Center of Attention (or Chicago)

I recently lost an old friend. I don’t mean he died. I mean he chose to end our friendship.

I would be visiting his town on business and wanted to catch up with him as it had been nearly eight years since we’d seen each other. During that time we’d kept a friendly but loose connection. He’d married, as had I, and the fact that we’d once dated never seemed to be a barrier to friendship.

While ours hadn’t been a very long relationship, he’d helped me through a pivotal point in my adult life and when we split it was with the understanding that we respected and cared deeply for each other and always would. It just wasn’t a love match. There had been lots of post-mortem talking and responsibility-taking and the air between us was well cleared for a healthy friendship. Or so I thought.

As my trip approached, he became vague about when and where he could meet up. I got to town and discovered my work schedule was more demanding than I thought. I also discovered I had no transport and asked if he could come to me. When the times I offered didn’t seem to gel with his schedule, he seemed to shrug it off: oh well, maybe next decade.

I was sad. It felt like seeing me didn’t matter to him enough to go out of his way. I regularly went out of my way to catch up with friends visiting from out of town, rearranging work or home schedules, so it hadn’t seemed like that outrageous of a request to me. That’s what friends do, isn’t it?

I stewed for a minute and decided I needed to tell him how hurt and disappointed I was. I realize this could come as a shock or challenge to some guys, but not this one. He is a great communicator, well-trained in feelings, personal responsibility and the like. Of all people, surely he’d hear the friendship behind my message. Instead, he snapped. He accused me of not respecting his time or family, confusingly of ‘playing the same shit games’ I allegedly played when we were together. He sneered that since I was all about being an independent woman I didn’t need to play helpless; I could figure out how to work around his schedule and come to him. And finally he spat that he was sick of me needing to be the center of his attention. He then unfriended me online and cut off all communication. It was a complete blindside from an evolved guy who’s great at communicating about feelings – from a friend. I was shocked.

It felt like I’d been punched in the stomach and my first thought as I fought my shaking hands was “it’s not safe to communicate upset feelings.” That’s a horrid, bottled-up, WASPy place to be. Did he really think of our relationship in the horrible terms he spewed at me? That by asking him to take time to catch up during my visit I was playing “the same old shit game?” What shit game? I wondered. Why had he never talked to me about this during all our post-relationship time as friends? Had he been holding on to these resentments all these years while I thought we were all clear? This probably saddened me most, knowing that there were still issues from our time together that he still carried with him and to which I was oblivious.

He could have a grain of truth with the independent thing: I am strong and in control at home, true, but when I travel I tend to revert to wanting my hand held if someone I know is around to help. Does being independent mean you can never ask for help?

It was his final comment about the need to be center of attention that resonated with me most. Since we talked maybe once a year, he clearly couldn’t have been referring to the ongoing nature of our friendship. While I hadn’t expected to be center of his attention here – maybe off to the side while I met his wife and kid, sure, part of his attention but not center - it had made me think that that was where he felt said ‘shit games’ were.

I’m aware of a preference for the spotlight. I mean I’m a Leo so there’s that and then obviously I believe my thoughts and beliefs deserve some modicum of attention or I wouldn’t bother writing this blog. It also wasn’t the first time a need to be center of attention came up in the context of relationships. I had been left by a college boyfriend after the same accusation. The same boyfriend had previously run to my dorm room daily and was annoyed when I had to shift my attention from him to go to class or to my shift at the radio station.

More recently, I had dumped a boyfriend for cheating on me – not as soon as I should have either. But what had hurt most, I reflected, was that I had lost my spot as center of his attention. He’d been ultra-devoted when we’d started dating yet after a few months it seemed I was sharing his attention with several prospects. I couldn’t live with that or forgive it.

I had in fact started dating this now-former friend in question after being particularly neglected by a self-absorbed boyfriend. In a period of unsure direction in his life, he had been devoted to me. In the end we saw that we came from worlds that were too different and had life goals too divergent to make a go of it but it had been a restorative relationship for me while we were in it. I had felt like the center of his attention. Now it seemed he regretted that.

As the shaking and pain subsided, I realized it wasn’t me. To actually end a friendship over a travel mix-up and an honest, open communication of feelings was a tad rash; especially for a fairly evolved adult with above-average communication skills. There had to be more to it.

I checked myself with friends and family – was I out of line? I got the same response from several parties: first, that one does go out of one’s way when a friend visits from out of town, and second, that there was something deeper that was triggering his anger, and it was most likely issues with his wife with whom he’d had issues over the years. Since she was one female it would have been more costly to lash out at, I got the shit-storm dumped on me. Disappointing to be sure but oddly comforting.

