Donald Hall - The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon

Copyright 2005 by Donald Hall

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Hall, Donald, 1928
The best day the worst day : life with Jane Kenyon / Donald Hall.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-618-47801-9
1. Kenyon, Jane. 2. Kenyon, JaneHealth. 3. Kenyon, JaneMarriage. 4. LeukemiaPatientsUnited StatesBiography. 5. Poets, American20th centuryBiography. 6. Married peopleUnited StatesBiography. 7. Hall, Donald, 1928Marriage. I. Title.

PS3561.E554Z74 2005
811'.54dc22
[B] 2004059421

Frontispiece photographs, in order of appearance:
William Abranowicz; Ken Williams, Concord Monitor; Boston Globe

eISBN 978-0-547-34698-4
v2.1118

F OR L. K.

J ANE K ENYON died of leukemia at 7:57 in the morning, April 22, 1995. My wife was forty-seven and had been ill for fifteen months, but we had not known that she would certainly die until the last eleven days. For a week I had sat beside her while her faculties diminished, disappearing like lights going out on a hillside across the valley. I had tended to her as I could, scratching her nose, bringing water to her dry mouth. She lost the ability to speak. I studied her breathing. I touched her and kissed her, but not so often as I wanted, because with whatever consciousness she maintained, she was concentrated on letting go. It was a Saturday morning. Chadwicks Funeral Home could not pick up her body until the visiting nurse confirmed her death, and the duty nurse was out of beeper range. It took two hours to connect with the nurse, and another hour before she arrived and telephoned Chadwicks. I sat beside Janes whitening body until almost noon. I kissed her cooling and cold lips. I spoke to her. Over the next days and weekswhen I woke in panic that I had forgotten to give her a pill, or when I returned from visiting her grave to fancy that she had been shopping and had arrived home before meit helped that I had sat so long beside her. Still, it was long before every cell in my body believed in her death. It was a year before I could give away her clothes, and two years before I could gather together her letters and manuscripts, her unfinished poems.

As I watched her breathe her last breath, the telephone rang, my daughter Philippa calling from her house thirty miles south. I told her what she expected to hear. My children, who were not Janes children, had cherished her. Almost every day, as I sat beside Jane over the fifteen months of leukemiain our house, or in the New Hampshire hospital, or in Seattle where we spent five months while Jane had a bone marrow transplantI had talked with them. The telephone, which is not my favorite device, centered the day of sickness. Often Jane did not feel well enough to speak. I talked with Janes closest friends and my own, and with Janes mother while she still lived. While I was talking with Philippa now, Janes brother and sister-in-law and niece, who had flown from Michigan when I told them Jane was dying, entered the house. They were staying in Janes mothers old flat, five miles awayuntouched since Polly died three months earlierand emptying it out. After a few minutes with Janes body, they went back to the flat and left me to the telephone. My son Andrew was in Texas for the weekend visiting in-laws. When I called him, he offered to fly back immediately, two days before he had planned to. I told him that I would be all right. Janes friend Caroline, who had driven on Thursday to say goodbye, called at eight-thirty. I called Alice and Joyce, Liam and Tree, all of whom had visited to make their farewells. I did not call everyone on my list until I could tell them the time of the funeral. I decided to bury Jane on Wednesday afternoon, April 26, but our minister was in Washington that Saturday and I needed to know for sure that Wednesday would do. All day I fretted over the timing of the funeraldisplaced anxiety: to worry over something trivial in order to look away from the desolation at hand.

Chadwicks drove its van to the house at noon, rolled a gurney to the front door, and entered carrying a canvas sling. I shut our dog Gus into my study; I thought he would go wild, seeing them take her away. Marion and Charlie from Chadwicks wrapped Janes body and carried her from bedroom to living room through kitchen out the front door and wheeled her to the van. I gave them the hymnbook and the order of service for the funeral that Jane and I had planned a week before. I gave them the obituary that we had composed. Gus was anxious, fretting when I let him out of my study. A reporter called from the Concord Monitor and interviewed me for the news story. I was able to speak easily about Janes poetry and about our life together.

My daughter telephoned again, to propose that she and her husband and daughters come calling late in the afternoon. A basket appeared on the porch, no name attached, with a huge cooked ham, a casserole of scalloped potatoes, vegetables, bread, and a cake. I guessed who had cooked and delivered the feast. In the afternoon our minister called from Washingtonand the funeral was set for three P.M. on Wednesday. I telephoned Chadwicks so that they could fax the obituary with the funeral notice to the newspapers. Then I called a dozen friends, who helped by calling other friends. Janes old acquaintances, in New York and Boston and Virginia, canceled dates or made airline arrangements for travel to New Hampshire. I told Kris Doney in Seattle, Janes hematologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. More casseroles and loaves of bread appeared on the porch.

It was good that my daughter and her family came to visit. Allison and Abigail were six and almost three. I hugged everyone large and small. At one point Allison and I went exploring, as we always do when she visits. We stepped past the kitchen into the toolshed and stopped suddenly as if turned to stone: Facing us, propped on my grandmothers practice organ, was the placard the grandchildren had lettered and illustrated for Janes return from Seattle to Manchester Airport, when we had come home encouraged, eight weeks earlier, with Janes new marrow: WELCOME HOME JANE FROM SEATTLE ! Quickly, neither of us speaking, I dropped the placard out of sight. That night the families from Michigan and Concord sat at the big dining room table, eating from the porch baskets. After dinner, I wanted to be alone. My visitors left early and I slept in an empty bed. I kept reaching to touch her.

The next morning at five I drove to the store where I pick up the paper, tugging it from the bundle. Top of the front page of the Concord Sunday Monitor was the headline POET JANE KENYON DIES AT HER HOME IN WILMOT . Under the headline the Monitor printed a color photograph it had used two years before when it did a feature story on Jane, Jane smiling a foxy, flirtatious smile as she looks into the camera with her reading glasses halfway down her nose. I loved this photograph; Jane preferred the more austere picture that appears on the jacket of