"I Thought There Was Only Us. I Thought There Was Only Now."
A Conversation With Author Lois Lowry
On New Year’s Eve 2021, I sat by a fireplace in Falmouth, Maine sipping on a glass of white wine with writer Lois Lowry, her husband Howard, and their neighbor—another charismatic and curious human in their 80s. I had just returned from Poland where I was on a family vacation with about a dozen of my in-laws. My mother-in-law, who was in her 60s, was battling cancer and dying. The trip, made in the midst of all the covid crazy, was to ensure that we spent Christmas together before the inevitable came.
My time in Poland had been one of the worst mental health periods I’d had in a long time. We gathered at an outdated ski resort in the mountains of the Sudetenland, an area of land between Poland and Czech Republic that is infamous for being given to Hitler during the Munich Agreement of 1938—a political choice that led to the invasion of all of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and subsequently a stepping stone to my family’s murder in the Holocaust. But, that’s not what was hard for me; I actually found the whole historical relevance quite interesting. What was deeply painful was that every time I joined my in-laws, I had to play the role of widow. My husband—my mother-in-law’s only child—had died from a heart attack nearly seven years earlier, during our first year of marriage. He was dead at 28 and I was widowed at 27. That identity became frozen in time in Poland. For years it was comforting but somewhere along the way it became suffocating. I was stuck between then and now, between here and there—desperate to shed this piece of me while also feeling required to remember.
My poor mental health took a toll—I drank too much and felt trapped. I was terrified of getting covid and being stuck in Poland, and felt guilty at how hard of a time I was having being there; I knew how much I was loved by this inherited family of mine. Every night during my visit I went to sleep breathing erratic breaths while desperately trying to make them even.
But now, on the last night of 2021, I was cozy in my home state of Maine. Relief.
I sat there in the light of the fire wondering how I got here. How did I end up taking my last deep breaths of the year casually sitting next to the writer whose words I feverishly read in elementary school? I felt the bone-deep need to be present. I wanted it to feel like it was just us and that the moment was only the now. I did my best.
A few months later, on a cold Friday in early March when the snow outside was crisp, bright and sunny, I arrived back at Lois’ home with my dog in tow. Lois had agreed to record a conversation with me for my podcast. I could feel the warmth of a growing friendship against the winter landscape as I moved the microphone back and forth.
Lois indulged all my curiosities about her work as an author. Her books The Giver and Number The Stars have played pivotal roles in my life. I was obsessed with The Giver as a kid and still am as an adult; that book is my earliest memory of loving memory. The latter book, Number The Stars, tells a story about how the Jews of Denmark were rescued during the Holocaust; it was the only example of literature I read in a classroom that spoke to my family history.
Lois told me about the people around the world who wrote to her giving some rendition of my own statements as a fangirl. She noted the students in Iran, Kathmandu, and Qatar who read her books. And about the community of Trappist monks that invited her to visit their monastery, and who consider The Giver sacred literature. She shared about how she became interested in Danish history and we talked about grief. Lois lost her son when he was in his 30s. She was the mother-in-law to a young widow; I was a young widow, preparing to say goodbye to my mother-in-law.
For those who haven’t read The Giver (or who haven’t picked it up since elementary school), the story centers around a young boy named Jonas who is on the cusp of teenagehood. In this dystopian community that Lois dreamed up for us, no one chooses their own jobs or journey; their purpose is decided for them. When it is time for Jonas to be given his role in the community at the tender age of 13, he is given a once-in-a-generation role as the receiver of memory. He is to hold all of the memories of the community. He's the only one who can see color, the only one who knows the feeling of snow, or who can feel the heat of the sun. And he's the one to hold the memories of war, falling in love or feelings of attachment and loss. Jonas is the one who carries the duality of life, which all of us readers can understand is the human experience that we can’t avoid.
In our conversation, I handed Lois my copy of her book—torn at the edges, it was the one I read as a child. I asked her to read the following excerpt:
“The man sighed, seeming to put his thoughts in order. Then he spoke again, “Simply stated,” he said, “although it's not really simple at all, my job is to transmit to you all the memories I have within me. Memories of the past.” “Sir,” Jonas said tentatively, “I would be very interested to hear the story of your life, and to listen to your memories… But I don't exactly understand why it's so important. I could do some adult job in the community, and in my recreation time I could come and listen to the stories from your childhood. I'd like that.” “Actually,” he added, “I've done that already, in the House of the Old. The old like to tell about their childhoods, and it's always fun to listen.” The man shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “I'm not being clear. It's not my past, not my childhood that I must transmit to you.” He leaned back, resting his head against the back of the upholstered chair. “It’s the memories of the whole world,” he said with a sigh. “Before you, before me, before the previous Receiver, and generations before him.” Jonas frowned. “The whole world?” he asked. “I don't understand. Do you mean not just us? Not just the community? Do you mean Elsewhere, too?” He tried in his mind, to grasp the concept. “I'm sorry, sir. I don't understand exactly. Maybe I'm not smart enough. I don't know what you mean when you say ‘the whole world’ or ‘generations before him.’ I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.” “There's much more. There's all that goes beyond – all that is Elsewhere – and all that goes back, and back, and back. I received all of those, when I was selected. And here in this room, all alone, I re-experience them again and again. It's how wisdom comes. And how we shape our future.”
