The Importance of Grace

THE WOMAN SAID YES: ENCOUNTERS WITH LIFE AND DEATH

by JESSAMYN WEST

180 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $7.95.

Albert Camus wrote that suicide is the essential moral question of the 20th century. Author Jessamyn West, 69, has spent a good deal of her life responding to the question.

In her 20s, seriously ill with tuberculosis, she contemplated suicide. Almost 30 years later, at the bedside of her dying sister Carmen, she faced it again in another form. Both encounters are gracefully recorded in these memoirs. The longer and more compelling portion of the book is a testimony to the extraordinary courage, humor and joyful energy displayed by her sister until the very end. Depleted by cancer, Carmen decided to choose the time, place and manner of her death. "Cancer was going to kill her," Jessamyn recalls. "She planned to be asleep before that happened." Jessamyn kept watch. Until the moment the sleeping pills worked, she had doubts that the scheme would succeed. Neither sister had doubts about its morality.

Quaker Meetings. The resolve necessary for such an act apparently derived from their mother, Grace, who once nursed Jessamyn when the author was gravely ill. At the time Jessamyn was 28 years old, married and about to receive her Ph.D. She found that she had tuberculosis and was rushed to a sanatorium. Two years later, about 1937, she was sent home to die. Grace had other ideas. Recovery was plainly harrowing: "I could not live in either the past which was past, or the present from which I was locked away." Jessamyn remembers and describes with some retrospective amusement her plans for exchanging "bed rest for something more everlasting." (She even thought of climbing into the bath and pulling an electric heater in after her.)

Grace nursed Jessamyn's body but could do nothing about her gloomy and exhausted spirit until she hit upon the idea of reconstructing her Quaker heritage for her daughter. "Grace gave me southern Indiana," writes Jessamyn, recalling how day after day for a year and a half her mother told her stories about courtship and farming, blizzards and Quaker meetings. "There was no pain there for me. It was nothing I once possessed and had lost; it was not a future forbidden to me." And so she was slowly wooed back to life. Eventually, she even turned her mother's gift into her own response to extinction --her writing, which celebrates the Quaker reverence for life. The Hoosier tales she published over the next several years turned out to be a beloved bestseller called The Friendly Persuasion.

Angela Wigan

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