“Stories About Us”
by Lore Segal
from the October 7, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
After one of the shortest gaps I can remember, we are getting a second Lore Segal piece (her prior once was “Beyond Imagining” from the June 10 issue a few months ago). I have really liked Segal’s work in the past, but I didn’t get much from “Beyond Imagining” — I hope “Stories About Us” is better.
But I’m not hopeful. It seems we are back in the same format and with the same characters as we got in “Beyond Imagining”: Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, Bridget, Ilka, Hope, and Lucinella. I’m not sure if I missed it last time around, but in 2023 Segal published Ladies’ Lunch: And Other Stories, and “Beyond Imagining” and “Stories About Us” are a continuation of that series. I’m looking at the table of contents for Ladies’ Lunch and there we see, among the nine stories in that section of the book?, “Ruth, Frank and Dario” and “How Lotte Lost Bessie.” I wonder if I’d have gotten more out of “Beyond Imagining” had I read these.
Here is how “Stories About Us” begins:
IN THE MAIL
Once [writers have] finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation . . . and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting.
-Robert Gottlieb, The Paris Review
“Let’s get the complaining out of the way,” proposed Hope. “I’ve got me a pacemaker.”
Farah said, “I’m losing my vision.”
Bessie said, “I lost my husband.”
And Bridget said, “I sent my story to a friend from my old writing class.”
“And how is that a complaint?” Bessie asked her.
Bridget said, “Because it feels — maybe it’s something like the actor’s stage fright.”
We’ll see how this goes for me! I hope you all are about to start a beautiful October, and I hope if you read this you’ll let me know your thoughts below.
? The collection also includes the other stories, like “Dandelion,” which I remember loving.
I love seeing writers still productive in their 90s! They deserve our appreciation.
In this story, the theme of younger people neglecting their senior loved ones most affected me. It brought to mind my grandmother, to whom I was very close all through my childhood and continuing into my adulthood. When I was in my 20s, we lived 3000 miles apart. Our family was paying for her to live in the home of strangers who fed and watched out for her, were kindly in manner, but who were otherwise not a part of her life. Her ability to get around was limited. She primarily stayed in her own room.
She had occasional visits from nearby family, but I know she was alone and lonely much of the time.
I last visited her shortly after she turned 96. She was smiling and cheerful, but I know she believed this would be the last time she would see me. She empatically told me, “I *don’t want to be 97”. When I was leaving, I had forgotten something, or to tell her something, I don’t recall what. Within seconds I returned to her room, where she had thrown herself on her bed and was crying. She quickly collected herself and sat up, in such a way as to hide her distress…
I intended to leep in touch. But she was hard of hearing, phone would not be effective. She wrote to me and I wrote a couple of times. After I wrote what turned out to be the last time, she replied. Twice. She asked me questions. I had in mind writing again, but frankly I was not much of a letter writer. Caught up in my own life, I unthinkingly put off writing—for months. My mind did not register the urgency of writing soon. Surely she would live to 97, in spite of what she said—or so it must have seemed to me subconsciously.
I was stunned near the end of that year when I was told that she had died. As my mother told me, on her last visit Grammie was quite distant and at the end of the visit uncharacteristically said, “Kiss me”, and touched her cheek. She had expressed no complaints, there had been no apparent ailment, but she died overnight. I know in my heart that she willed herself to die to end her loneliness and heartache.
That was 44 years ago. I knew I had failed her, effectively abandoned her, whatever my purported intent. Indeed, I did not exercise my true intent. I could have given her comfort, eased the loneliness of her last weeks, days, hours. How difficult could it have been?
To this day, I have never gotten over my regret. It makes no difference what anyone might say, what I might tell myself: that I should “overcome” it, forgive myself, accept what has been and cannot be changed, and move on…. No, the heartache is always underlying, ready to arise upon any remider.
The best I can do is to alert or remind others not to make the mistake I made, and hopefully not do so myself.
Thank you for sharing, Eddie :-)
Do not take your behavior as only your mistake. I assume you did not make the decision to let Grandma live in another persons home. Give yourself a pass, young, generation removed, and finally your a secondary player in the drama.
There is a lengthy article about Lore Segal in the current issue of The New York Times Magazine: “A Master Storyteller at the End of Her Story,” by Matthew Schaer.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but it looks really good.
I loved this story. I’ve enjoyed her previous stories about this group of friends, but not on this level. She moves from the anxiety of awaiting a response from a publisher to feeling left out by younger people to world historical trauma (presumably this final knock is from the Nazis). At first, it seemed light and then it gradually built into a powerful experience.
I just went to look up Segal’s dates on Google and found that she had passed away yesterday, Monday October 7, at age 96 through an article in The Guardian.