Why, in her view, had the area been so ready to forgive the man rescued from the scene of the crime? “I think what people were surprised at was that it was a local person. Not even so much that it was a hunter, but that it was a local person,” she says. “We all knew how dry it was out there, so they’re like, ‘Why would you do that?’ I don’t know — that could’ve been a disappointment to find out it was somebody local as opposed to somebody coming from a city out there.”
Of all the explanations, Skalski’s rings most true. We say we tell stories to understand the world, but the ones we choose to believe often fit into our existing understanding of it. A local kid should’ve known better than to start a fire on the hot, dry afternoon of Aug. 17, 2013. A terrible accident with untold costs was too simple an explanation. And so, many other stories began to be told.
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With today’s news of Cormac McCarthy’s death at age 89, American literature has lost another giant. As with so many giants, McCarthy inspired a journalistic cottage industry of sorts; his stylistic and creative influence touched countless other writers, many of whom felt moved to acknowledge that influence in their own writing. What follows is a quintet of such pieces that Longreads editors have read and enjoyed over the years.
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Robert Draper | Texas Monthly | July 1992 | 2,116 words
Cormac McCarthy showed up in El Paso around January 1976, his move from Knoxville unannounced and his arrival completely unnoticed. He was a 43-year-old writer of three out-of-print novels, a man twice divorced, living exclusively off of literary fellowships. He began to be seen in pool halls and bowling alleys on the south side of town, as well as in various Mexican restaurants, always with some esoteric book under his arm. The friends he slowly accumulated had no idea who Cormac McCarthy was in literary terms. They knew him as a short, handsome man who wore simple clothes, who seemed to live comfortably with little income, and who enjoyed talking about almost any imaginable topic—except, as it happens, contemporary literature. He did allow as to how El Paso was a proper setting to research his latest project: the spectacular Blood Meridian, perhaps the most unyieldingly savage vision of the Old West ever committed to print, in which cowboys and Indians scalp each other and their own kind without a moment’s hesitation or remorse. But something else about El Paso appealed to McCarthy. It was, as he told a friend, “one of the last real cities left in America,” with its own unvanquished eccentricities and the added feature of geographical remoteness. A man could move freely in El Paso. He could get lost there.
David Kushner | Rolling Stone | December 1, 2007 | 4,196 words
But among this rarefied gathering of leading intellects, none is more respected than the spry old cowboy dipping his tortillas in beans at the lunch table. Dressed in a crisp blue shirt and jeans, he sits comfortably with his weathered boots crossed and listens intently as a theoretical biologist who has flown in from Berlin discusses something called evolutionary economics – the relationship between animal behavior and marketlike forces. This is quintessential Santa Fe stuff, examining one phenomenon (biology) in the light and lexicon of another (economics).
The discussion soon turns to the topic of suicide. As a slide of a West African tribe flickers on the biologist’s computer screen, the researchers dig into the idea that suicide attempts can be evaluated as a kind of expression of market forces – a threat to remove oneself as a source of benefits to others. The neuroscientist in the corner raises her hand and poses a question to the group: “Does anyone know another animal besides humans who commit suicide?”
Brains churn. Air conditioning whirs. For once, though, the scientists are stumped.
Then the cowboy chimes in, as he often does, with the answer.
Tom Chiarella | Esquire | June 28, 2009 | 5,900 words
Cormac McCarthy fathered a son as an old man, and this story is an ode to a ticking clock, to the diminishment of time, to last chances. Last chance to parent. Last chance to warn, to train, to prepare. The father fights to teach. And the father teaches the boy to fight. In the movie’s first teaching moment, the father shows his son where to shoot himself in the head should it come to that. With the gun loaded. It is perhaps the movie’s only lurid turn, a moment that, like almost every moment in the movie, appears in the book as well. By the time it occurs, it is understood to be a gesture of necessity. There they are, citizens of a kind of now, bad teeth and all, pallid, filthy, damp to the bone, at their end, and whether you’ve read the book or not, the sight of it makes you seize.
