In Watermelon Sugar in the Light

I’ve just read two unrelated books. One is Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience by Kenneth Ring. The other is You Can’t Catch Death by Ianthe Brautigan, a memoir by the daughter of author Richard Brautigan.

Did I say unrelated? I beg your pardon. Watch me. I am on my knees, begging. See?

Ianthe Brautigan’s sad and chilling memoir is about life with her father.

I always mention him when people ask me who my favorite authors are. It comes out Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, and Richard Brautigan, not necessarily in that order. Then I say that my writing is kinda like theirs with subject matter more like Richard Bach, James Redfield, Richard Matheson (What Dreams May Come), and to a lesser degree, Mitch Albom.

I discovered Richard Brautigan through the recommendation of a beautiful woman, a flight attendant for TWA when they still called themselves stewardesses. She showed me her favorite book at the time, In Watermelon Sugar.

I wanted to kiss her in watermelon sugar.

A whole lot of books would be sold through word-of-mouth if all publishers did was to get beautiful women to recommend books to aspiring suitors. “Here, read this, and you will know my heart.”

I ended up buying a trilogy: Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar. Ianthe Brautigan’s photo, taken when she was a child, is on the cover of that book.

Here is part of a poem that I put a stickie on a couple of decades ago:

Oh, Marcia,
I want your long blonde beauty
To be taught in high school,
So kids will learn that God
Lives like music in the skin
And sounds like a sunshine harpsichord…

I had hoped that the TWA stewardess would become my high school lesson, but she flew away with someone else. I guess it is some consolation that thirty years later I can’t remember her name.

But in many ways, Richard Brautigan’s words set for me a standard in literary lovemaking I wanted to achieve as a writer and as a lover. I wanted to make love in metaphors. I wanted lovemaking to sound like sweet weather.

I wanted to kiss and hear thunder and see lightning. I wanted to find a lover who understood what Richard Brautigan meant, what I meant. I wanted a lover to unbutton her blouse and show me her ideas.

“For reasons that no one will ever really know,” Ianthe Brautigan wrote in her book, “my father committed suicide in 1984.”

Her book shows that contrary to any of my fantasies, Richard Brautigan, author of images that made me yearn to write and make love, because sometimes they are one in the same, was no stranger to pain.

I hear him sobbing all the way from heaven.

If only he’d had a chance to read Lessons from the Light before he pulled the trigger.

Ianthe’s book is full of pain and suffering, much of it caused by the untimely death of her father. He never said goodbye.

Kenneth Ring’s book includes accounts of what happens when you die as told to him by people who’ve been there, done that.

A major focus of the book is the life review where the new arrivals in the spirit world encounter a complete recounting of everything they thought and did in life. Every teeny tiny itsy bitsy thing. Talk about anal retentive. But not only do we get to review the minutiae of our lifetime, we also get to feel everything good and yucky that everyone else felt in and out of our presence—and every ripple of feeling that anyone felt down the line.

Near-death experiencers who attempted suicide but didn’t succeed report how during their life reviews they experienced all the pain that their in-progress suicide attempt caused others.

Richard Brautigan, after he had blown his brains out, was able to experience all the joy that he had brought so many people. And then he got to feel all the sadness that his self-imposed death brought. Worst of all, I would imagine, would be the pain that he brought his daughter who loved him so much.

Another book that is entirely about a woman who was so sick she was willing herself to die—and then discovered the consequences during an NDE is Heavenly Answers for Earthly Challenges by Joyce H. Brown. She wrote from her experience to communicate the quintessential message if you’re thinking about taking your life, don’t do it, and here’s why.

While in the mortal sense and instant karma sense, Richard Bruatigan’s exit was tragic, the other side of the coin is that he is still alive, perhaps still creating, perhaps even dreaming in watermelon sugar.