“Oh, all right,” Sigrid finally said. But clearly her heart wasn’t in it. If I don’t do something right now, I thought, Sigrid’s going to quit trying for a cure and go home. Our plan to get her digestion restored and thereby gain at least a few months to promote her brand-new book was crashing. What to do? She lacked the energy to entertain visitors or phone calls. Get-well cards from friends would certainly come too late. Her Johns Hopkins room came equipped with a keyboard enabling patients to access their e-mail on their TV screen. This gave me an idea.
That night, I e-mailed several dozen friends. “Sigrid is fighting cancer again and is in a hard place. I’m soliciting e-mails to raise her spirits. If you’ve read her book, she would especially love to hear your reaction.” Sigrid’s book, her first, called “Goodbye Stalin: A True Story of Wars, Escapes & Reinventions,” was officially coming out several weeks hence. But we’d had two prepublication parties, and the memoir, which describes her family’s four flights from communism, was already available at some stores and Web sites.
We all know how the Internet has transformed the way we live. I was about to discover that e-mails were going to transform the way Americans handle long-term illness and death.
My emergency e-mail went out on a Saturday night. By Sunday noon, when we opened Sigrid’s mailbox in her hospital room, a dozen messages brightened her queue. Besides standard wishes urging courage, several included chatty personal notes. One reported amazing problems involving Elvis, the e-mailer’s sick horse. Another friend, praising Sigrid’s book, delighted her with the news that the writer’s grandmother had worn the same kind of black-velvet ribbon as a choker as had Sigrid’s grandmother. Sigrid’s interest and awareness rose with each message. By the time I bedded down in the recliner next to her that night, our spirits were rising.
The e-word quickly spread. Within days Sigrid was receiving eight to 18 messages daily. From Europe, a stream of messages brought photographs and accounts of a family reunion. Gardening friends weighed in with pictures and notes on the state of their plants. Three people from Sigrid’s horse world thanked her fervently for getting them their current jobs. Sigrid also learned that her book had acquired legs. Friends were buying extra copies as gifts. The publisher e-mailed that unexpected bookstore demand had forced a second printing.
Week by week, as Sigrid slogged through procedure after procedure, the flood of life-sustaining e-mails never faltered. When Sigrid was moved to a ward that had no Internet access, I was able to print out her e-mails during my daily trip home. Ultimately, her monthlong hospital battle ended, alas, in failure. Sigrid returned home to hospice care and death two weeks later. Yet in one final e-message, miraculously received the morning of her death, Sigrid learned that Postimees, the leading daily newspaper in Estonia, the country of her birth, planned to devote an entire page to an article on her book. She would be famous in her homeland.
At Sigrid’s memorial, friends said they had been as heartened by the e-mail extravaganza as had Sigrid. “Everybody aches to support a sick friend,” explained one, “but usually you can’t do much—a card, a bunch of flowers. E-mails kept us in constant touch, and a chance to feel I was really helping.” The ease of the Internet is key. Almost everyone sits down at a computer each day, and a message can be tapped out in a matter of minutes. I believe this simple act by her many friends and acquaintances helped sustain Sigrid in her final months of life. I believe it could help others in similar predicaments and that many will survive because of it.
Even for those who don’t, like Sigrid, there is a final benediction. Sigrid enjoyed, while she was still alive, an outpouring of love, respect and admiration that otherwise her friends could only have shared among themselves at her memorial, after she had died.