Jim White | Radio Silence | June 12, 2012 | 4,987 words
In my left coat pocket is a dog-eared copy of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which happens to be set here in Knoxville way back in the ’50s. I’m not much of a planner, so to some extent or another (depending on your take on the mechanics of serendipity) it’s sheer coincidence that it ended up in my suitcase as I packed for this tour. Likewise I’m no great bibliophile, certainly not one of those types who might find it exhilarating to locate and use, say, the exact toilet that Jack Kerouac took a shit in while writing On the Road. That said, I’m happy it ended up with me here in Knoxville, as the city itself is practically a character in the novel. Gay and Central Streets, where Walter’s barbershop is, are mentioned frequently, so it’s interesting to be in the physical locale where the action takes place. I’m about halfway through Suttree this time around. I’ve read it front to back many times, usually when events in my life have gone spiraling out of control and that black cloud of depression that’s dogged me off and on for much of my adult years descends.
Noah Gallagher Shannon | Oxford American | September 5, 2017 | 6,836 words
If it’s not so uncommon for a writer to traverse literary landscapes, McCarthy does seem unique in being claimed by the native intelligentsia of two separate regions. In the late sixties, Guy Davenport wrote that in McCarthy, Appalachia “has found a new storyteller to depict the darkness of its heart and its futile defiance of its luck.” So too in the West, where he is considered the reviver of an aesthetic long cheapened. A poll taken a few years back by High Country News named the Border Trilogy, which comprises All the Pretty Horses and its sequels, asamong readers’ favorite books about their home, alongside canonical texts by Lewis and Clark and Wallace Stegner.
All this critical sorting and swerving tells us a few things about McCarthy: that no one quite fathoms him enough to name his place in the culture; and that his absence has shifted the responsibility of this naming over to his obsessives, many of whom have become fixated on figuring out the best method to secure his legacy, a task which, the closer you get to it, feels less and less like scholarship and more like a Rorschach test. To many, he has become a ghost, a figment of study—which is strange since, of course, he’s alive, and writing. His existence today, at eighty-four years old, feels already posthumous.
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Amanda Chemeche shares her memories of when the Chelsea Hotel was “a home to artists and outsiders alike who lived, tried, and beautifully failed.” Her reminisces are almost dreamlike, yet capture the essence of a special time in this hotel’s history.
There used to be a bookcase, half obscured by a large tropical plant, in the lobby. Looking at it evokes a haptic experience for me. On each shelf is a table setting: one all in blue, another in red, and so on. I remember my curious, child fingers nudging the objects in confusion, mistaking them for a glued-down Fisher-Price tea set. My hands came away coated with tacky dust and grime.
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In his own words, Hashim Mohammed, 26, tells the story of his escape from the Uyghur region of China via a Thai detention center. His goal was to navigate “the smugglers’ way” through Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, to be able to fly to freedom in Turkey. In China, Uyghur faithful have been persecuted for displays of devotion to Islam, which the Chinese government considers a threat.
The authorities bulldozed mosques, saw any expression of religion as extremist and confiscated Qurans. By 2018, as many as one million Uyghurs had been sent to so-called “re-education” camps. Across the region, an extensive high-tech system of surveillance was rolled out to monitor every movement of the Uyghur population. This remains the case to this day, with the Chinese police in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, reportedly requiring residents to download a mobile app which enables them to monitor phones.
It started back in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang, 10 years ago now. I was 16 years old and had recently begun boxing at my local gym. In the evenings, I started to spend some time reciting and reading the Quran. The local Chinese authorities were beginning their mass crackdown on Uyghurs in the name of combating terrorist activity. Any display of religious devotion was deemed suspicious.
The local police considered my boxing gym to be a sinister and dangerous place. They kept asking us what we were training for. They thought we were planning something. They started arresting some of the students and coaches at the gym. Police visited my house and went through all my possessions. They couldn’t find anything.
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Last night the Denver Nuggets secured their first NBA Championship in team history. Though the group made it clear that this is the best team in the league, nobody doubts that the effort was led by the unlikeliest of superstars: Nikola Jokic.
Jokic’s eye-popping statistical superlatives have come fast and furious in the last few years, but ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne does the much tougher work of getting to the core of his makeup. How did he go from being a longshot in an NBA no-man’s land to undisputed MVP on a championship team? In this profile, Shelburne talks to those around the Serbian big man—reporters know that Jokic won’t talk about himself—to uncover the genesis and story of how he molded his body to fulfill a lifelong dream for not only himself, but also the team, coaches, and city around him.
