With the publication date for the paperback edition of The Colony approaching, it’s a good time to share some news about several of the more prominent characters in the book.

On September 28, at 12:40 a.m., Olivia Breitha passed away. She died at the Kalaupapa care home, only a few hundred yards from the spot at which she first set foot in the settlement, 69 years earlier. Olivia was 90 years old. She was buried the afternoon following her death, in a grave dug alongside that of her late husband, John.

I spent a good deal of time with Olivia during the reporting of The Colony. One morning in her cottage, I asked Olivia what confinement had meant to her. At various times she gave different responses to this question, or similar questions, and the replies seemed to vary depending on who was doing the asking and her mood. On this day, however, she answered, “As strange as this may sound, it didn’t bother me. When you’re in a locked place and you can’t run away, what are you going to do? The key is not yours to open doors. Plus I got to know God better than if I hadn’t come here. I don’t know what I would have been if that had not happened. I probably would have been a ruffian or something. So getting to know God was good thing. You know that you can take what comes to you because you know somebody else is with you. It helps me from being angry.” The response was classic Olivia: heartfelt, wry, and with an astounding lack of bitterness. She had a wonderful ability to find the smallest slivers of silver within life’s darkest clouds.

In her powerful memoir, Olivia had observed:

“We all make the best of our lives here. This is it for us. This is the end of our fight. You know how it is. You fight against the isolation. . . . You fight yourself, the disease, the other patients, the board of health. Then finally, you give up, and find yourself.”

Another resident of the Kalaupapa community who figures prominently in The Colony is Henry Nalaielua. I spent a lot of time with Henry as well during my reporting, both at Kalaupapa and on Oahu, at Kalihi Hospital. We spent our time discussing books and art and history, and some afternoons we just went to the movies. Henry had been diagnosed with leprosy in 1936, when he was eleven years old, and, as I described it in The Colony, was eventually sent to Kalaupapa:

As a boy, Henry had stood at the rail of a steamer and spotted the Molokai cliffs for the first time. “It took forever to get here,” he recalled about that day. “I thought I’d never get here.” When they had put him on the boat, Henry had known nothing about Kalaupapa and imagined it might be a wasteland. Then he saw the immense curtain of rock. “That’s when I knew that I’d like it here,” he said. “If there were cliffs, there were streams, and if there were streams, there were beaches. It would be like home.” One of Henry’s friends in the community, a man named Paul, had remarked of the residents, “The more we suffer, the more strength we have. The more suffering, the closer we are to one another. Life is that way. If you haven’t suffered, then you don’t know what joy is. The others may know something about joy, but those who have gone through hell and high water, I think they feel the joy deeper.”

While I was working on my book Henry was also working on a book, writing in longhand on large pads of paper. That memoir, No Footprints In the Sand, has now been published. Do Henry — and yourself — a favor: buy a copy.

In my laxness of late I’ve neglected to post some recent reviews of The Colony. So I’ll start adding them now. In September, the New England Journal of Medicine weighed in on the book. The full review will be in the appropriate spot shortly, but here’s the money quote:

The Colony begins as a tale of heartbreak, suffering, and terrible loneliness, but it ends as a testimony of triumph and survival, with Tayman writing of the poignant and successful efforts of the survivors of Molokai to overcome prejudice and disability and rejoin society. The book is a painstakingly researched social history, a morality play illuminating the best and worst of human nature, a page-turning narrative, and a deeply sympathetic drama featuring a fascinating cast of characters.