If you have been reading my essays you know about my friend, Sandy, and our 43 year friendship that has been by far the most influential and meaningful relationship of my life. Our friendship began when we were fourteen. We were together for the births of each others’ children, our divorces, her mother’s death, both of our weddings, new friendships, and twenty years of building a business.
When I was married at seventeen and life was looking fairly hopeless, Sandy taught me the positive aspects of living as an adult without parents. You could open the bag of chocolate chips and eat as many as you wanted, and make the cookies later. Better yet, you could make the batter and eat it all, and never make cookies. You could eat potato chips as your main course and have chocolate chips for dessert. Chocolate chips were a very important part of the advantages of independence.
She cleaned my filthy two room apartment to save me from the dangers she warned me could kill us all if I ever again left a plate of beans and weanies sitting on the counter for three days. There was botulism, deadly mold and cockroaches. She used enough bleach to kill all of the offenders she had described – and possibly both of us if we hadn’t quickly opened every window. We gagged from the bleach fumes and bent over with laughter at our dual incompetence.
I talked Sandy into coming to work for me when I needed a bookkeeper, not because she had bookkeeping skills, but because she made me so happy when we were together that I knew it would work out. For twenty years we entertained clients with our caustic banter, and kept each others spirits up throughout our darkest times. When she left to care for her ailing mother I dreaded going to work. I cried every morning as I braced myself to greet Sandy’s replacement – a sweet, well-meaning Baptist lady with little sense of humor.
When Sandy’s mother was lying comatose in the hospital, I smuggled in a bottle of wine and we got mildly drunk as we told stories of her mother’s eccentricities when we were teenagers. Sandy’s mother had never had a sense of time. She would sew clothes for Sandy all night long and nap intermittently throughout the day and night, leaving us with a great deal of freedom. We could sneak out of the house at midnight to meet a group of friends without worry. She would greet us at 2 AM as if we had just arrived home from school. We told story after story about her delightful mom, and laughed until we cried. Then we just cried.
Sandy didn’t come back to work after her mother’s death, even though my urging came close to begging. Her unexpected loss had convinced her that she should spend the rest of her own life pursuing the things she had always wanted to do. She loved painting - walls, furniture – anything that needed freshening up with color and perhaps a vine or a happy looking flower that would turn a chair into a work of art.
We vowed to keep our friendship as close as ever by seeing each other every week. We would have lunch, meet for drinks, visit old friends together - all of the things that sustain and strengthen a friendship.
As so often happens when you know you have plenty of time, we began to put off our get-togethers to take care of the more mundane necessities of life – the laundry that had piled up, the business calls that needed to be made. We would put off weekends away, saying we would get to it in the fall or during the holidays. Our lunches became few and far between.
When Sandy was diagnosed with a “very curable” form of colon cancer we worked in our long overdue weekend away, and promised to spend every minute together that we could. Her doctors’ appointments and my work schedule didn’t allow for many of those minutes.
We talked on Tuesday and made plans to have lunch as soon as her negative reaction to the chemo had cleared up – in a few days or so. She died on Thursday from a blood clot to the lung.
There is no time for the weekends, the lunches, the drinks. There is no time.
If either of us had known, we would have rushed to each other and embraced the time we had left. We didn’t know. No one ever knows.
I promised myself that I would not get maudlin or preachy as I told you about Sandy’s death. She would have made a joke and dismissed me as morose. I didn’t know how I would end this on a note positive enough to please her. As I sat, staring at the monitor, at a loss for positive sentiments, my daughter handed me the lyrics to a song she and her campmates at music camp wrote today. They were told to write a song expressing what they would do if they had but one day left to live. Here is the chorus to the song the group of fourteen year olds composed.
I would seize the day
I would throw my cares away.
I would try something new.
I would spend the day with you.
I would seize the day.
We are losing people at a faster rate than we know how to deal with. After your friends are gone then you find yourself scraping every moment that you spent together. Never put anything off when it comes to friendship!
Posted by: Regina | July 17, 2006 at 03:30 PM