Focus on the work, not what it means to be an MVP.
Jokic thought about it for a little bit before answering.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
After every game, no matter how many minutes he played, they’d lift weights. He would change his diet, cutting out as many indulgences as possible, which meant no soda, no beer, no snacks while he played video games.
An exception was made for orange juice and the occasional bite of his mother’s cooking, when she visited from Serbia. But just a bite. “I actually told him to enjoy his mom’s food after games,” Eichenberger says. “Like, come on, you can’t not eat your mother’s cooking.”
“But once he gets something in his head,” Eichenberger adds, “that’s how it’s going to be.”
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Adam Reiner | Longreads | June 13, 2023 | 4,992 words (17 minutes)
The hospital room is full of strangers. I do my best not to look worried and take a deep breath, inhaling the antiseptic odor that permeates the air—a sterile cologne of surgical masks, latex gloves, and industrial-grade cleaning solvents. Worry is the enemy of hope, and cancer spreads faster in the crevices where hope slips through.
My uncle Robert is propped upright in the hospital bed in the center of the room, leaning limply to one side like a resting marionette, awake, but looking like he hasn’t slept in days. Malignant tumors are blooming along his spine like mushrooms on a log, which makes lying on his back incredibly painful.
A square-shaped cake studded with plump, bright strawberries rests atop a tray stand at the foot of the bed. The generous layer of vanilla frosting reflects the fluorescent light above like a moonlit snowdrift. The longer I stare at it, the more the cake’s soft edges blend into the stark whiteness of the hospital walls. A tangle of shiny helium balloons sways on the nightstand.
It’s my uncle’s birthday. We’re all standing in a semicircle around him wearing adhesive identification tags from security. It feels awkward, like a company mixer. One of the strangers passes me a Styrofoam cup filled with tart sparkling cider. I wish there was alcohol in it.
A plush doll of Pope Francis lies on the blanket next to my uncle. The pontiff had recently traveled through Philadelphia—where the hospital is located—only the second papal visit in the city’s history. Robert was too weak to attend the procession but had wanted to go, a surprise given he wasn’t a particularly religious person, nor a Catholic. The souvenir was meant as a joke, but the doll never wandered from his bedside.
Robert’s cancer is rare, a soft tissue sarcoma that formed on the crown of his left ankle three years earlier. Doctors amputated his leg from the thigh down to stem the tide. He’d been in remission for months, but now the cancer is everywhere. Over the summer, he consulted sarcoma specialists at the Abramson Cancer Center, and after weeks of commuting from New York City for radiation treatment, he and my aunt Terri took refuge at the nearby Kimpton Hotel Monaco.
The strangers in the hospital with us are hotel employees. They brought the cake and all the party favors. Kayla, the hotel’s front office director, flashes a cherubic smile. She has soft, bronze skin and round cheeks that dimple slightly like those of a mischievous toddler. Her voice is raspy with the deep timbre of a jazz singer. “Don’t worry, we take very good care of your uncle whenever he’s down in Philly,” Kayla says, winking at Robert. Terri gently adjusts the pillows behind Robert’s back, maneuvering his frail body into a more comfortable position. He winces a little then goes back to reading the pile of birthday cards that are strewn about the bed.
I introduce myself to Roshid, the portly and affable concierge, and the bellman, Maurice, who they affectionately call Coach. Roshid puts his arm around Robert and sings a few bars of one of his favorite pick-me-up songs, “Games People Play” by The Spinners:
Can’t get no rest
Don’t know how I work all day
When will I learn?
Memories get in the way
Roshid presents Robert with a special mixtape of his favorite soul and jazz music, along with a custom-printed photo book. Coach pulls a leather football out of his long black trench coat, signed by all the members of the bell staff. “I doubt I’d be much of a force on the gridiron in my current condition,” Robert says, catching the shovel pass from Coach and looking down at his missing appendage. “Definitely not the kicker.”
The strangers in the hospital with us are hotel employees. They brought the cake and all the party favors.
