Writing About (Imminent) Death With Grace: Amy Ettinger

Steve's Blog on Writing

Years ago, here in Santa Cruz, local writer Amy Ettinger showed up one Tuesday night to read some of her writing at our OpenMic night at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. I remember liking her right away, her combination of excited energy about writing, held in check nicely by the ballast of a healthy modesty and sense of perspective.

And I loved the idea for her book, Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America, from which, as I recall, she read that Tuesday night, probably in early 2018. Who doesn’t love ice cream, right? As poet Wallace Stevens memorably put it: “Let be be finale of seem/ The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.”

Amy was candidly thrilled about fighting through all the obstacles and actually landing a book deal for a memoir on the ostensibly unlikely topic of ice cream. Her enthusiasm and pride were nothing like gloating, just infectious joy in the possibilities of writing.

“I went on to land a contract with Penguin Random House to travel the country, eating ice cream, gathering research, interviewing Jerry from Ben & Jerry’s, and riding around on the back of an ice cream truck through the streets of Bensonhurst, N.Y.,” she would later write. “The book contract was lucrative, and the publication of Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Through America opened up opportunities I never expected, like being on NPR and teaching creative nonfiction writing.”

Amy and I were in occasional touch after that—she wanted to make an Author Talk Event we had with Madison Smartt Bell in March 2018, and later asked about hosting a yoga workshop here.

Then in August 2023, like so many others, I was gobsmacked by Amy’s article for the Washington Post, part of that paper’s “Inspired Life” series, headlined “I AM DYING AT AGE 49. HERE’S WHY I HAVE NO REGRETS,” with the subhead, “Life is all about a series of moments, and I plan to spend as much remaining time as I can savoring each one.”

I turned sixty-one that month, and the fact that I knew Amy a little, had talked to her about her life, her writing, maybe gave the article even more impact. I know it deepened in me a sense to try to do just what she said: To see life as a series of moments, to be savored, moments with my wife, Sarah, moments with my young daughters, Coco and Anais, and yes, moments with writers we try to offer a little inspiration and nourishment.

That Amy article for the WP, written in an honest, unsentimental, just-so style I would compare to the classic New Yorker essay my friend Roger Angell wrote on life as a ninety-something, “This Old Man,” touched many readers.

“I’ve always tried to say yes to the voice that tells me I should go out and do something now, even when that decision seems wildly impractical,” she wrote. “A few years ago, with very little planning, my family and I got in a car and drove 600 miles to a goat farm in central Oregon, where we camped out for four days to watch a solar eclipse. I once jetted off to Germany on two days’ notice, spending a week exploring Dresden and hiking through the Black Forest.”

Touching on all the reasons she felt satisfied with her life, she evoked a stretch of Pacific coast four miles downhill from where I now write this blog. “I love spending time in the redwoods and by the ocean. Just a few months ago, I was walking four miles a day along the sweeping ocean coastline at West Cliff Drive where I could see surfers and otters frolicking, and humpback whales lunge-feeding just off the shoreline. This became my everyday routine.”

That article closed: “The end of my life is coming much too soon, and my diagnosis can at times feel too difficult to bear. But I’ve learned that life is all about a series of moments, and I plan to spend as much remaining time as I can savoring each one, surrounded by the beauty of nature and my family and friends. Thankfully, this is the way I’ve always tried to live my life.”

That life ended earlier this month, and as Amy’s old paper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, put it: COMMUNITY MOURNS LOCAL AUTHOR AMY ETTINGER. “Ettinger, forty-nine, is survived by her brothers Mark and Steve, her aunt and uncle Mary and Kenny Parker—her daughter, Julianna, and her husband, Dan White, whom Ettinger met while she and White were both working at the Santa Cruz Sentinel,” the Sentinel wrote.

The article explained that after high school in Cupertino, just over the hill, she “attended UC Santa Cruz where she majored in American literature and met lifelong friend, Bessie Weiss, in a class taught by literature professor Paul Skenazy.”

