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I've read Calvin Trillin's lovely tribute to his late wife, Alice, twice: first when it was published in The New Yorker in March and now as a slightly expanded 78-page book, About Alice. Both times, I've laughed and I've cried.
Alice Trillin, who died in 2001 after 36 years of marriage, was a mother, educator and writer who's best known by readers who never met her as the unflappable foil for her husband, a humorist, essayist and reporter.
She got top billing in 1978's Alice, Let's Eat, about his passion for food, which has been reissued as a paperback companion to About Alice.
Alice died of cardiac arrest at 63, her heart destroyed by radiation treatments for lung cancer that was diagnosed 25 years earlier.
"You could say that she died of the treatment rather the disease," Trillin writes. "Presumably, though, it was also the treatment that, against horrifying odds, gave her twenty-five years of life."
She got her wish: to see her daughters married. Six hours after leaving the hospital after her cancer recurred, she marched down the aisle at Abigail's wedding.
Four months later, at Alice's memorial service, her older daughter, Sarah, said she thought her mother had toughed it out until she was sure "her girls had married the sort of husbands she considered good for the long haul."
Trillin writes that his wife's attitude toward religion "was somewhere between uninterested and hostile, except that she claimed to believe that you could hear what your children said about you at your funeral."
Alice and the girls weren't always in perfect harmony, and her complicated relationship with Sarah made it easy for them to wound each other.
But Sarah ended her eulogy saying, "Mom, I know you're listening somewhere, waiting patiently to hear me say these words: You were the coolest girl I ever knew."
About Alice celebrates a life well lived. It's not as raw or fresh a portrait of grief as The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's account of dealing with the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne.
Alice wrote about her cancer in "Of Dragons and Garden Peas: A Cancer Patient Talks to Doctors," a 1981 essay in The New England Journal of Medicine that is still read in medical schools.
Her husband adds that she once said, "'The worst thing cancer can do is rob you of your identity.' Her identity included engagement and optimism and enthusiasm."
So call this a sadly engaged, optimistic and enthusiastic book. Alice got to see her girls grow up. Her husband imagines her saying, "I'm so lucky!" He adds, "I try to think of it in those terms, too. Some days I can and some days I can't."
About Alice
By Calvin Trillin
Random House, 78 pp., $14.95
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