Letter to a Friend at the End of Her Life

London, May 10, 2021

Dear Mrs. Chen,

Ever since Ming and Wah told me that you will be doing home hospice in your sunroom, I have been thinking of what I could send to you—an image to keep you company—and I keep thinking of Matisse making his cut-outs.

I think you perhaps already know the story of their creation: about ten years before his death, Matisse was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and he took to his bed for a decade with a twelve-foot-long cane, with which he arranged and re-arranged the cut-out pieces of colour on the walls around him, while his assistants wheeled his bed back and forth through the rooms above Nice. He said of the cut-outs, “You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed, because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk, there are leaves, fruits, a bird…”

I love these pictures that he created at the end of his life with the Provençal light shining through his windows because I think they illuminate a form of truth: that painful times and the sadness of things ending can also contain, mixed up within them, some of the most rich and intense moments that we will live, in a way that we only realise or fully come to terms with much later. For me, in his colours, there is hope… hope that I am sending to you.

I am glad that it is spring and that summer light will soon be shining through the windows of the sunroom. You have always been an inspiration to me—from the first time that I caught sight of you when I was fifteen, standing at the bottom of a staircase, laughing and joking: “Wow, what fun! Not a typical mother,” my schoolgirl’s mind thought, and then Ming and Wah and Aileen and Caroline and I came rushing down the stairs. Who would have imagined that thirty-five years later, I would be writing this to you in a pandemic? I am so grateful for our long friendship.

Those wonderful and warm days that Caroline and I spent as your guests in Millburn, in 1985, full of the Chen clan’s and the Lees’ enthusiastic laughter and generosity—Windows on the World, eating flat noodles for the first time in Chinatown, The Nutcracker, but most of all just hanging out—changed my view of life. At that time, things in my home were very difficult and the trip gave me hope. What would I have become, I sometimes wonder, had I not received that fortuitous push? You were so open and curious about us, in a way that adults rarely were then, and you made me believe that we mattered.

I think of you as a storyteller because you have the gift of noticing peculiarities and details about people and situations that when you recount them, in a few direct sentences or a funny anecdote, get to their essence and bring them to life in one swoop—so that small talk is never small with you and Dr. Chen but a feast of little stories that sparkle. Whenever I sit eating a meal with you, I think of your conversation as bubbles of wisdom floating around the room.

All that curiosity and openness to life has left me with the impression for decades now that you have somehow magically avoided growing old in your mind, and so it is hard to get my head around the fact that while your wise thoughts stay fantastically young and curious, your body—like all our bodies—is following a less elastic and magical timetable.

As I am writing this to you, an email has arrived saying that my offer on a house in London has been accepted. It feels like a special omen that my finding of a ‘home’ in England, after thirty years away, should coincide with the writing of this letter—and I remember how you and Dr. Chen came to see the first flat that I tried and failed to buy in London, a few years ago, on your birthday. The world is full of coincidences: the current tenants of the new house, a Chinese American family, have a photograph sitting in their sun room of a woman who I imagine to be their grandmother, whose expression reminded me strangely of you, and I lingered in front of it during my visit, surprised.

I wish the crazy pandemic was gone, and that I could wander along P—- Drive and walk through that famously open, unlocked door, or jump through this computer screen to give you a hug and chat and laugh a bit with you and Dr. Chen. Because I know however hard things are you will both, when you can, be laughing and chitchatting—it is in your souls, and why you so impress us younger, less wise ones, with your resilience and fearless optimism, and of course your love. I hope that Matisse will make you smile.

Isn’t Ming and Wah’s book wonderful? This is, of course, a rhetorical question because I do not want you to tire yourself writing emails at this precious time.

Thank you so much for being you and for all the generosity you have shown me. Kindness and generosity across a life that I have never managed to repay in even the smallest way.

Lots of Love,

Laura xxx

In Memory of Margaret W Chen, March 21, 1938 – May 21, 2021.

Letter published with the kind permission of Ming on behalf of the Chen family.