Upon first read of the vitriolic message I’d panicked that this need of mine was a bad thing, a character flaw. But then I thought again. I do expect to be center of attention to the man I am in a relationship with. I unapologetically think that’s how it should be. I’d hope said man also focuses on a satisfying career, old and new friends, and other interests, but as far as women go, yes, I have no problem admitting I need to be center of that realm of his attention.

When my husband and I first started dating, he went back and read my entire blog, cover to cover as it were. I was touched and honored. Here was a guy who was making me his focus, trying to learn all he could about me and understand the ways in which we might fit together, where my weaknesses were, when I would need my hand held. In turn, I made him the center of my attention.

But that’s serious partnership. I certainly did not have that same level of expectation regarding meeting up with my now-former friend in his town. I just wanted the attention it takes to catch up with someone over a beer and would have gladly given him the same in return. I’m sorry to have lost a friend over a long-ago frustration with me that could have been worked out in conversation. I know at the end of the day it wasn’t about me but whatever else he has going on with his family. Perhaps one day he’ll see that and reopen the lines of friendship.

I responded to his spew-mail saying that if this really was it, I wanted to end by thanking him for who he’d been for my life, pointing out some key contributions he’d made to who I am, and wishing him well. I felt relief that I’d walked away with positivity mixed with sadness knowing I may never see or hear from him again. I don’t agree with his choice but I can’t control it. And that, I think, is the hardest lesson of all.

The Ex Factor

My first engagement did not end well. Which is to say that it did and then it didn’t.

We’d both been afraid to admit we were growing apart but when we went to visit my family for Christmas the built up misery came crashing down on me and I knew I couldn’t get back on the plane to go home with him. What followed was a grey area of ‘are we or aren’t we’ during which we discussed ways we could keep the us alive; make that next step, maybe try Los Angeles, he came out and interviewed in my mountain town even. One week after a tearful profession of his love for me I agreed to give New York another try. The next day he admitted he cheated on me, in my bed. Her name was Erica. Needless to say I never went back to New York and after some quietly subdued negotiations he packed up our shoebox of an apartment and shipped me my stuff.

We kept in touch, always civil. Even friendly at times. I think we were a bit lost without each other. We’d been each other’s first real loves. We’d met on a cruise and been instantly smitten. As we were both vacationing with our families, the various parents and siblings met and it was like six months of dating condensed into a week. He flew out to visit me in California a month later. Two months after that I visited him in New York. We looked at apartments and I moved out that Spring.

We had originally planned to marry a year to the day that we met. We started looking at wedding cruises, I found a dress, picked out invitations, a caterer. But even though we pressed on, he never gave me a ring. I started to feel false about the whole thing as every woman I mentioned my wedding plans to inevitably looked at my finger and then I had to explain. It wasn’t really a money thing although he claimed it was. His sister in law had given us a diamond and his best friend was the scion of a diamond district jeweler. A ring would not have been difficult. I lost it when I discovered charges on his credit card to a strip club the day after the last money excuse. He’d left the statement open on my book and in a way I think he wanted me to find it. To see what was real for him.Still by the end, he’d been my best friend for three years and it hurt to just let go of that. I sat in the snow outside my mother’s house and cried my eyes out.

At the time I never thought it would be so long before I found my next Mr. Right.
As time passed we kept up a friendly contact. Loosely at least. He eventually started dating someone and moved to LA with her. When I decided to move to LA for the movie business he was supportive. Said he couldn’t wait for me to meet his girl, that I’d really like her. As several of my best friends were next girlfriends of exes I had no doubt I would. He even offered me help in finding a job when I landed. I was happy to have at least one trusted face in the sea of unkept promises that is LA.

But then I did land. He didn’t return my emails. Then he didn’t return my calls. I left an angry message with his assistant that his ex-fiance wanted to speak with him. I wasn’t just some acquaintance fluff to be brushed aside. I had been engaged to this man. Did not that confer a certain status of intimacy with him? Of entitlement to connection?

And then it dawned on me. It must have been her. She must have been uncomfortable with the idea of a friendly ex being back in his life. I got it and I felt for her. I wished I could tell her I was no threat but he’d have to do that. I wrote him a heartfelt letter saying I was sorry for not having gotten the clue earlier and understanding her point of view but hoping she’d understand. I really did need his help after all. I was running out of savings and still had no job on the horizon.

