Bon voyage, my friend

I came down with the flu as Luanne lay dying. I got sick the same day her sister told me she wasn't expected to live through the previous weekend.

Lu was 59.

She is now a small smiling picture on a 3-by-5-inch memorial card and a jar of ashes somewhere in Phoenix.

She was the oldest girl of nine children born to child-like parents. She raised the younger ones and ate pancakes three times a day when there wasn't anything else to eat. She could not stand pancakes. Her hands and feet stayed cold most of her life after the time her mom forgot to pick her up from school and left her standing until after dark in the snow, wearing a school uniform.

Sometimes being sick makes you crazy.

When I was sick and Luanne was dying, I lay in bed at night holding her hand. It was small and soft and cold, the bones like those in a bird's body, though not as fragile. I kept telling her it was OK to go.

She knew it was OK for her, but not so much for me.

She waited two weeks and four days, without eating. She smoked imaginary cigarettes when she could still move her arms. She saw dead people.

I lay fully clothed under six blankets shivering. I thought I might be trying to give her some of my life.

Ten thousand things you think when someone you love is dying. One is that they are not really dying. Another is that you have more time. This helps you stay wrapped up in potty little fetishes at work instead of getting on an airplane and not knowing what to say or do.

We had not lived close for years but somehow kept thinking the same thoughts. We were not ones to talk on the phone or write letters. We just walked together on earth with nothing between us. She was there and I was there. Now she's not there. I had no idea how unnatural that would feel.

Her son called the morning she heaved and shuddered and left her body. I choked and coughed as if I might leave mine as well. I swallowed myself back in long enough to make a deadline, close out and go eat a meal for the first time in days. Long enough to get home and sit on the side of my bed and sob from the core of my being.

How useless I was, and how utterly and always forgiving was she.

It was only after she died I was able to breathe well enough to go see her. By the time I crossed the desert, she was a slide show, a candle and a half-acre of carefully arranged flowers at the Radiant Church in Surprise, Ariz.

She was two grieving sons; sisters and brothers and families, and one forlorn old friend longing to sit next to her just one more time and marvel at kids these days. To wordlessly share unspeakable secrets. To be on the planet in human form, making it safer for each other than it otherwise was.

Now there is no one that knows me the way she knew me and there never will be again. Had I known then what I know now I probably would have been just as ineffectual; just as wrapped up in things I'm convinced have to be done.

She would have laughed at that.

I wish the end of Lu's life would make me a better person.

Maybe the whole of it did and I just don't know it.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.