Fortunate Lives by Robb Forman Dew

Author:Robb Forman Dew [DEW, ROBB FORMAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780316090346
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-10-31T04:00:00+00:00

Dear Mr. Mount,

Do you think it’s true that people don’t reach adulthood until the death of their parents? Erik Erikson said that, and I have no idea how he meant to define adulthood. I don’t even remember where I learned it. Some people never become adults no matter how old they are and even if both their parents are dead. I think other people are adults at age six or seven. But I’m trying to understand what he was getting at. I wonder how old Erik Erikson was when he decided that. I wonder if his own parents were still alive, and also if he was an only child. Is adulthood what we’re all striving for? Do you think it’s a particularly desirable condition, or did he only mean that it was inevitable? He may have meant that adulthood is regrettable.

Our daughter Sarah just turned thirteen and still needs us, and I think that she probably knows it. I think that she needs her father right now more than she needs me, but in some ways she would never recover if she lost either one of us at her age. What I’ve been thinking, though, is that it seems possible to me that David could survive contentedly without either one of us. I do know, of course, that in all sorts of ways he would feel grief at our absence, and he would miss us terribly, but I’m no longer sure that our existence is necessary to his living a successful life. I guess it’s true that in the ordinary way of the world it may be that parents simply live too long.

When Sarah and Anna Tyson reappeared, and all four of them were eating their lunch, Ellen told them about the problems she was having with her writing.

“I worry and pace,” Ellen said. “I glance at the final poem and compare it with the shape of the copy I tape up across the room. It all seems wrong. The real poem—I mean, when it’s written out—seems to me to be only a sort of shadow of the literal shape I’ve intended. Oh, well… but now that Owen Croft is in The Review office, Vic wants me to help weed through some of those poems. I don’t know if I can cope with the distraction.”

“What do you mean?” Dinah said. She was helping Anna Tyson slip the Tanglewood T-shirt over her dress. “What does Owen’s being there have to do with your helping?”

But Ellen had lost the thread of what she was saying while Dinah was struggling with Anna Tyson’s puffed sleeves. Ellen had turned to watch Sarah, who had taken off, then put back on, her wide-brimmed straw hat, arranging her hair with a toss so that it fell across one shoulder. She had grown restless where they were sitting—at the far edge of the lawn. They had Shed tickets and hadn’t needed to eat their lunch among the multitudes in order to establish a place on the lawn close to the orchestra.

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