KELLY: Wow. Copyright 2022 NPR. Writers still came and spent the night; bookstore events were still packed. Well, Sooki said when we were finished. So happy to be the connector of good things. Sooki came to Nashville and stayed in one place, no more movie stars, no more trips to Morocco and Tan-Tan. Its supposed to keep your hair from falling out, she said. But you write that what you loved was finding someone who sees you as your best and most complete self and that she did that for you, and you think you did that for her. It was her only chance of getting back safely anytime soon. Once she gets here and sees the way things are, shell be fine.. Surely there was a piece of this story she was leaving out because the next thing I knew shed sailed off with them. But a few months later, I got an email from Tom Hanks early in the morning. The sky had turned a tenacious gray, the rain sheeting sideways. How Much Is A Raphael Painting Worth? And youre going to freeze your head for eight hours every week? Wed been together for a matter of minutes. There is a bright therapist named Hassan at my assigned machine, always the same, with a sweet attitude. Thats like the building blocks of my, of my life, Farley told SurvivorNet. But I think Ann is the saint in the story. I had a purpose to serve. Click, click, click. My friends arrived and we waved at one another from a distance as they gathered Sooki up. Wednesdays chemo hit Sooki on Friday afternoon. Sooki, the middle daughter. He recommends books and asks for recommendations. She was to stay in the trial, three Wednesdays on, one Wednesday off, until the regime was no longer effective or, to put it another way, until she died. Sooki and I needed the same thing: to find someone who could see us as our best and most complete selves, writes Patchett. She even worked for Wilson's husband, Tom Hanks, as his assistant. Sookis a pilot! Karl said. Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process. Once I start writing things down, I feel like Im nailing the story in place. The assistant was a tiny woman wearing a fitted black-velvet evening coat embroidered with saucer-size peonies. ", (SOUNDBITE OF STATIK SELEKTAH SONG, "TIME"). Absolutely. Putting together a novel is essentially putting together the lives of strangers Im coming to know. Just remember, Wednesday chemo left you very sad on Friday and Saturday, so it stands to reason that Thursday chemo will break your heart on Saturday and Sunday. To introduce Karl into this narrative as a general internist (he calls himself a pediatrician for adults) would be reductive. There was no more walking to a class in the dark of morningeverything was closedand so I asked her if she wanted to exercise with me. Asked to endorse Hankss short story collection,Uncommon Type, and then to interview him on stage during his tour, Patchett first meets Sooki in the wings of a Washington theater. The very fact of her existence in our house kept me on track. I knew people in college and graduate school who took mushrooms, and then about thirty years passed before I heard anything about them again. KELLY: Well, it's really, really true, so it was a pleasure to get to say it to you instead of just pining to my book club about how I wish you had another book coming out. She made wedding cakes that tasted as good as they looked. I didnt know you had a husband!! I kept up with a great number of people, and I didnt know to what extent Id told Sookis story to Karl before, and if I had told him, I didnt know whether hed been listening, but now I had his full attention. And she couldn't fly because the flights were canceled. When it was over, I managed to make my way into the shower, perhaps the biggest single accomplishment of my life. I wanted to call and tell her how it had all turned out. We found a diner down the street from where I would be speaking. She even dedicated the front cover of her new book to Raphaels lovely painting of her dog. Germline variants are passed from parents to their children, and are associated with increased risks of several cancer types, including pancreatic, ovarian and breast cancers. Common sense and a book - that's all you need. They were lucky and the fire skated past. She was just coming out for, really, a matter of days so she could start it here and then fold into the UCLA trial. I didnt know what I would have done in her place, but I imagined that upon getting the news of recurrent pancreatic cancer I would go see my lawyer and settle up my tab with the house. I want to envision it as a healing room, but it reminds me of a meat locker: freezing coldIm guessing the temperature favors the delicate machinerywith a rack of blue torsos lined up on hooks. Don't have an account? I told her I would pick her up at the airport. Then one day she told me she was starting to shed. When we turned out the light that night I felt myself buzzing with happiness: After nearly three months of lockdown, we were going to have an adventure. Its important to think about your intentions before you start, my friend told us. (It was not reassuring to know that one of the nurses at UCLA thought that Sloan Kettering was the name of the doctor Id be seeing.) And this led to you meeting Sooki. About a quarter of the trees were down. I came back from Virginia and took Sooki to see the daffodils at the botanical garden, but we were too early. You all did a book event. Susan Joan "Sooki" Raphael of Topanga, CA passed peacefully on April 25th surrounded by friends, family, color, light, joy, and love. Ken would come later. We went to the bakery across from the bookstore and bought spinach-feta bread and cinnamon-raisin bread. Westchester was still a pandemic hot spot and there could be no congregating, even outside. This is a great read. It hadnt occurred to me that he might say yes. "[Sooki] was so many things," Wilson wrote. Or I would have forgotten about it, except that I got a call from Tom Hankss publicist a few weeks later, asking whether I would fly to Washington in October to interview the actor onstage as part of his book tour. She had transferred her life into brushwork, impossible colors overlapping, the composition precariously and perfectly balanced. The greenroom crowd was then escorted to their seats, and we were ushered to the dark place behind the curtainTom Hanks, his assistant, and I. dec. 27, 2019: Sweetest Ann, I am traveling todayjust for the dayup to Stanford for a second opinion, with the magicians elephant in my carry-on bag. Dont do this., That was when her eyes would well up. It's essays. I dont drink. I pushed my face into his shoulder, apologizing. If she missed a session, would her hair fall out anyway? He was in Nashville. Like, I really understand that I'm going to die, but I don't want the whole novel to be wiped out. We will never know all the things other people