Before his illness, Robert had a full head of black curly hair, wound in tight, springy coils like a poodle. He’d lost all of it during chemo, but it had begun to grow back in sporadic, directionless threads like matted shag carpet. His face was gaunt and his cheeks sunken, but his smile still had the same paternal warmth.
When I was a kid, my uncle’s visits were like holidays. My sisters and I would climb up on the green velvet couch by the bay window in the living room overlooking the driveway. As soon as we’d see him pull up, we’d run outside and bum-rush the car before he could turn the engine off. In the mornings, we’d barge into the guest room where he slept and violently wake him up by jumping all over his bed. He didn’t visit often, so we savored every moment. Seeing him lying there in the hospital, I felt the urge to vault onto his bed again, wishing I could somehow wake him up from this nightmare.
Kayla had arranged for the chef of the hotel’s restaurant to prepare a strip steak, one of Robert’s favorite items on the dinner menu. He devours it out of a cardboard takeout container while Kayla neatly divides the birthday cake into even slices. After an hour or so, we share warm hugs and say our goodbyes. Although the thought lingered in the back of all our minds that day, none of us knew that it would be my uncle’s last birthday.
The Hotel Monaco opened in 2012, an opulent 268-room hotel located in the historic Lafayette Building overlooking Independence Hall, a stone’s throw from the Liberty Bell in the heart of Philadelphia’s Old City. The 11-story Greek Revival-inspired tower was built in 1907 by the estate of the late financier and philanthropist Stephen Girard and named after his friend Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette.
The facility served as office space for over a century, but after sitting vacant for several years, Kimpton transformed the building into a luxury hotel. The interior is accented with nautical elements—a giant crystal galleon in the entrance, compass-themed carpeting, and porthole-shaped mirrors inside the elevators—an homage to Girard’s seafaring days. The hotel painstakingly restored the façade, preserving many of the building’s original architectural elements, like the towering Corinthian columns that guard the entrance and the stone gargoyles ensconced in the cornices.
Terri and Robert discovered the Monaco after visiting several other hotels in the area on foot, my uncle hobbling on crutches in the scorching late summer heat. With medical bills piling up, the hotel was more extravagant than they could afford, but they needed accommodation for two weeks while he started a new round of radiation. When they arrived, Kayla welcomed them graciously from behind the front desk and checked them into a handicap-accessible room.
The next morning, Terri took the elevator down to the lobby for the complimentary coffee service. The urns had already been dismantled, so she approached the front desk to see if it was possible to have someone deliver coffee to the room. Kayla recognized Terri from check-in and said she would send someone up right away.
As she did with many new guests, Kayla asked why they were visiting Philadelphia. “My husband has cancer,” Terri said. “We came here to start radiation treatment.” After a long silence, they locked eyes. “Is he going to be all right?” Kayla asked. “I don’t know,” Terri said, with a tear in her eye. “I really don’t know.”
Terri explained their commute to consult with specialists at the Abramson Center and the arduous schedule of medical appointments ahead. The travel was taking its toll on Robert. Their room was comfortable, but he hadn’t slept at all the night before because of debilitating back pain.
When they returned later that day, the bed was covered with brand-new pillows. Kayla had been to a local department store and purchased a variety of head and neck pillows with her own money. She had also arranged for room service to deliver a basket of wine and cheeses. A valet left a selection of relaxing bath products for Terri and installed a coffee machine, so they wouldn’t have to worry about missing the morning coffee downstairs again. Personalized notes from staff were scattered around the desk wishing Robert a restful stay and a speedy recovery.
As word of my uncle’s tragic circumstances spread, everyone who worked in the hotel knew their story. The doormen greeted them with hugs every time they returned from doctor’s appointments, always inquiring with genuine concern about my uncle’s health. “Those hugs from the doormen gave me the inspiration to get through the next day,” Terri told me recently.
When they returned in mid-September for another round of radiation, checking back into the hotel felt like a family reunion. Kayla upgraded them to room 601, a much more spacious suite. They only expected to be in town for a few days, but an MRI revealed the source of his excruciating back pain—new tumors on Robert’s thoracic spine—forcing them to extend their stay.
Kayla had been to a local department store and purchased a variety of head and neck pillows with her own money.
