Then the 74-year-old writer moved on to the bad: “In early December I thought I had an upper respiratory bug that has been going around,” he said in a second post. “Well, it didn’t seem to respond to antibiotics, so I had a chest X-ray and a CAT scan that found cancer.”
Specifically, in his lungs and “lots of other places.”
“A week ago I learned that what I have is a very aggressive and all but untreatable form of cancer that was apparently induced by the radiation treatments I had for prostate cancer nine years ago,” he wrote. “I have gone from feeling pretty good to being in hospice care.”
And so as Mosher is settled at home, his friends and neighbors are wrestling with the news.
“I just can’t tell you how heartbroken we are,” Dede Cummings, founder of the Brattleboro-based Green Writers Press, said Monday. “He’s aware — he can hear everything — he just can’t talk. He’s not in pain, and his wife (Phillis, his spouse of 52 years) is right there by his side.”
Mosher is the third Northeast Kingdom writer to face incurable illness in the last six months. In September, Mosher’s former student, poet Leland Kinsey, died of lymphoma at age 66. Eleven days later, fellow poet and playwright David Budbill died of progressive supranuclear palsy at age 76.
Cummings has published the works of Budbill and Kinsey with the help of Mosher, who heads the Green Writers Press advisory board.
“He gives so much of himself to other writers and readers,” Cummings said.
Mosher, born in the Catskill Mountains in 1942, has lived in Vermont since 1964. He has seen four of his novels — “Disappearances,” “Northern Borders,” “A Stranger in the Kingdom” and “Where the Rivers Flow North” — made into feature films by Barnet director Jay Craven.
“Well, the best laid plans, as they say,” the author began the post reporting his cancer. “Our kids and grandkids have been with us, and I’m comfortable. I’m also grateful for all my bookseller friends, writer friends, reader friends and friends in general who have been so supportive of me and my work over these many years.”
Mosher’s announcement came the same weekend his centenarian mother died, Cummings said.
“He physically doesn’t have a speaking voice right now,” she said, “but his voice is going to live on through his work.”
Cummings’ advice to friends and neighbors seeking to offer support: “Buy his books.”
