by Matthew Power
The most recent of these instances where I felt him trying to express something from beyond ( and I'm really not given to these sorts of thoughts) was about the thousand paper cranes I'd begun to fold when I found out he was terminally ill. I'd had a love of origami since I was ten, and during my last time with Allen, in the winter of 1997, I'd made all sorts of little animals for him and told him some of the thoughts I'd had about paper folding. It's really quite meditative, a way to occupy part of your mind while letting another drift quite unconsciously, like how I imagine listening to classical music is for some people, or jogging. And people, kids especially, love the alchemy that transforms the two dimensional paper into any of the vast menagerie of models that have been designed over the centuries. I have hitchhiked in 27 countries, in the majority of which I didn't speak the language, and made friends with many children who had been forced into the backseat when their parents picked me up by folding them dragons, elephants or eagles out of candy wrappers and the linings of cigarette packs.
I was alone at an internship in Austria when I found out Allen was sick, and I knew immediately what I had to do. There's an old Japanese folk tale that anyone who folds a thousand paper cranes will have a long and healthy life, and be granted a wish by the gods. I had read about it as a kid in a tremendous story called Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, about a girl growing up in Hiroshima who contracts leukemia and tries to fold a thousand cranes. I'd gotten quite practiced at folding, and walked around with a pocketful of inch-wide squares of paper that I'd fold into cranes. I got to the point where I could fold them without looking.
In four days, I had nearly 700 finished. It was the same day I found out he had died.
I felt like I should finish them, some kind of prayer to offer him even gone, a way to make something of my own sense of loss.
There was a girl working at the same place as me in Austria, and her mother happened to be visiting at the time. The mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, and had been undergoing treatment. Her hair was gone, and she wore a wig. Her daughter, a shy, quiet girl named Laurel, was an emotional wreck, worried about her mother and feeling guilty for being so far from home.
I had the cranes spread out on a map of Europe in my room, and on the night before Laurel's mother left, I gave them to Laurel and asked her to give them to her mom, tell her the story about Sadako and about Allen, and to take them back to Maine and throw them in the ocean. She told me her mother burst into tears whe she gave them to her.
Time passed, I returned to the states and moved to New York. This past Fall, five years after Allen died, I got a letter from Laurel. Her mother had gone into full remission for several years. She had kept the cranes in a bowl in her room all that time. Last summer, she had a rapid relapse and succumbed quickly. At the funeral she'd told the whole story of the cranes, and they'd taken them and thrown half of them on the wind into the ocean. The rest were taken by her friends and family and spread around the world, in places they thought she would appreciate. In the bottom of the envelope were three of the cranes I had folded for Allen five years before. And one of the strangest things: a friend of mine who I've known for years in New York City, when he heard this story, called me in the middle of the night to tell me he had grown up next door to Laurel's mother, had been best friends with Laurel's brother, had been at the funeral and heard her tell the story. He had one of the cranes in his wallet.
Readers' Comments (if you don't see anything below, try clicking here)