Roshid, the concierge, caught wind that they were running out of clean clothes and snuck a pair of my uncle’s pants out of his closet to check his size. He bought three extra pairs of khakis from a nearby Old Navy store—again with his own money—and had the pants hemmed and altered to remove the left leg to suit Robert’s amputation. Before they returned to the hotel, and without a word to anyone, Roshid hung the altered pants in his closet.
“At that point, I didn’t even see him as a hotel guest anymore. I saw him as my friend, somebody who needed help,” Roshid says of my uncle. “It humbled me to know that someone like him was walking the earth. He was a genuinely good man.” Robert and Terri returned to the room later that day, flabbergasted to find the closet filled with the new tailored pants.
In late October, after the staff threw Robert’s hospital birthday party, Terri asked to meet with James, the hotel’s general manager. James is a man of very few words, but he chooses them carefully. As a point of pride, he prefers to operate in the background, mindful not to upstage his team. Terri was concerned that she wasn’t doing enough to show the staff appreciation. She hoped that James might have some insight into how she could reciprocate their generosity. Should she be tipping them more? James listened intently, nodding along without answering until Terri finished speaking.
“How do you like your room?” James asked with a sheepish smile. “I love it,” Terri said. “It’s bigger than our apartment in New York City.” It wasn’t true, but she wanted James to know how much she appreciated being upgraded to a larger suite. As Robert’s condition deteriorated, Terri hadn’t been able to teach as many yoga classes, so financing their trips to Philadelphia was becoming burdensome.
“It’s yours for as long as you need it,” James said. The next day, he notified Kayla that the hotel would stop billing room 601, effective immediately. The Monaco would also extend heavily discounted room rates to family members so that Robert would be surrounded by loved ones whenever support was needed.
Kayla couldn’t wait to share the news with Terri. “I started crying,” Kayla says. “I called Terri, and we both started crying.”
I questioned James about his decision over the phone recently, wondering if it caused any controversy. “The financial piece didn’t matter anymore, so why should they have to worry about it?” he said, not wasting any words. “We decided to just make that go away.” From that day on, Robert and Terri never received another bill from the Monaco. The hotel established a standing reservation for room 601 under their name to ensure that the suite would be available to them at a moment’s notice.
The joy of staying in a hotel lies in absolving yourself of the responsibility for maintaining order and cleanliness. Every time you return to your room, your messes are untangled by an invisible hand like sorcery. Linens are always fresh. Hand soap and tiny shampoo bottles regenerate like magic.
All humans are born with a deep, primal anxiety about self-care that begins the moment we’re jettisoned from the womb and detached from the umbilical cord. The world’s finest hotels quell these anxieties effortlessly. They dote on us like devoted mothers, with staff that anticipates our needs and makes everyone feel at home.
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Truly great service demands profound selflessness and integrity. That isn’t teachable. Money affords luxury, but even the most obsequious service rarely makes guests feel seen. That’s because transcendent hospitality is a more profound connection, earned through mutual respect and an equitable exchange of sacrifice for appreciation.
The etymology of the word hospitality is the Latin hospitalitas—or the English hospital. Checking into a hospital is, obviously, far less luxurious than an overnight stay in a five-star hotel, but it can be 10 times more expensive. According to a 2022 report by The Commonwealth Fund—which conducts independent research on health policy—the United States spends more than twice as much on medical care compared with 38 other high-income nations. Meanwhile, we boast the worst outcomes, the highest rate of citizens with multiple chronic diseases, and the greatest likelihood of dying prematurely from avoidable causes.
The prohibitive cost of health care leads Americans to routinely neglect preventative care and leave grave illnesses untreated. Extended hospital stays are one of the most common causes of bankruptcy. Yet, despite the cost, service in medical facilities can be perfunctory, rote at best. The choice between dying in a foreboding hospital room or a luxury hotel suite is an easy one, but, of course, most never have that luxury.
Robert spent Thanksgiving confined to an inpatient rehab facility. A life-threatening surgery to remove spinal tumors—requiring hours on the operating table and multiple blood transfusions—meant weeks of physical therapy to regain his strength.
The day after Thanksgiving, Roshid’s mother sent him with a care package of leftovers: turkey, mac and cheese, and other holiday trimmings. “She told me: ‘Now, you tell that man that we season our food here,’” Roshid says, adding, “Unless he was a good liar, he tore that food up.”
