The Conjuring Blu Ray

[Curtis Cassel]

Agraduate of Philip Exeter Academy and Stanford University, John Binkley was a playwright, political activist, and television producer, writer, and director. He summited the Matterhorn at age seventeen and continued blazing trails for the rest of his life. In 1977, he moved from California to Houston, Texas, where he met Sherrie Matthews; they were married six months later. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Sherrie spent time in New York studying opera (her lifelong nickname was Songbird, because of her youthful habit of practicing arias nestled in a tree at her childhood home) and sang in various choirs throughout her life, including a visiting performance at Westminster Abbey. She was also involved in political campaigning and nature conservation, especially planting trees. John and Sherrie eventually settled in San Antonio, where they raised their daughters, Mollie and Liza. They are planning to publish a book of the letters John penned to Sherrie after her death in December 2022, before he followed her to the other side in October 2023.

In last week\u2019s newsletter, I shared this video I made in February 2022 from my hospital room-turned-makeshift studio, and before I did, I watched it myself for the first time. I felt like I was time-traveling. That\u2019s been a common experience the last two months, as I\u2019ve been revisiting the studies I made from the transplant unit, reimagining them in large format. But watching a video of it was something altogether different. Suddenly things that were lost in the morphine haze sprang into focus, like how painful it was to return to this hospital without my beloved cancer comrades Melissa Carroll and Max Ritvo. I was overtaken by a kind of raw grief, even all these years later. In a sense, we\u2019d been each other\u2019s caregivers\u2014accompanying each other to the chemo suite, answering phone calls when the anxiety attacks struck in the middle of the night, showing up at each other\u2019s doorsteps when someone got bad news.

Melissa and Max had also experienced the terror of a recurrence\u2014of several recurrences, rather\u2014and I wanted so badly to see them and talk to them about this particular experience. I found myself resisting the idea of new friendships within the cancer world, because in my mind, they could never be what those first friendships were. There was a very unique chemistry at the heart of those friendships, not only in our twin fates of illness itself but in our creative work too. With Max, that connection was so direct, since we were both writers. He was often a first reader for me back then, and when I was starting to write my memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, he was my biggest cheerleader and champion.

As for Melissa, it was as if she opened a door into another creative dimension. Without her example, I don\u2019t think I would have turned to watercolors when I reentered treatment. I never would have realized how watercolors mirror life\u2014how much control you have to cede, how you have to surrender, how it\u2019s full of happy accidents. At so many points in the last weeks, I\u2019ve conjured Melissa here in my studio\u2014for ideas, for advice, even in the playlists I\u2019ve made for myself. Though she is not physically present with me (whatever that means), I\u2019ve felt so close to her.

This brings me to today\u2019s guest essay and prompt\u2014and introducing it, it\u2019s hard to even know where to begin. I\u2019ll start with last summer, when I was at the Telluride Film Festival and met a woman named Liza Binkley. Here again, a happy accident: She had come to Telluride with her sister not for the festival, but to spend time in nature. Their mother had died the previous winter after more than three years in cancer treatment, and they were in the throes of grief. As it happened, Liza got a ticket to see the premiere of our documentary American Symphony, though she didn\u2019t know whom or what it was about. Afterward, she came up to say hi and to tell me we had a mutual friend who had shared my book with her as a source of solace.

What Liza didn\u2019t know at the time was that her father, John Binkley, had found his own source of solace\u2014writing letters to his late wife. For what turned out to be his last nine months on earth, he wrote to her, and though he didn\u2019t tell his daughters what he was doing, they could tell that, whatever it was, it was giving him such light and connection and purpose. In that time, his own health began to fail. And last fall, less than a week before John passed, he showed these letters to Liza and her sister.

Today, in honor of fathers loved and lost, I\u2019m sharing the first of those forty-six letters, which Liza and her sister hope to publish as a book (tentatively entitled Instead of Death: Letters to Sherrie). For one of the most astonishing acts of conjuring I\u2019ve ever witnessed, please read on.

Each week in our Isolation Journals chat, we share a small joy that we want to hold onto\u2014we call it our chorus of collective gratitude. This week I wrote about the utter delight of sharing a back fence with a baker-friend (think easy-access cinnamon rolls galore!). To be buoyed by the joys of others and to add yours too, click here!

I\u2019m still on this side. As you, safely ensconced on the other side, well know. At least that\u2019s the way I picture you. Only two long months since we were in the same room. I\u2019m still having difficulty accepting that I can\u2019t communicate with you the same way.

If you are reading this note, it means that the tumor won, and I am now in heaven\u2026 I appreciate how well you take care of me. You seem to really care, and you have sad eyes. I think you are a \u201Creal\u201D person\u2026 Please never feel like you failed if a child dies\u2026 You will go to heaven some day and all your cancer kids will have hugs waiting.

How did that little boy transport himself through spacetime and imagine himself speaking to his doctor from the other side? If he can do it, I can. Right? The way he moves from present to past tense and then back to present and future exposes his ambiguity about where he is in time and what is real. I experience the same fluidity of time with you. Past, present, who knows\u2014future? Where I am spatially when I encounter the energy you created during your lifetime is irrelevant. Am I courageous enough to embrace it, whatever the form, or am I afraid that I may be ridiculed for engaging with a force that no one understands? I have never been afraid to be contrarian in the past. Why start now?

I\u2019m writing to keep you alive. Perhaps that\u2019s presumptuous. Maybe I\u2019m only believing in the possible. I\u2019ve spent a lifetime pushing that dream. You gave me so much love for forty-six years that it has fueled my recovery from the loss of your companionship. You changed my life. From the start. And these past three years, we drew even closer to each other as the insatiable cancer attempted without success to consume the best in each of us. We defeated it. We two became an inseparable team, determined to beat back the disease and preserve your indomitable spirit for every instant possible. Over time, two distinctly different personages melded from my perspective into one seamless identity. Two became one. We fought as one. Love required no words. Hope and all of love\u2019s dividends appeared as needed and crossed tired boundaries with unfamiliar ease.

Now we need that child\u2019s confidence that we can continue to communicate across the ultimate divide. Picture that ten-year-old child imagining himself to the other side and conjuring up what he wanted to say to his doctor. I don\u2019t even know how to label such a feat. But he\u2019s thrown down the gauntlet to me.

If a child can transport himself across the gulf of spacetime, surely I can. Rational thinkers define spacetime as any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. I want a spiritual variation on the same phenomenon: a dimension which permits a party on one side or the other to transcend whatever boundaries might obstruct the commingling of two spiritual entities. What is refreshing about children is that they don\u2019t bother with justifying or reasoning; they just leap from one reality to another and expect adults to follow them without questioning. Children possess the ability to create new reality where there was none before.

Damn the skeptics. Crush the fences. Transcend the static, whatever the interferences, to enable us to carry on the teamwork. The oneness. I don\u2019t need to understand it to embrace it. To live by it. To profit from it. There are no rules. No barriers. No tracks in the snow on this one.

If you\u2019d like, you can post your response to today\u2019s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.

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