Dragonwriter (24 page)
Authors: Todd McCaffrey
“Beyond Between” certainly exposed a raw nerve here and there. Anne's narrative powers had undoubtedly been lessened by a number of recent health problems. But I suspect that the real venom arose because she had also crossed a well-defined line in the minds of some, perhaps many, readers. No one actually ventured to say as much, but the displeasure seemed unusually savage. In any case, “Beyond Between” did not garner much praise, to put it mildly.
Still, “Beyond Between” expresses something of Annie's struggle to come to terms with significant losses in her own life. It was written as Anne approached the last years of her own life and the final days of many others important to her. Damon Knight died the following year, and Joan Harrison died later that year, too. Annie's American agent and friend, Virginia Kidd, died a year after that, in 2003.
The following summer Annie's mentally troubled niece, Karen, who had moved to Ireland some years earlier, died suddenly. I was in Ireland at the time and was able to preside at the funeral, held at Our Lady Queen of Peace Church in a Catholic parish in Bray where Karen had become a member and received sympathetic care and attention from the church's outreach group. The parish priest graciously turned the church over to the family for the funeral mass. He and the parish staff couldn't do enough for us and wouldn't take a cent as a donation for their pains. As we left the church, Annie stuffed a fifty-euro note into the poor box.
Annie continued to write over the next several years, but declining health slowed the pace, which in her heyday had been prodigious. Collaborations with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (“the other Annie”) and especially with her son Todd, who was emerging as a fine writer in the Pern tradition, became more the norm, a development not viewed favorably by some readers, who had complained before at collaborations Anne had undertaken with promising writers such as Margaret Ball, Mercedes Lackey, Elizabeth Moon, Jody Lynn Nye, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, and Steve Stirling.
Anne did not publish again under her own name only. In the summers to come, we met several times over tea and her favorite “biscuits” to blue-sky plot devices for
After the Fall,
the last of her Pern novels (although she finished a first draft several months before her death, it is unlikely to be published in the form in which she left it).
Annie died of a stroke suddenly and, of course, prematurely, on November 21, 2011, just before Thanksgiving. I grabbed a quick flight to Ireland and arrived in time for the wake and funeral. The service was not held in a church. No surprise there, and there was standing room only at the funeral home in Bray. Annie looked great in her favorite purple chiffon dress. I'm sure she would have enjoyed herself. The service started with Bach (“Sheep May Safely Graze”) and ended with Brahms' “Academic Festival Overture”âAnnie's favorites. Alec gave a short but eloquent eulogy, and later, after Celine Byrne (the rising young opera star) sang “It's a Wonderful World,” Jim Carson gave a homily based on 1 John 4. If it seemed almost impromptu at points, he cleverly packed a lot of “religion” into it, and no one seemed to mind.
So yes, religion on and off Pern was a nuanced affair for Anne McCaffrey. Organized religion was kept at a distanceâan interstellar distance on Pern, if less so at Dragonhold-Underhill. But the deeper and more mysterious dimensions of life, even on Pern, did not escape notice. Anne loved life, all of it, and lived it full stop. And she had a great ride. If it wasn't on a real dragon, she at least got to swim with dolphins in Key West and rode her favorite horses till arthritis got the better of her.
Jim Carson had called shortly after I arrived in Ireland the day before Annie's funeral and asked me to provide a short reflection on her favorite scriptural passage, Psalm 23, which she had selected for her funeral months before. I was grateful for the invitation, but with only a few hours to prepare, found myself perplexed. I bounded awake at 3 a.m. with most of it clearly in mind. This is how it went:
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The Lord was her shepherd. No one else could have gotten away with it so long. If she did occasionally wantâit was her own amazing generosity that led to it. A couple of times, she asked me for a short-term cash loan because she had literally given away every coin in her purse. An authentic Christian, she also preferred anonymity, and I know that in making some truly heroic donations, she insisted on not letting the left hand know what the right was doing.