Robert and Terri. Image courtesy of Adam ReinerRobert practicing yoga after his amputation. Courtesy of Adam Reiner.Roshid and Robert in the hotel lobby. Courtesy of Adam Reiner
By December, their trips to Philadelphia grew longer. Terri and Kayla would often convalesce in the hotel bar over a glass of wine and a cocktail at the end of a long day. Kayla was managing personal trauma of her own, shuttling back and forth to Delaware to care for her ailing father, a military veteran living on a modest pension, who was battling alcoholism and early-onset dementia.
Over drinks one night, Terri confided in Kayla that the oncologist had told Robert there were no treatment options left. Since his cancer was no longer treatable, he needed to be discharged from the hospital. Terri knew that he was too weak to return to New York, that he might not survive the trip back home. She feared that transferring him to hospice care would make his final days intolerable.
Early the next morning, Kayla met with James in his office to discuss a contingency plan—installing a hospital bed inside room 601, so that Robert could spend his final days in the hotel. No one dared say the quiet part out loud: What would happen if he died in the room? But they all knew it was a possibility.
The engineering team removed the king-size mattress and box spring from their bedroom and replaced it with a rented hospital bed. The adjacent common area had a fold-out couch that could accommodate attending medical staff. By the time Robert returned to the hotel, the suite had been transformed into a hospital room. Terri hired nurse practitioners to monitor Robert’s health during off hours when she needed to rest.
No one dared say the quiet part out loud: What would happen if he died in the room? But they all knew it was a possibility.
I took the train down from New York that week to visit him. He’d lost so much weight that his body seemed hollow, like paper-mache. He didn’t speak much, and his gaze was dull. At times, I couldn’t tell if he recognized me. He had a tube threaded through his nostrils to a nearby oxygen tank and was heavily sedated on morphine. Some days I would sit in silence for hours while he slept. If he was awake in the evening, he watched episodes of The Voice. I wondered how a frivolous reality show competition could matter to someone so close to death, but I suppose he welcomed the distraction.
One night, near the end, Robert and Terri watched a movie together in the bedroom. Terri lay down next to him on a rolling cot pushed flush against the edge of his hospital bed. She was happy that there were no machines creating distance between them. They watched in silence, holding hands in the dark. When the movie ended, Robert told her he didn’t want to eat anymore. “It’s okay,” Terri said, “you don’t have to eat.” The next day, his condition severely worsened, and Terri called an ambulance to transfer him back to the hospital.
Kayla remembers seeing their hands clasped through the rails of his hospital bed. “I saw what I felt was the purest form of love that I had ever seen,” she tells me. “Watching them in that moment, it was like nothing else mattered.” She remembered Terri telling her about meeting Robert on the beach. How their love affair was kismet. Fate brought them together, and fate tore them apart. Though their relationship was fleeting, everyone around them could feel the deep spiritual energy they shared and were drawn to it. Robert privately described their relationship as his version of Eat Pray Love. The kind of romance you only read about in novels.
Back in 2010, Robert was healthy and practiced yoga regularly. He had never been to Tulum, never even heard of it, in fact—but a friend suggested it as a tranquil getaway where he could refresh and clear his head during a contentious divorce (that was costing him his sanity and thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees every month). He’d given up on the idea until, sitting in a coffee shop, he overheard a random couple mention how much they loved the Tulum beaches. It must be a sign, he thought. He booked a last-minute flight, driving miles out of state to renew his expired passport.
Terri adored Tulum. She’d attended yoga teacher training seminars there but never alone, always with work colleagues or friends. Her family typically gathered in Florida for the holidays, but this year they celebrated early. So she decided to spend a week in Tulum by herself to focus on her yoga practice.
They both arrived at the yoga studio at dawn, unsure which room the class was being held in that day. After a brief conversation outside, they went in and set down their belongings next to each other. Robert laid out his mat and assumed a headstand, a pose he’d recently mastered. Terri assumed he was showing off, but she still thought he was cute.
