Glowworms
September 30, 2025 at 10:09PMWith commitments pending in Australia and New Zealand, American author Ann Patchett considers cancelling her trip when it becomes apparent that a close friend, her 102-year-old mother-in-law, and her 12-year-old dog, Sparky may all pass away before she returns. In the end, she chooses to go, and, in an unexpected turn of events while on a trip to see glowworms in Te Anau, New Zealand, she confronts her own mortality.
Yes, in the pitch dark we could see tiny glowing worms dotting the ceilings and walls, but they were, in number, several hundred billion fewer than the stars that covered the night sky above Lake Te Anau. I took Karl’s hand and whispered that he should hold on to me, no matter what. We’d been told not to speak in the boat as it was being pulled along, and that was just as well, because everything I had to say was about death.
Not Jo’s death or Jim’s or Sparky’s, though I kept the three of them close. In the punt on the river in the cave, beneath the dim light of glowing worms, it was my own death that consumed me. If any of the strangers in this open boat lost their minds and threw a few of us overboard, threw me overboard, that would be that. The river was cold and fast and headed to the center of the earth. If there were a geological shift, an earthquake, a rock slide, that would be that. The one entrance into this cave was, coincidentally, the one exit, and that small opening could close at any moment. But more alarming than the ways in which this physical space could turn against us was the simple metaphor of a wizened little man pulling a boat down a river in the dark. I had always believed myself to be pretty sanguine at the thought of my own death—I’d had a good long life, done good work, experienced true love, was generally A+ lucky—but now all I wanted was to get the hell out of there. I wanted to be above the ground and not beneath it.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/30/glowworms-death-ann-patchett/
via IFTTT
Watch