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Although they became home to a collection of remarkable horses, dogs, and cats, her pastures were always green. On the other hand, the waters around her were not always still, in fact rarely so, but with a guiding hand, she sometimes seemed to walk on them. Her faith was not little.
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Annie had a way of choosing the road not taken, which today is too often the path of righteousness, but she would be the first to guffaw at the suggestion. She was the least hypocritical of women and hated even the semblance of evil. She didn't fear it, but often railed against it. Nevertheless, she was not always a strict judge of human character because she preferred to believe that people were more righteous than, in fact, they were. When she was cheated, it hurt, but it failed to make her bitter or lessen her faith in human decency.
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Even so, I'm sure she's had a few words with God about his staff, who did not always comfort her as much as they should have, but it's sometimes hard even for God to get good staff these days. I was chuffed when back in 1981, she did not find me totally wanting but invited me back to Dragonhold as a kind of an occasional weyr chaplain. We sometimes even talked about religion, the Church, and, yes, God . . .
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Annie didn't always wait for God to prepare a table in the presence of anyone, much less enemiesâif she had any. She got there first. And if her cup occasionally overflowed a little with good Chardonnay, it was more often the cup of kindness and mercy that made her blessed with family, friends, colleagues, and that strange cloud of witnesses called “fans,” over three million of whom quickly tapped into Google about the death of the Dragonlady of Pern, who has found a lasting dwelling place not only in the Lord's house but in those millions and millions of hearts.
Born and reared in New Mexico, RICHARD J. WOODS did undergraduate studies in Washington, DC, New Mexico, and lowa before joining the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), a Roman Catholic community of priests, brothers, and sisters. He earned a PhD in the philosophy of religion (Loyola Chicago, 1978), MAs in systematic theology and scholastic philosophy, and an STM (master of sacred theology) from the Dominican Order. For twenty-seven years, he taught on the graduate faculty at Loyola University Chicago and also taught undergraduate theology and philosophy, and since 1981, has been adjunct associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Loyola University Medical School. From 1991 to 1999, he was lecturer and tutor at Oxford University, and he held the Dominican lectureship at Emory University in 1999. He has written thirteen nonfiction books, coauthored a novel with Anne McCaffrey, and published three novelettes. He has edited four anthologies in religious studies and has authored articles in spirituality, theology, health care, sexuality, and Celtic studies. His last book,
Meister Eckhart: Master of Mystics,
was published by Continuum/Bloomsbury in 2011. Currently, he is professor of theology at Dominican University, River Forest, Illinois.
1
http://karimblogl23.blogspot.ie/2012/08/anne-mccaffrey-example-of-stupid-being.html
2
http://annemccaffreyfans.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1024665&postcount=126
3
http://pernhome.com/aim/anne-mccaffrey/frequently-asked-questions/
4
http//www.writing-world.com/sf/mccaffrey.shtml
5
Lynne Jamneck, “An Interview with Anne McCaffrey,”
http://www.writing-world.com/sf/mccaffrey.shtml
6
See
http://www.amazon.com/Legends-II-Dragon-Sword-King/product-reviews/034547578X/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt_sr_4?ie=UTF8&filterBy=add FourStar&showViewpoints=0
, and
http://www.amazon.com/Legends-II-Dragon-Sword-King/dp/product-description/034547578X/ref=dp_proddesc _0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books
I
n many respects, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro is to horror what Anne McCaffrey was to science fiction. She holds numerous awards, many of them lifetime awards, including the rather charming “literary knighthood” from the Transylvanian Society of Dracula. I knew her first, respectfully, as Ms. Yarbro.
Whenever she and Anne got together, they would make it a point to disappear and compare whatever occult notes they'd made since their last rendezvous. They always had a marvelous time together.
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ASIDE FROM WRITING,
Anne McCaffrey and I shared a love of opera and horses, and were as likely to talk about “horses we have known/know” as we were to discuss the state of the publishing industry. We met infrequently over the years, but when we did, eventually we'd end up at horses, and we'd exchange stories, suggestions, anecdotes, tips, and other horsey things.