It was his response that was the truest moment of our break-up. Two years later. He was clearly upset with me and I don’t know if it was because I’d seen the uncomfortable truth of the matter or if he was frustrated with her attitude toward me and was taking it out on me, or if, like so many in Tinseltown, he was only paying me lip-service about being friends and helping me get a toehold here. Either way his tone was terse and cold. He informed me that I was wrong about his beloved and had no right to comment on the matter. He told me he had other priorities in life now and I was not one of them. I sat back from the keyboard stunned and hurt. We were broken up now for real and true.

I never responded to his email and have never spoken to him since.

Now a decade since our breakup and my snowy cry I have returned to the state of engagement. And now the shoe is on the other foot. My fiancé has an ex who is out here and lonely and looking for help getting her toehold. I should be inclined to be generous but I find I’m not. Not that I have any fear of him going back to her or her turning his head. Trust me when I say it is not possible. But I find her desperation repugnant. Like a fly circling our calm spring day. She is a nuisance I don’t want to deal with and he’s happy to use my irritation as his buttress for his No.

I’ll never know what really went on between my ex and his next regarding my presence in LA. But at least now I understand the state he was in when I came beseeching. Despite the love he once had for me and the promises once made, a new love simply doesn’t leave room. You can only create one life at a time and by rights it’s the one you’re creating together.

I’ve been so angry at him for so many years. I’ve laughed at my cousin when she says she’s seen him at work things and he’s asked after me. He hates me, clearly, I counter. If he’d cared he could have lifted a finger. Since the day of his last email I’ve held a big ‘screw you too’ in the space in my heart where his love once lived. Now I see I was off base. For him it was never hate. It was just the view from a different state.

In Honor Of

We are in the midst of a strange phase it seems. I have lost more friends, had friends who've lost someone, or heard crazy stories about death and loss in the last few months than I can ever recall. I just found out that the girl who replaced me at my big Hollywood Studio job died falling out a window at the Cannes Film Festival. I am not sure what's going on but I hope it stops now.

As Monday is the jewish holiday of Shavout, I wanted to take a post to remember my friend Aidel and the strange and special Shavout I spent with her. This post originally appeared after her death in January of 06.

A Guardian Butterfly

Part of moving to a big city like L.A. is having a more diverse community, meeting people you just wouldn’t have access to at home. People besides Brad Pitt. I have lived in a lot of places and have met all kinds of people. Even living in New York and being engaged to a Jewish man did not prepare me for Aidel.

During my first month here, I spent one of my pre-employment days of leisure at the DMV switching my license and my plates to the California variety. I was thumbing through a friend’s script in the waiting area when a soft voice at my side asked “what’s that?” Surprised to meet someone in this town who didn’t recognize a script at fifty paces, I spent the next two hours discussing life with this tiny, orthodox Jewish Israeli woman with the impish glint in her eyes.

Only a few years older than me, she told me about her four children and her American husband. She told me about the crazy way her parents had met in London high society and fled to Israel during the war. She told me about some cousin or other that was supposedly a big deal producer in town.For some reason I felt completely at home with her. I told her about everything. She seemed genuinely delighted to get inside my life and not in the “what can you do for me?” way of LA. But in the way a child listens to you read a story because you are giving her access to a new world.

After that day at the DMV, we’d meet every month or so and sit and talk. It was always at her house.“I need time with my friend,” she’d shoo her kids out of the room.It was early in these meetings that I began to realize Aidel was different from me in ways other than her Jewishness. I’d tell her I’d spoken with my mom about my latest script idea and she’d tell me that my mother was about to go through a big change and that she’d make a move that would surprise us. Later that year my mom went through a divorce, radiation, and then moved to New York City, a place she’d professed too big a fear of to visit when I’d lived there just a few years earlier.

I hate to use the word ‘psychic,’ especially in conjunction with the word ‘friend’ as that conjures up visions of Dionne Warwick. Later, when I finally met her sister, she referred to it as Aidel’s gift. Whatever it was, it was at times unsettling and always accurate.Usually the first thing she’d ask me about was my love life. I had told her about my Jewish ex, the Agent Man, and my time in New York.“I was his shickza” I laughed.Her face clouded. “Don’t use that word. It’s not kind.” For as much as I’d learned about Judaism, I knew so little about Jewishness.

I remember later reporting excitedly to her about a man I was dating. He was European - always a source of points with me - and from a very rigidly ethical background.She sighed and without ceremony said “No, he’s not the one for you.”I sputtered and protested that yes, I thought he was. She calmly waited until I was done and then proceeded to tell me why he wasn’t the right one.“He doesn’t appreciate your humor or your sense of life.”I got quiet and we talked about other things. I felt like a petulant teenager.

