Gracefully Gone

Book excerpt: In my wildest literary dreams, where I imagine I am a highly acclaimed author, I would love to imagine that if Simone de Beauvoir was an angry twenty-one year old young woman living in Manhattan in 1992 with a passion for boys, Marlboros and Depeche Mode and she lost her father instead of her mother her memoir A Very Easy Death might very well have been titled Gracefully Gone. Gracefully Gone is the fusion of two journals: my father, Matthew L Coppola Sr.'s and mine. My father's journal was written in 1982, two years after his diagnosis and remission with brain cancer. Mine was written in 1990-1991, roughly eight years later, as he began to die. In Gracefully Gone I chronicle my twenty-one year old pursuit of life and all the bitter and amusingly confusing angst that accompanies being twenty-one during the last six months of my father's struggle towards death. In one sense, it is a coming of age tale: from the age of twelve on, I was acutely aware of all things cancer. I was sent to a New England prep school at fifteen to escape all things cancer only to return after graduating NYU in 1990 to all things cancer. During the six pivotal months between the summer of 1990 and January of 1991, not only did I journal my caretaking of my dad but also our profound love story. At its core, for me, Gracefully Gone is very simply a love story: it is my love affair with my dad. I loved, he loved, he died and a bit of me went with him. When thinking about who might be interested in our story I was reminded of an article I read in the Los Angeles Times, (November 19, 2003) about Rebecca Brown who wrote “Excerpts From a Family Medical Dictionary.” (University Of Wisconsin Press, 2003) It is a memoir of her mother's death and according to the LA Times “raises an important question; 'How does one make the death of a beloved parent meaningful to strangers?'” Well, I think I'd like to try and answer that with my own question: how is it not? Everyone I know has either lost or is losing a loved one to cancer. Very few superbly lucky ones have struggled and beaten the cancer monster. The sad fact is in the world we live in today there are no strangers to cancer and there are certainly no strangers to struggle and loss. What I am hoping, what I am counting on, is that my life, my father's life and our story, might be meaningful to strangers; or perhaps, if not meaningful, then at the very least, identifiable, relatable and at times, humorously understandable. Gracefully Gone is not about death, it is about the journey of a family, specifically, the journey of a young girl trying to find her way in the wake of growing up in the looming shadow of cancer. Gracefully Gone is to me the literary version of the magical love song “Unforgettable” by Nat King Cole that his daughter Natalie Cole laid her own track to; it is, very simply, a duet. Perhaps our duet in Gracefully Gone is written as a prayer for all the families, all the children too young to understand and for all the victims of this all too often insurmountable war to know they are not alone. Even though my mother and brother went through the same experience as I, we experienced it very differently. It was as if my father was the LOVEBOAT and we three were on our own separate lifeboats surrounding him, each of us handling our grief privately. Perhaps, if we're really lucky, Gracefully Gone might allow someone a little peace and some comfort knowing that even though they are on their own lifeboats they are in an ocean full of them.