“I want to pull out one of those sentences,” I told Lois when she finished reading. “The quote ‘I thought there was only us. I thought there was only now.’” I told her that I found this statement as haunting as I did calming and asked if there was a part of her that felt like life would be easier if we weren’t left with the task of holding onto the past?
“I mean, that's what we have fallen victim to in this world today,” she said to me. “And it's why we are not dealing with environmental issues because we think it's only now, and it's why we have trouble with immigration issues because we think it's only us.”
Lois and I talked for nearly two hours. I was taught a big lesson about generosity during our conversation. She gifted me not just her time, but her presence. And even though this new podcast I was creating hadn’t been published yet, she trusted me in having her as my first guest.
Just as with the written word, audio requires editing. My job after we finished recording was to take our conversation home and distill it down—pick and choose what would be shared with you all, the audience. In simple terms, some of her stories, the ones that weren’t as personal for me, were cut. Our hour and a half became 40 minutes.
Listen to the unedited conversation here.
An important story that was left on the cutting room floor was her story of the USS Arizona—one of the battleships that was bombed on the morning of December 7, 1941 during an attack on the military base at Pearl Harbor. The attack would cause the Arizona to sink, with the loss of over 1,100 crewmen, and be a deciding event in America officially joining the world war.
One of Lois’ more recent books, titled On The Horizon: World War II Reflections, is about this history. Her father was in the military and they lived in Hawaii for part of her childhood. She became inspired to write this book when she discovered a home movie of her as a kid playing in sand on the beach with the USS Arizona in the background. Her family would relocate to New York shortly before the attack.
“People who are young don't know what the Arizona is,” Lois said to me. “People my age all recognize that name.”
Fast forward exactly a year after that conversation with Lois to March 2023 and I met T.J. Kirkpatrick at a photojournalism conference. We were immediately drawn to each other, and in those early weeks of courtship we spent a distracting amount of hours talking on the phone. The early conversations that led us to falling in love were about the past—who we once were and where we came from. How we got to the here and the now. As he shared about his family history, he told me that his grandfather, Thomas Leroy Kirkpatrick, was killed on the Arizona; he was the ship’s chaplain and had a long career in the military.
Fast forward again—about five months this time and now in a serious relationship—I planned to bring T.J. to meet Lois and her husband. I told him that we both had to read On the Horizon before we went. “She wrote Number The Stars which is about my family history and this new book is about yours,” I said to him. There was some serendipity there.
The book is small—just 80 pages. It’s one of those reads that a child can sit with for days and an adult can finish in one sitting. It’s divided into three sections; the first is about the attack of Pearl Harbor and the second section is about the bombing of Hiroshima. Both give us vignettes of victims and survivors.
“And the third section tries to connect all of them together,” Lois told me during our conversation. “Because, of course, that's what the world consists of—people with connections to each other. And finding those connections, I think, is our task.”
I read the book all at once while laying in bed and then put it on T.J.’s pillow for him to read. I watched as he turned page by page by page. Waiting for the very last story of the book, the lines that tell about a young grandson bringing flowers to his grandfather’s memorial at Pearl Harbor. And like in a freezing of time, I watched him read Lois’ words:
“… I took my eleven-year-old grandson, Jamie, to Hawaii for a vacation, just the two of us. I showed him the hospital where I’d been born and the place where my family had lived just outside of Honolulu. Then we went to Pearl Harbor.
It was on the USS Arizona Memorial, where we stood in the midst of a hushed crowd, that something caught our attention. In front of the engraved list of names—those who had died, those who still lay below us on the sunken vessel—was a small glass jar containing a few flowers. A note propped beside it said ‘For my grandpa’ and followed that message was a name. Jamie and I read the name, then found it in the list of doomed men. We did the math, whispering to each other. That young sailor had left a child, we realized. That child had grown up and had a child of his own. That child had left these flowers for the grandfather he had never had a chance to meet.
My grandson and I moved to the side and stood there looking at the sea, almost overwhelmed by the way history had become real, and watching the slow formation of oily bubbles that still, after so many years, oozed their way to the surface.”
When he finished reading, I witnessed T.J. weep. It was a cry that was as deep as generations can go. Back and back and back came to the surface. I felt jealous—in all my years of working with family history, I had never touched emotion like that. At least not about our ancestors and not about the strangers. I felt him weep for someone, for anyone and for everyone who came before and also for those who will come after. Because there wasn’t only us, there wasn’t only now.
As I get ready to release season two of the Along The Seam podcast, I am sharing the unedited conversation with Lois. You can find that wherever you stream your podcasts or right here: www.alongtheseam.com/Lois-Lowry
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This was beautiful and made me weep. Thank you for sharing!
Yes...wow!