She was a good student and Skenazy wrote her a letter of recommendation to the San Francisco Chronicle. “She's got a style, a voice, a way of living on paper,” he wrote. “She knows how to handle difficult and complex material, whether abstract (as in essays on literature) or personal (as in some evocative reminiscences of her father).  She also knows how to take material and milk it for meaning:  a lost red ball, a problem with roommates—these turn into powerful metaphors in her hands. She has the intelligence to find her way into stories and issues, the maturity to keep at things, the skill to turn her thoughts into clear, exact prose.  I think you'd find her a pleasure to work with and an immediate contributor to the paper.”

I was on staff at the Chronicle at the time and I’d like to know who it was who read that letter and didn’t hire Amy right away.

Evaluating Amy as a student in his American Autobiography course, Skenazy wrote at the time: “Amy was a quiet student in class. Her central concern was with loss and efforts at retrieval, the relationship of writing to resurrection, reconnection.  This elegaic impulse provided a depth to several pieces, from a fairy tale that mixed memory and fantasy to a photographic portrait to a series of family stories.  The impulses of memory were also supported by a clear and pointed prose, and an intelligence that was able to see the significance of small moments:  the loss of a red ball in childhood, for example, became a metaphor for the effort to recover lost times through writing. Amy was looking at two deaths from her childhood, her father’s and a friend’s; seeking in writing a wholeness, a resurrection, that life firmly and fatally won't provide: a mending, binding, folding together.”

She found all that and more, and touched many lives with her brave writing—especially in that Washington Post article. As Santa Cruz author Wallace Baine put it after the article appeared, “I’ve known Amy and her husband, the journalist and writer Dan White, for years, and in fact worked with both in the Santa Cruz Sentinel newsroom a lifetime ago. Dan and I shared a writers group for many years. Though they have both dealt with tragedy in their lives, I’ve known them both to be kind, funny, free-spirited people and devoted parents to their daughter, Julianna.”

And he concluded: “Amy’s Post piece will likely remain one of the bravest and most forthright things I’ve ever read about the experience of facing death at a young age. It’s a frightening thing to have to reflect on your life knowing the credits are about to roll, but Amy does it with a kind of grace I find breathtaking. And he concluded: “Amy’s Post piece will likely remain one of the bravest and most forthright things I’ve ever read about the experience of facing death at a young age. It’s a frightening thing to have to reflect on your life knowing the credits are about to roll, but Amy does it with a kind of grace I find breathtaking. Her friends and family are helping her measure out the sweetness of the days she has left. But even if you don’t know her or have never heard of her, her piece is a thing of terrible beauty. Spend some time with it, and carry it—and her—in your heart.”

—Steve Kettmann

Steve Garvey’s New Field of Dreams

As a writer whose two major specialties are baseball and politics, I pretty much had to check in on Steve Garvey’s run for Senate. “Here is the thing: Garvey’s Senate bid is a run for rehabilitation,” I write for the Washington Monthly. “He knows as well as anyone that blue California isn’t going to elect him. He’s running for the publicity. That’s why he doesn’t even feign at knowing substance—a rite of passage for famous Californians who have sought to turn celebrity status into political office going back to author Upton Sinclair, actors Helen Gahagan Douglas (who Richard Nixon defeated in 1950), Ronald Reagan, Sonny Bono, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Garvey’s Senate bid is like Jay Gatsby’s only-for-show library. His website isn’t the ideal showcase for a typical politician. It’s more like a clearing house for baseball memorabilia; you can almost smell the horsehide.” Click here to read the rest.

Upcoming OpenMic Nights

Let us know if you’re in the Santa Cruz (California) area and would like to attend one of our upcoming Tuesday night OpenMic readings, when people read from their works in progress (usually about 1,000 words for prose writers) at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. We’ll host people at 7 p.m. on the following dates: Tuesday, April 16, Tuesday, April 23, and Tuesday, May 21. Email us to confirm if you’d like to attend please.