I stopped calling or coming by so often. I told myself it was because I felt like such an outsider in her world and I didn’t want to upset things by calling on a day I didn’t know was a Jewish holiday or come by not dressed conservatively enough. But really, I didn’t want her to be right anymore.One day this boyfriend and I were driving and, as usual, I was singing along to every song and doing goofy car-dance moves. I thought it would make him laugh. My sister and I always cracked each other up this way. Instead, he reached over and slammed the radio off. I froze and heard Aidel’s voice in my head. He may as well have told me to stop being me. The relationship held on for a few more months but I think I knew it was over right then. I called Aidel and she told me she couldn’t see me, she was sick.

It was a while before she called me again. Finally, she was well enough and wanted to see me. I came over and told her she’d been right about the boyfriend. She smiled quietly. She was bony and rail thin and I worried my hug hurt her. She never spoke to me of cancer. For as much as she wanted to delve into my life, it seemed she felt there were parts of hers she needed to keep from me. She dodged my questions after her well-being and asked about my life. I said my sister had met a guy. Aidel told me she’d move somewhere hot. A week later, my sister called to tell me she was moving to Arizona for this guy.

I saw Aidel less after that. It depended if she was well enough. I would never have minded to see her in any health but I think it embarrassed her to be seen so frail when she’d been so vivacious. She never wanted to need help.

She called me one Monday. She needed to go to her doctor. It was a Jewish holiday: Shavuot. This meant no one but a non-Jew could drive her. When I pulled up to the door, I was greeted by looks of distrust by the neighbors. It had only been about a month since I’d last seen her but the Aidel that emerged from the building made my voice catch in my throat. Her husband did not smile at me as he helped her into my low sports car. I wondered if it was from his own distress watching his wife waste away or the same distrust of outsiders I’d read on the neighbors’ faces.

As we drove to her doctor’s clinic she explained that they’d disagreed about her even going to the doctor or riding in a car on the holiday but she felt her life was more important than the holiday. God would understand. I cursed my sport suspension which jounced her birdlike body over every bump.

“It’s fine,” she soothed, “with the morphine I don’t feel it.”

She would not let me carry her up the stairs to the clinic though she could not have weighed more than eighty-five pounds. She insisted she could do it herself. I steadied her and she did a sideways shuffle up the wheelchair ramp since she couldn’t get her legs to lift forwards. I watched them inject her with an experimental stem cell potion. After, she seemed to walk more steadily, clinging to my arm as we made our way back to the car.

At this point in our friendship, I saw no point in sugar-coating anything.

“Are you scared to die?”

“No.”

“Are your kids scared?”

“They are prepared.”

There was so much I wanted to understand about her life and her spirituality. So much I wanted to apologize for in my absences. How could I tell her how much I valued her when I’d never really shown it?

“Any new men?” she asked as her head lolled on my passenger seat.

“No.” Then I told her about letting go of my delusions with the Director.

“He’s British,” she smiled, “and tall, yes?”

“Yes, 6’4”

I held my breath. I hadn’t wanted to bring him up. I didn’t want to have her tell me what I already knew: move on.

“He is the one for you. It will be a good life together. Just give him space”

My vision blurred and I had to focus on gripping the steering wheel. A few months before, that news would have been welcome but now it was like a punch in the stomach. Dreaming of him had suffocated me. Was I supposed to open back up to that hope and hurt? I concentrated on the road.We arrived at her door and I wanted to tell her I loved her. But I didn’t. She brought me inside and insisted on peeling me a grapefruit for helping her. I cried all the way back to work.

The next phone call I got was not from Aidel. A month later I turned my phone on as my flight from New York landed. I’d been visiting my mom in her improbable new life. A voice I didn’t know told me that Aidel had passed away and there was a memorial that night if I could make it.

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed a large scarf out of my suitcase and wrapped it around my head and shoulders. I stood in the back of the Yeshiva and listened to the soothing sounds of the Hebrew prayers. I really had believed that she would get better and always be there to talk to as I grew my Hollywood life. I was in shock.

Later, a woman I’d met at the memorial called to tell me when the family was planning to sit Shiva. I panicked and called all my Jewish friends. What do I bring? What do I wear? How do I act at an orthodox Shiva? Even my least reformed Jewish friend didn’t know. I worried I’d offend the family by showing up as an outsider. Then I decided I had to go just out of love for Aidel.

