06/30/2026
In 1963, Maurice Sendak gave children something no one had thought to hand them: permission to be furious.
His book was about a boy named Max who put on a wolf suit, made mischief, and got sent to bed without supper — and then sailed off in his imagination to an island where enormous wild things roared and gnashed their terrible teeth. Max wasn't punished for the wildness in him. He became king of it. And when he'd had his fill, he sailed home, because home was where someone loved him best of all.
Children understood it immediately. A lot of adults didn't. Some librarians kept it off the shelves; some parents thought it too dark, too frightening for small children. But the children, who tend to recognize the truth long after grown-ups have forgotten how, loved it without reservation.
Where the Wild Things Are was barely forty pages long. It would end up beside the beds of millions of children who didn't yet have words for what moved around inside them — the anger, the fear, the wildness, the need to run away and the equal need to come home.
By 2011, Maurice Sendak was eighty-three, and he had outlived almost everyone he loved. His parents were gone. His brother and sister were gone. Eugene, his partner of fifty years — a relationship he'd kept mostly private across his whole life — had died of cancer in 2007. Sendak had written his final book at Eugene's bedside during those last months. He said later that he'd made it to save himself. He hadn't wanted to die alongside the man he loved.
He survived. But the world around him had grown quieter, and smaller, and somehow more beautiful than it had ever been.
That September, he sat down with Terry Gross of NPR for what neither of them knew would be his last interview. They had spoken many times over thirty years, and he trusted her completely. And so, at eighty-three, with nothing left to protect and nothing left to prove, he simply told her the truth.
He talked about the maple trees outside his studio window — hundreds of years old, standing there long before he was born and certain to stand long after he was gone. He said the strange thing about getting old was that he had fallen in love with the world. Not in spite of everything he had lost. Somehow because of it.
Then he said the thing that stopped people where they sat. He admitted that he cried a great deal now — not out of despair, exactly, but because the people he loved kept dying and he could not stop them, and every time one of them left, he only loved them more. "They leave me," he said, "and I love them more."
Terry Gross cried. Across the country, strangers pulled their cars to the side of the road and sat there weeping — not out of sorrow, but out of recognition. Because most of them had been there too: holding love in their chest for someone no longer alive to receive it, with nowhere left to put it.
Before the interview ended, he thanked her. He told her she had a rare gift, that she drew out of people the things they usually kept locked away. And then, plainly and gently, he said: "Almost certainly, I'll go before you go, so I won't have to miss you."
And then he left three words for everyone listening. Not three different things. The same thing, three times, because once was not enough.
"Live your life. Live your life. Live your life."
Eight months later, on May 8, 2012, Maurice Sendak died in Connecticut. He was eighty-three.
His books are still everywhere. Children still follow Max across the water to where the wild things are. Parents still sit on the edges of beds and read those words out loud, and sometimes, without quite knowing why, they feel their voices catch.
Now they know why.
In his last year, he cried nearly every day. Not because life had taken so much from him — though it had. He cried because life had given him so much to love, so many people and so many ordinary mornings to love them in, that even at the very end, the love still had nowhere to go but over the sides.