After class, they continued the conversation. Robert was staying at a hotel nearby, and Terri mentioned how much she loved the restaurant there. “Would you like to join me for lunch?” he asked. “Okay, what time?” Terri said. Robert looked at an imaginary watch on his wrist. “How about noon?” They ate lunch overlooking the beach, chatting the day away as the frothy waves disappeared into the parched sand, exhaling a briny mist into the air. As the tide ebbed, the sun hovered above the shoreline, casting a blanket of warm shimmering topaz across the horizon. They met again for dinner and spent the night walking along the ocean under the stars. Terri likes to say that the lunch never ended.
While they soaked in Tulum’s majesty, a massive snowstorm shut down all the airports along the Eastern seaboard, rendering air travel nearly impossible. When Robert was notified that his flight was canceled, he immediately texted Terri that he needed to stay in Mexico for a few more days. It was late, so she texted back her room number and said she’d leave the light on for him. They spent the remaining days and nights together as though their time had never been interrupted until Robert was finally able to book a return flight home.
When they said farewell, Terri doubted she’d ever see him again. Robert was still anxious about his divorce. But they continued to talk over the phone every day. Robert flew to Cleveland to see Terri just two weeks after leaving Tulum. They traveled back and forth to each others’ cities over the ensuing months before Terri eventually moved to New York to be with Robert permanently. They found an apartment in a quiet neighborhood in Brooklyn, and she found a job teaching yoga in Tribeca.
Robert privately described their relationship as his version of Eat Pray Love. The kind of romance you only read about in novels.
His cancer diagnosis interrupted the fairy tale two years later, but by then their bond had grown stronger. In March 2015, between debilitating rounds of chemo, Robert married Terri in a quiet ceremony inside the office of the city clerk in lower Manhattan. He looked handsome in a black tuxedo with a red rose boutonniere and a backward black Kangol hat concealing his hair loss. Terri looked angelic in a flowing silk wedding gown with a white faux-fur shawl she borrowed from her sister and strappy blue suede heels. For a moment, when they kissed, the cancer disappeared. As sick as he was, it was one of the happiest days of his life.
On Christmas Eve, my cell phone rang. I was on my way to my restaurant job and didn’t even need to look at the screen to know who it was. Terri had warned me that Robert might not make it through the night. The sidewalks were icy, and the coarse salt scattered on the sidewalk was crunching under the soles of my shoes.
“He can hear you,” Terri said softly. “But he can’t answer.” It was hard to concentrate over the rumbling garbage trucks and police sirens wailing in the distance. Terri’s voice wavered a bit, but the cadence of her words was soothing. “I’ll put the phone up to his ear in case there’s anything you’d like to say,” Terri said. I could hear his oxygen tank wheezing in the background.
I cobbled together a few sentences but struggled to find the right words. My uncle was my hero, my rock, my brother. After my mother died when I was 17, he became a surrogate parent. My sisters and I nicknamed him “LG”—short for legal guardian. “I love you, LG,” I told him, covering my other ear to drown out the traffic.
I hung up feeling like I’d failed an audition. I broke down crying on the street corner, wishing I could transport myself to his bedside. There was so much more to say. I never told him how scared I was of losing him because I didn’t want to burden him with my fear. He never wanted to burden me with his either.
Robert passed away quietly in his hospital bed later that evening, leaving behind his wife and 10-year-old daughter from his previous marriage. He was 57 years old.
We often mischaracterize cancer as a test of will—a battle with tangible wins and losses. Before his illness, Robert was much physically fitter than me, even though he was 16 years my senior. Unlike most life-threatening diseases, cancer doesn’t need to exploit a person’s deficient health. It destroys life indiscriminately.
“I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you die, the cancer dies at the same time,” the late comedian Norm Macdonald once famously noted. “That’s not a loss, that’s a draw.” Macdonald, who would eventually succumb to cancer himself in 2021, understood how naïve it is to assume that living or dying of cancer is determined by one’s will to live. Cancer’s violence lies in its willingness to leverage its own survival to destroy its host. It isn’t a fair fight.
Millions of people across the world quietly suffer from cancer every day, their families and their doctors befuddled and powerless to cure them. From the sidelines, we goad victims to fight harder. We tell them: You got this! But then we remand them to sterilized, underfunded medical facilities that provide little comfort to the sick, nor empathy for their survivors. My uncle was one of the lucky ones who, in a new city, found community and love from people outside the medical complex—people who had no reason to provide it other than the purity of their hearts.
