A Summer To Die: An Open Letter to Lois Lowry

Dear Ms. Lowry,

You don't know me. I am a third-grade Language Arts teacher from halfway around the world. I am a fan of yours, though I’ve only read four of your books: The Giver, Gooney Bird and the Room Mother, Gathering Blue, and most recently (just last night, actually) A Summer To Die.

Allow me to digress a bit and provide you with a short background of myself before I get to why I am writing to you now.

A number of tragedies hit me and my family last year, my dad passing away and floods inundating our home being the most heart-wrenching ones. I lost all my books in that flood. My students, with whom I shared my survival story, since then have been sharing their books for me to read. One has lent me your Gathering Blue and A Summer To Die. And I loved, love, both dearly. A Summer To Die especially. It wasn’t until I as in the middle of reading it that I realized it reminded me of my father.

My father was my best friend. I can’t get to the details of our relationship here because it would simply take up too much time and space, but it was a lot like Meg’s relationship with Will Banks combined with her relationship to Molly. He was also sick. He was diagnosed with diabetes in his forties and lived with it for nearly thirty years. He would be seventy-three now, if he lived.

The past couple of years, my dad went in and out of hospitals as his organs started bailing out on him, which was a consequence of his having diabetes. He started dialysis last 2008, which terrified him greatly, then had his worst attack last April. He spent nearly a week in the ICU while we slept on the cold, hard floor of the hospital waiting area. When he recovered, he gave us firm orders not to put him through that again. It must have been a million times more excruciating for him that for us who were just stuck watching helplessly, agonizingly. We knew that the end would come soon.

It did only a month after.

I wasn’t even there when he was rushed to a small hospital nearby (no big, ultra hi-tech hospitals for him anymore), which I didn’t really dwell on at that time. It didn’t really bother me at all because there were too many other things to think about then. Now, I realize it must’ve been God’s way of working things out. See, weeks before that my mother told me she couldn’t just stand by and follow my dad’s wish of not getting the best medical treatment there was to save whatever frail life was left in him. My mother said that if my dad wanted to be left in peace, she would have to stay out of the hospital. But in the end, she didn’t. Which was how it should be. Just the two of them. My mom stayed by my dad’s side ‘til the end.

My dad’s passing was a cheerful event for me, or so it seemed at that time. He was such a cheerful soul that literally moments after his death, I was left laughing with unexplained joy.
I did not grieve, for a long time. When I finally started to four months later in September, a super typhoon came and dumped the heaviest rainfall our country’s seen in decades. The ensuing floods swept away everything: our home, our car, all our belongings, our memories, everything. It was like a Divine Hand telling us to move on, don’t waste time holding on and grieving over a happy soul.

Now, we’ve all started over. We’ve left behind our old house with all the memories of my dad. Of course, we haven’t forgotten still. I just remember the happy times.

Reading your book, it touched my heart. Though starkly different in many ways, our stories have eerily similar circumstances, including the important fact that my dad died in May (which is summer in our country) and that we left our home, too (or rather, the flood drove us away), one September day like the Chalmers. I also felt a strong connection with Meg. Our attitudes and behavior are remarkably the same (yes, even at my present age) and interests, too. I was a good student with an eye for art. And I have always felt somewhat unpretty and slightly out of place wherever I go.

Ms. Lowry, of your four books that I read, A Summer To Die is not my favorite but it has struck me the deepest and will not be easy to forget. I will probably never read it again, but such are great books, I think, that are difficult to read (for one reason or another) and must only ever be read once. I wanted to write to you to share this all with you, though I’m not entirely sure now why. If it offers any enlightenment or consolation, another great book I’ve read but which I cannot read again is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. Have you read it? I read it a long time ago. The main character, Jose Arcadio Buendia, reminds me very much of my father.