The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood

by Sy Montgomery

Each battered airmail letter, covered with as many as fourteen stamps, was blessed proof the family had survived. In grateful reply I composed simple but detailed letters describing life in our village on the other side of the world. I sent photos: our post office and church in five feet of new snow; a picture of my father in his military uniform; Howard and me in parkas and snowshoes. I sent pictures of Kate and Jane and Lilla, Ed and Pat. And, of course, I often sent pictures of our animals. (“Your very large Hogwood pig is wonder to see,” Girindra wrote. “There is no such pig in Sundarbans. How can it be? It is as miracle to us.”)

But I was Tess’s person. We were a unit. We were family. Because I loved her with almost drunken abandon, and because she loved me so completely and deeply, I believed I might love Tess back to life. I knew I could not do this for my mother. Her person was my father, and he had already passed on to a place she was eager to go. Yet I knew at that moment where I needed to be: in the hospital in Virginia, by my mother’s side, where perhaps there was still hope of another kind of healing.

“I wish for you the insight to recognize the blessings as such,” I said, “and sometimes this is hard. But you’ll know it’s a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by the experience. So be ready. There are great souls and teachers everywhere. It is your job to recognize them.”