Erica Heller - One Last Lunch: A Final Meal with Those Who Meant So Much to Us

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: Copyright by Dare Wright Media

: Copyright by Marianne Barcellona

: Copyright by Frank Nastasi

: Copyright by Shelley R. Bonus

Photos on are candid, provided by the authors

Copyright 2020 Erica Heller

Cover 2020 Abrams

Published in 2020 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019939903

ISBN: 978-1-4197-3532-5

eISBN: 978-1-68335-891-6

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Dedicated to my mother, my grandparents, Mary Lou Shulman, Richard Glass, Catherine Flanagan Stover, Janavi Held, Warren Cassell, Alan Epstein, Arthur Gelb, Dolores Karl, Juris Jurjevics, Ilse Dusoir Lind, Irene Towbin, Lucy, Sweeney, Thistle, and Lola.
What I wouldnt give for just one more lunch.

There will be time to murder and create...
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Mr. Eliots message of loss mingled with memory is achingly clear, but what if, in some cases, there wasnt time? Too often, when people are whipped from this earth, they leave behind loved ones who are lost and left fumbling with unresolved issues, without having expressed crucial emotions, secrets, breathless declarations of love, and apologies, troubled by questions, so many questions. Who among us has not dreamt of having just one more sliver of precious time with someone we miss terribly and wantno, needto see again? Sometimes its in order to tie up loose ends, other times to luxuriate in the divine splendor of their company, linger once more in a loving embrace that was once as warm as sunshine to us on a dark, blustery day?

I just hope she knew how much I loved her, whispered a tearful friend recently, having just lost her sister.

The last time we met, we had a tremendous argument. I brutally criticized him, and Ill never forgive myself, a lifelong friend told me this week, in the small, trembling voice of a child, about his brother, who had just succumbed to cancer.

How terrible, Ive always thought, to stagger through this life freighted with regrets, with moments lost to us because of stubbornness or fear, all because we always assumed there would be future opportunities.

But leave it to the French to concoct the perfect idiom: lesprit descalierliterally staircase witthe predicament of chancing upon the perfect riposte too late, when youve already reached the bottom of the stairs. Well, for our purposes here, lets change it to lesprit du cimetire.

We almost always feel that a loved ones death has cheated us of critical time together. Some people are lucky in that they really do have time to say everything. When my saintly but sassy mother was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1994, I quit my job, moved in to care for her, and thus began an honest, ever-ranging conversation with virtually no boundaries that lasted a year and a half. With my father, it was quite the opposite: a call in the middle of the night telling me that he had succumbed to a massive heart attack. Still, Id give anything to be able to sit around at lunch with one or both of them on a bright, cheerful day. I would laugh and reminisce with my mother, luxuriously cloaked once more in her warmth, wit, and tenderness. With my father, I would finally get the chance to ask the big questions Id always been afraid to ask, hopefully elicit some rarely exhibited gentleness, and unscramble and decipher some of the constantly crossed wires that helped contribute to a lifetime of cryptic, slow-simmering intolerance from him. It was this lunch, trapped in my imagination but making itself known repeatedly, like a door in the wind that keeps banging away but never quite slams shut, that led me to the basis for this book.

In talking to people for it, I never once heard from anyone that there was no one theyd like to have lunch with just once again, if only they could. In most cases, I only had to explain the books premise and inquire as to whether theyd like to contribute. Most were happy, no, eager to participate, but even those who hesitated found that when it came time to create their lunch, the experience they forged tumbled out onto the page almost effortlessly.

Writers, actors, artists; everybody had somebody they missed terribly, whose absence was palpable, for what turned out to be a startling variety of reasons. Rain Pryor chose her father, Richard Pryor, to laugh and lunch with. Writer James Grissom longed for one more lunch with Tennessee Williams. Kirk Douglas picked his father, and so on. Amazingly, the current of powerful emotions that ran through all these stories was never the same twice.

What I learned from the lunches was that even the death of someone who means the world to us cannot rob us of two magical things: our memories and our imaginations. Our minds, unchained, are free to wander back any time we like, as often as we long to, to feel comforted or amused or angry or even peevishly annoyed; to rewrite the ending to our own private scenario. Our fantasies, too, often sprint way ahead of us, untethered, to occasions and emotions we might still experience with the person who has been lost to usto hold on to that person just a little longer and feel as if theyre back in our reach and in our life.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about this book is that in each instance, in each fantasy, in order to recount an honest, faithful story, come what may, the person doing the imagining really did get to spend valuable time with their loved one, friend, sparring partner, or cherished acquaintance again, if only in their deeply private, kaleidoscopic imagination. One or two lunches were shown are in fact past lunches, because the writer wanted so much just to circle backward and relive them.

This wish for a definitive denouement is visceral, as old as time. In fact, in Platos Symposium, he imagines an after-dinner conversation between a bunch of Greek luminaries, past and present. Symposium just happens to be one of the most famous pieces of writing from the ancient world. And Platos wish, his fantasy of one last meal with Socrates, was written 2,400 years ago.

But now, please be seated, take a sip of water, and kindly place your napkin in your lap.

Lunch is about to be served.

I just want you to be happy.

To imagine lunch now with my father, Joe Heller, it would have to be in spring. Unknowingly reacting to the blooming nature all around him, shoots pushing obstinately up even through the cracks in the city pavement, he was often softer, gentler in spring. Perhaps the tender buds unfurling all around him would somehow leech his own fiercely guarded tenderness to the surfacewho knows?