worry about. We miss you. Do you want to come downstairs? she asked. Pay attention every minute. The money behind Ron DeSantiss populist faade, What the American Academy of Arts and Letters taught me about death. It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown how Tom Hanks's assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing treatment for recurrent pancreatic cancer, came to be living in the basement of the novelist Ann Patchett and her husband Dr Karl VanDevender. Not everyone is like this. When Ann Patchett decides to try medicinal hallucinogens to accompany her ailing friend on a spiritual journey (also to alleviate the pain caused by chemotherapy), he gives them space. I looked up every anomaly online, settling on too much black tea, or maybe the wrong color shoes. A week later, Tom Hanks started recording The Dutch House at a studio in Los Angeles. I didnt say, Your death. What Sooki gave me was a sense of order, a sense of God, the God of Sister Nena, the God of my childhood, a belief that I had gone into my study one night and picked up the right book from the hundred books that were there because I was meant to. I paid the check. The price of living with a writer was that eventually she would write about you. In a previous interview with SurvivorNet, Cuozzo tells us how she found comfort expressing herself through her work. I tried to imagine chemo while living in a hotel. Welcome to the last book event on earth, I said when I walked onstage. Sooki Raphael is a TH Assistant at Playtone based in Universal City, California. Remember in the future not to make assumptions. But before her passing, she had a long career in the film industry which included her time spent as Hanks assistant before indulging her passion for painting. She was perfectly willing to talk, she wanted to, and now she was leaving in the morning. One thing led to another chief among them, finding out about Raphaels illness and soon, the movie stars longtime assistant had moved into her house. He told SurvivorNet that after losing his wife, Alice, to a two-year battle with ovarian cancer, hell never really get over losing her, but he does hope to move forward. 2,560 Followers, 85 Following, 25 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Sooki Raphael (@sookiraphaelartist) Then came the moment one feels on a roller coaster just as the bar locks into place and the car starts to pull up, the body pressing back into the seat, knees out ahead, and you think, Wait a minute, was this the best. Tell me how you know her again? he asked. It wasnt that I could kill someone; it was that I could kill her. That was my reward. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. They were waving. Now, their friendship lives on in Patchetts latest book which will be released on Tuesday Nov. 23, 2021, entitled These Precious Days: Essays a collection of essays that shares another intimate look at the inner workings of her mind. She kept to herself, sleeping and painting, trying to wrestle it out. In Tan-Tan there was no electricity at night, either. No doubt if Tom Hanks and Ann Patchett believe their friend to possess such wonderful qualities, she probably is a saint. She wrote home with vivid tales and photographs that demonstrated the color and beauty of her travels in the most unique ways. And I want you to explain why that felt easier to write during a pandemic than fiction. There was no hesitation on the canvases, no timidity. The world that Sooki inhabited was electrified by greens and blues, purple bougainvillea draping over hot-pink walls, colors too vivid to be explained. Like a Cessna? Forget about the heartfelt letters. And if I did have a favorite, I definitely would not admit it publicly. The truth was that we had no idea how long we were going to be together. There was a delicacy about her that was well-suited to baldness. Telephone poles were down, and electrical wires snaked across the asphalt. Her true work, which had lingered for so many years in her imagination, emerged fully formed, because even if she hadnt been painting, she saw the world as a painter, not in terms of language and story but of color and shape. Go together. We looked downstairs and in the kitchen and the den. The next day she brought up the vacuum cleaner to vacuum off her yoga mat. On the porch, Sparky joined in. It was a shaggy dog of a story by a woman passionate about dogs, touching on a variety of subjects, including her friendship with Tom Hanks assistant Sooki Raphael; Raphaels treatment for cancer; the early days of the coronavirus pandemic; the art and craft of writing; and I kid you not psychedelic mushrooms. I felt their love for me. I went by myself. View Sooki Raphael's business profile as TH Assistant at Playtone. I need to go home, she would say, like home was another place she could walk to. Death was the river that ran underground, always. Astonishing to come across such a friendship at this point in life. When Patchett connected with Tom Hanks, who is a fellow author and book lover (among other things! The wind was coming down the street like a train. I thought of her time as precious now. is the author, most recently, of The Dutch House. Sooki had come to our house thinking shed be staying with someone who was gone half the time and busy the other half of the time. PATCHETT: Yes. We werent the only ones who felt restless. Sooki Raphael is an artist. We did a different hour-long class every morning, identifying our favorites, ordering more DVDs. And I found maybe five other kids who had done the same thing and decided that I was going to make Thanksgiving dinner. Everything was lined upexcept Sooki didnt want to go. I will keep you more closely posted as I move ahead (in the right color shoes). It was a straight-line wind, a freak occurrence that came out of nowhere. She liked the team in Nashville. Overview; Filmography; Filmography. Im in Albuquerque shooting a movie. Raphael is Tom Hank's assistant and friend. Register, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilsons Assistant Died of Pancreatic Cancer. Kate DiCamillo is coming later on Wednesday. To say that Patchett was impressed is an understatement. We went home and baked a spectacular cake that was especially well suited to travel. I had interviews scheduled all day on Tuesday, Sooki had chemo on Wednesday, and my friends were leaving for California on Thursday. Backstage, she met his beguiling assistant. Pay attention, I told myself. I promised to call when it was over. Below is my story. 30, 2019: I imagine your kindness comes from you being kind. She painted as fast as she could get her canvases prepped, berating herself for falling asleep in the afternoons. For Patchett its Snoopy: Snoopy taught me that I would be hurt and I would get over it. 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