She was born the same year as Teresa Marie Schindler Schiavo. Two years ago today, I was waiting for her death, which arrived at 5:00 a.m. the next morning. Unlike Mrs. Schiavo, she had a good death, on her own terms. She wasn't a national issue, a body to be fought over, a prize to be won, but a person to be cherished and loved.
In a different place, at a different time, we would never have been friends.
It was 1984, an AA club in Denver. I was with a group of people, and over coffee and cigarettes we were talking about where we came from, how we got there. I announced "no one knows where I was born - Merrill, Iowa". Across the room a voice said "I know where Merrill is. I was born in LeMars". She was the epitome of a corn-fed Iowa girl: young, round in form, with the blondest hair and the only true porcelain complexion I've ever seen. She wasn't intellectual, hadn't read a book since she'd graduated from high school, knew who the president was but little else. We had little in common other than being young alcoholic women who shared Iowa as our natal state. I was 26, she was 21, and we became friends.
During the first years of our friendship, we taught each other. She didn't know how to balance a checkbook. I didn't know how to relax without drinking myself into oblivion first. Within a couple of months she'd balance her bank statement to the penny the day it arrived, and I learned how to lay around doing nothing in particular, thinking about nothing in particular, talking about nothing in particular.
True friendship. She went with me to Grateful Dead concerts, even though she never particularly liked that style of music (and after her death, I found she saved ever damned ticket stub). I went with her to parties and social events, even though that type activity initially made me uncomfortable.
She talked of the baby she'd relinquished for adoption as a teenager, I of my early 20's abortion. We saw each other through our first disastrous marriages. We were there for one another for the death of a beloved mutual friend.
We were so different. She yearned for drama and change; I reached for and found stability. I lucked into the job I still have, while she bounced from job to job. After my first marriage ended, I swore off men until I met my current husband. After her first marriage ended, she dated many, married and divorced again.
Gradually time and circumstance led us physically apart. We no longer lived in the area of the AA club. She moved across town, we each had a child. She went to work at the Postal Service, first as a temporary holiday employee and then as a permanent employee. For her daughter, not for herself, she grasped for and found stability. But we always knew the other was there, would give whatever the other needed, even if our contact was reduced to a few phone calls and e-mails a year. We were friends, and would always be friends, no matter where our bodies were.
On his 18th birthday, the son she had relinquished used his new adult status to contact her; she called me in grateful tears, so excited to see that baby boy, grown up and ready for college.
In early January 2003 she called again. She had cancer - a rare, aggressive form of liver cancer. Death would come within six months. I don't cry easily, but that night I wept hard, bitter tears: how could she bear it? Leaving behind her 9 year old daughter, the child upon whom she'd lavished a double-dose of pure, loving motherhood. The randomness of life deals so many unfair hands.
There was no known treatment protocol, but she'd been in contact with an oncologist at the Mayo Clinic - the father of that baby boy she'd given away so many years before. Perhaps, an infinitesimal chance, an aggressive course of chemotherapy could knock the cancer back if not cure it. It was a very long shot, and it could also kill her faster - "but hey, I'm a single mother. I gotta try". Taking yet another risk.
After two rounds of chemo her kidneys shut down. She was dying. With the practicality she'd used in learning to balance her checkbook, she went about arranging her death. There was little I could do, but damn, you feel you need to do something, to somehow mend, to fix the tear. I gave her lawyers, some of the finest legal minds in Denver working on her behalf gratis. I made sure that every i was dotted and t was crossed for her daughter's guardianship with a close family friend - her daughter's father had returned to active cocaine addiction and homelessness, and her daughter barely knew my friend's family, and my friend would not have her daughter moved from Colorado and the people she'd known and loved here. I made sure her assets were protected against any claims by creditors of her ex-husbands (who had already been trying to stick her with their bills), that her powers of attorney were in order, her will clear in its intent.
And I gave her my presence - no more making do with phone calls. She talked to me of her fear of dying, how it lessened as it came nearer, yet still gripped her in the middle of the night. Of her joy in her daughter, and her comfort in knowing that she was surrounded by people with different strengths, who would love her and protect her. Of her gratitude in having had the chance to get to know her son, and her son's adoptive mother. We laughed about our early days of sobriety, of our awful choices in husbands the first time we tried marriage. And that she was going to "piss off my mother one more time" by being buried in her favorite soft pink nightgown, rather than in the dress her mother thought "more appropriate". "Hey, it's my funeral, right?"
I last saw her on Sunday, March 30, 2003. Her fine porcelain skin was fragile, her rounded cheeks gaunt. The light was going out. On Monday she went into a hospice facility, drifting in and out of consciousness - and swearing she would not die on April Fools Day. Her will, even as she died, was strong enough to keep that final promise, and she held on to life into the early morning hours of April 2.
I gave the eulogy at her funeral, and spoke, as I do here, of the vagaries of friendship. Beneath my burgundy silk jacket I wore a Grateful Dead t-shirt, purchased at the last show we attended together. And that fall, I planted hyacinth in my garden, a pale pink matching the bloom of her healthy cheeks, and the color of the nightgown in which she was buried.
They are at their height right now, their scent reminding me of the sweetness of friendship, and the love of my friend.
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Peaceful rest, MJ.