A month after Robert died, we held a memorial service at a local church in Brooklyn. He’d befriended the church’s pastor, finding comfort in her counsel. On sunny afternoons, he lounged in the gardens of the church’s courtyard for hours.
I never told him how scared I was of losing him because I didn’t want to burden him with my fear. He never wanted to burden me with his either.
Kayla, Roshid, and Sean—one of the hotel’s doormen—took Amtrak up from Philadelphia together to pay their respects. In front of the congregants and mourners, I shared a passage from one of my uncle’s favorite books, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. In it, a young Siddhartha stands along the banks of a flowing river, contemplating its secrets: “[Siddhartha] saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.”
Even without the physical presence of our loved ones, I told those assembled, life’s current pulls us forward like a rushing river, always the same and always new. When I finished speaking, I looked over to see Kayla wiping away tears.
Robert asked for his body to be cremated. He wanted his ashes spread in three places: The first set in an urn at a gravesite in a cemetery upstate where his parents were buried; the second in the flower beds around the courtyard of the church where the sun soothed him. Terri promised to return to Tulum to scatter the rest of Robert’s ashes in the infinite, crystal-blue waters of the Caribbean, along the beaches where they first met—his final dying wish.
To show her appreciation for the hotel’s generosity, Terri developed a mindfulness and meditation workshop for the Hotel Monaco staff, that she could offer for free to all who wanted to attend. The following spring, she returned to Philadelphia for the first time since Robert died.
Addressing a room full of Kimpton employees, Terri recounted her emotional story. She spoke about the stages of grief. How suffering begins as a gaping wound. “According to Rumi, the wound is the place that light enters you,” Terri said. “Our light-infused wounds can become beacons for helping others to heal.” When we let love and light into these wounds, she told them, they become scabs and then, eventually, scars. “In Sanskrit, a remnant of unliberated past experiences is called samskara, an impression or imprint. We carry these scars with us until we learn to liberate their foundation.”
She peered out at the faces of all the maintenance workers, housekeepers, restaurant staff, and management who’d offered strength in her darkest moments and helped assuage her suffering. She was grateful for the opportunity to replenish their strength and resilience as they had done for her. “I’ve learned that part of the healing process is that even though the scar remains, the wound can heal,” Terri said. “I carry that scar with me like a proud warrior.”
Years have passed, but the Monaco staff, both past and present, still hold my uncle’s memory near to their hearts. Kayla keeps a framed picture of her and Robert on her bookshelf at home, a reminder of life’s fragility. “It was a part of my mission to make sure the end of this chapter was peaceful for them,” Kayla says. “If these were his last moments, the only thing that mattered was helping them find the peace that they both deserved.” She works as a general manager for Equinox fitness clubs now and frequently shares the story with new team members to remind them about the power of hospitality.
James tells me that Robert’s passing felt like a death in the family, but the experience fundamentally changed how the hotel cares for guests with special needs. “Whenever a situation like this arises and we’re made aware of it, I always immediately think back to Terri and Robert’s time with us,” James says. “We certainly learned from that situation and utilize that in every decision we make for every family that comes here with these types of struggles.”
Roshid puts this knowledge into practice regularly. “There’s a 3-year-old staying in the hotel right now who has eye cancer that’s breaking my heart,” he says. When Roshid found out the boy’s favorite superhero is Spider-Man, he immediately sprang into action. “He and I have something in common because I love Spider-Man too,” Roshid says. “So, every time this kid comes in with his eye patch on, I have a tent waiting for him in the room with some Spider-Man goodies in there.”
He forwarded me an email Kayla sent to the Monaco staff in 2017, recounting my uncle’s heartbreaking story, almost two years after he passed away. She stressed how every guest interaction is not only an opportunity to improve someone’s day but also how those interactions can profoundly alter the trajectory of people’s lives. She changed Robert’s and Terri’s, and they changed hers. “Remember,” Kayla wrote, “there are a million Robert and Terri Barnetts walking around out there. You never know when one of them will walk through that door. So, keep making those moments.”
Adam Reiner is a food writer and editor ofThe Restaurant Manifesto. He is currently writing a book about dining culture for LSU Press and lives in New York City.
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