Remember Tuesdays with Morrie? Released in 2002, this bestselling book by sportswriter Mitch Albom chronicles a series of visits he made to an ailing mentor. Kenn Kaufman’s new book, Flights Against the Sunset, is something of a Tuesdays with Morrie for birders—it’s even been published as a very small book, about 5 x 7 inches, as was Tuesdays with Morrie. In each book an acclaimed writer weaves tales of life into a story about visiting a cherished person for whom death is imminent. The idea, of course, is that experiencing the end of a loved one’s life adds poignancy to one’s own experiences.
I think there’s a little more going on with these books. When a loved one dies, we all go through a series of emotional responses to the grief. We all feel a need to honor the one we have lost and to face the inevitable guilt about things we might have done better in our relationship with that person. In Flights Against the Sunset, Kaufman pays homage to his ailing mother and shares a few details, good and not so good, about his life as it pertains to his relationship with her.
This story takes place over the course of a single day—a metaphorical day, I’m sure—during which Kaufmann, sitting at his mother’s bedside, tells stories to her about some of his birding adventures. Many of the stories in Flights Against the Sunset are reprinted here, having first been published as Kaufman’s long-running column in Bird Watcher’s Digest. “My lifelong passion for observing birds … provided me an intensity of experience beyond what most people have in their daily lives,” he writes in the first chapter, but in chatting with his mother, “This was no time for dry details of ornithology.” Instead, he chose to talk of, “That frontier where the world of birds intersects with the world of humans.” Since that’s also where he directed his Bird Watcher’s Digest columns, this book does provide a successful framework for retelling those stories. To better fit them into the narrative, at mid-book he writes, “I had been struggling to come up with more things to talk about, to keep my mother’s mind occupied so she wouldn’t focus on the discomfort she was feeling. Those written columns would give me material … I could read to her.”
In some ways I wish that Kaufman had simply published an anthology of those columns. Yet weaving those stories into this tale allows the narrative to include some revealing autobiographical material. Of course, nothing reminds us of our own mortality as directly as the loss of a parent, and when looking ahead to the end our own days we all have a tendency to reminisce, and to find greater meaning some of our lifetime’s memorable events. It’s difficult to make this meaningful to other readers, however, Kaufman is a gifted writer and he pulls it off quite well. This is finely crafted, wonderful book, and Kaufman is a wonderful story-teller.
Still, I don’t like this kind of book very much. I didn’t like Tuesdays with Morrie, nor did I enjoy reading Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams’ celebrated book in which she watches the coincidental demises of her mother and her favorite birding spot, the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. My initial thought was to review Flights Against the Sunset negatively. But I gave it a bit more thought, and I realized that I just didn’t want to relive the passing of my own parents, to ponder my own mortality and shortcomings. That’s no fault of Kaufman’s fine book. With all the objectivity I can muster, I offer congratulations to the author for this moving tribute to his mother, and for the delightful set of stories at the center of the story. The final image of real chickadees at a feeder and imaginary flamingoes and penguins flying into the sunset is powerful indeed.
Kaufman, Kenn. Flights Against the Sunset: Stories That Reunited a Mother and Son. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. 225 pages, $24.00 hardcover. ISBN-13: 978-0-618-94270-1; ISBN-10: 0-618-94270-X).
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