A time to reflect
Dead but not yet departed, a woman views her life and learns the secrets of her closest friends
It is morning, and Mrs. Annette Zinn, age 95, has just had her tea and toast. Quietly, Annette passes away in her favorite chair in the library of her home. Henry Preston, her aide, close friend, sharer and companion, arrives to find her; her body is still warm.
These are two of the opening moments of Mary E. Carter’s inventive, enchanting and intriguing short novel “The Three-Day Departure of Mrs. Annette Zinn.” a story about people who are ordinary yet special.
The “departure” in the book title could more accurately be described as a “passage” of three days when Annette’s soul is hovering over earth.
Those few days allow her to look behind and into details past events and conversations, some from her own life, before she ascends “to the world to come.”
Carter, a Placitas resident, said the concept of the three-day passage is drawn from Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz’s “The Soul,” a scholarly book on Jewish mystical literature.
One previously hidden event that the floating Annette reveals is the painfulness Henry suffered from the robbery of his treasured belongings. Another hidden event she sees is an “accident” that befell the parents of their mutual friend Sarah Sax. Sarah had endeared herself to Annette and Henry with her original whimsical origami designs made out of starched restaurant napkins.
The three become a “family of friends.” Yet they are, in a sense, ordinary people about whom they know only parts of the others’ lives. “Isn’t that what occurs with our friends and relationships? We only know a little piece of what they do,” Carter said in an interview.
Carter writes about the ordinary struggles of ordinary, flawed humans.
“While exploring these kinds of people, and by inventing their stories, I see how extraordinary these people are,” she said.
“I believe I am, within my cherished Jewish life, an observer, and I create — within the embrace of fiction — both Jewish and nonJewish characters and I put them together in situations and observe and tell their stories,” Carter said in further explaining her approach to fiction writing.
Annette Zinn is a secular Jew who applied the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, meaning doing one’s part to repair a broken world. Annette, a well-off widow, believes her large charitable donations to the YMCA and a homeless women’s shelter will help heal the world. Then, while floating, Annette questions the value of her charity.
“She wonders, ‘How can I be so foolish that my money would fix anything. How do you decide these things?’” Carter said of her protagonist.
The graphics — photographs and illustrations, all in black-and-white, enhance the text.
The book is Carter’s second novel. Her first, “I, Sarah Steinway,” was a finalist in the Debut Novel category of the 2018 National Jewish Book Awards.