An Electronic Cure for Despair

My pain-worn wife, Sigrid, lay on the hospital bed, a tube down her nose and half a dozen IVs in her arms and chest, confronting a semicircle of white-clad doctors. "Give us just 48 hours," pleaded the head of the medical team. "We can make you comfortable, then we can open your blockage. Please, just 48 hours."

"Oh, all right," Sigrid finally said. But clearly her heart wasn't in it. If I don't do something right now, I thought, Sigrid's going to quit trying for a cure and go home. Our plan to get her digestion restored and thereby gain at least a few months to promote her brand-new book was crashing. What to do? She lacked the energy to entertain visitors or phone calls. Get-well cards from friends would certainly come too late. Her Johns Hopkins room came equipped with a keyboard enabling patients to access their e-mail on their TV screen. This gave me an idea.

That night, I e-mailed several dozen friends. "Sigrid is fighting cancer again and is in a hard place. I'm soliciting e-mails to raise her spirits. If you've read her book, she would especially love to hear your reaction." Sigrid's book, her first, called "Goodbye Stalin: A True Story of Wars, Escapes & Reinventions," was officially coming out several weeks hence. But we'd had two prepublication parties, and the memoir, which describes her family's four flights from communism, was already available at some stores and Web sites.

We all know how the Internet has transformed the way we live. I was about to discover that e-mails were going to transform the way Americans handle long-term illness and death.

My emergency e-mail went out on a Saturday night. By Sunday noon, when we opened Sigrid's mailbox in her hospital room, a dozen messages brightened her queue. Besides standard wishes urging courage, several included chatty personal notes. One reported amazing problems involving Elvis, the e-mailer's sick horse. Another friend, praising Sigrid's book, delighted her with the news that the writer's grandmother had worn the same kind of black-velvet ribbon as a choker as had Sigrid's grandmother. Sigrid's interest and awareness rose with each message. By the time I bedded down in the recliner next to her that night, our spirits were rising.

The e-word quickly spread. Within days Sigrid was receiving eight to 18 messages daily. From Europe, a stream of messages brought photographs and accounts of a family reunion. Gardening friends weighed in with pictures and notes on the state of their plants. Three people from Sigrid's horse world thanked her fervently for getting them their current jobs. Sigrid also learned that her book had acquired legs. Friends were buying extra copies as gifts. The publisher e-mailed that unexpected bookstore demand had forced a second printing.