The only death ritual I know is the Catholic wake where everyone needs to eat. I bring a bag of fresh fruit with me, the only thing I can be sure is kosher. I enter their modest house and find the men and women gathered in separate rooms. I sit with the women, awkwardly holding my fruit until someone takes it and puts it on a table.We are silent for a while until Aidel’s sister sits on the couch facing me. She looks at me with the same wide grey eyes as Aidel; still and glinting at the same time. I introduce myself.

“Oh, you are Heidi.”

She explains to me that when they asked Aidel to make a list of who she wanted at her Shiva, mine was the first name she had said. Me. Why? What had I given her? Not half of what she had given me. I breathe through my mouth to keep from crying.

We sit for a while longer before another friend prompts Aidel’s oldest, a twelve year old daughter, to ask me about her mother. The girl takes up a pad and pen.“I’m making a memory book,” she explains. She looks like she’s tired of people waiting for her tears.

I tell her about how I’d met her mother in the DMV and the unique friendship she’d brought to my life.I talk about Aidel always lending me books she wanted me to read. Most had been about Jewish history. She’d been torn about lending me one because “the narrator had some anger at the Germans he escaped from.” She knew I had a German background.

“I think he had a right to be angry,” I’d told her.

Aidel had lent me the book, laughing about all the Germans in her life now and how she never would have imagined she would have Germans as friends; people who helped her family’s well-being rather than hurt it.The women laugh as I come to a stop. How could I explain to this girl what her mother had given me? How Aidel’s gift terrified me, challenged me and thrilled me all at once? Her earnest grey eyes fix on me, pen poised.

“She was a butterfly,” I finally say. “She was a beautiful soul that flew into my life for little while.”

She nods and writes. How can I tell her I feel just as lost without her mother as she does?

Her sister watches me watching Aidel’s daughter write.“Did you know her Hebrew name?”I shake my head.“Schlomit,” the sister tells me. “It means ‘Complete’.”I start crying.

As the months have passed I have thought of Aidel on nearly a daily basis. I wonder how her family is managing without her. No doubt they’ve been embraced by their community and though they surely miss her, they are managing. Selfishly, I wonder how Aidel could have left me with so many questions unanswered. The most burning of them: how could she have been wrong about the Director? I tell myself the morphine must have scrambled her reception.

Sometimes I talk to her. I ask her if she sees things I see. I tell her I miss her. I ask her what I should do about whatever is going on today. Last night, I watched a fluffy love story where the lovers loved passionately but had to go through trials of fire to finally be together. It was silly overall but I was inspired by the main idea of a love like that…that does not alter when it alteration finds. Later, I turned off my bedside lamp and asked Aidel if she was there. I asked her what fires I have to go through to find that love. In the next moment I heard a faint but clear whisper:

“You are burning now.”

Leaving Home

This is for the empty bar stool in Hendo's corner.

And the pint of Stella that sits there.

RIP Nuala

2008 is shaping up to be the year of losing amazing people. First my friend Jon and now Nuala O'Faolain. I stumbled across Nuala's work by accident and fell in love with her frank, enchanting prose. She was known as a feminist and rabble rouser in Ireland - a country where one just doesn't talk about certain things. (My ancestors must be rolling over in their graves at this blog.)

Her book "Are You Somebody?" was sparked when a stranger ran into her on a Dublin street and thought she might have been a celebrity. He asked her the titular question and it set her off on an exploration of that for herself. Who are we anyway? Her novel "My Dream of You" is a rich and lyrical journey towards self-acceptance.

Check out all her works. And if you're feeling you need to do something nice today, donate to a cancer research fund. Nuala did not have a happy life but she gave her heart in her writing. Nuala, here's hoping the rains fall softly on your fields in the next world. Thank you for everything.

The Drugs Don't Work

“Who would want to take this on?” Jon shrugged as if it were a foregone conclusion that the idea of a girl wanting to date him was absurd.

“You are being completely selfish.”

Our friends from the bar gasped at me. How dare I talk to the guy with cancer that way?

“No, you are. Just ‘cause you think you know your expiration date. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

Jon had been given a six-month diagnosis. Five years before.

The Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work” was on the stereo. A song about watching a beloved friend die. I gracelessly forwarded to the next song.

“I mean I’d rather be with a great guy like you for six weeks than with some schmuck for sixty years.” I’d meant it as a hypothetical in the moment. And it was true. All of it. He was being selfish not sharing himself with someone. He was one of the most extraordinary men I knew. And I did want to be with someone great. Like him. But him?

I met Jon a year earlier when my dot com went bust and I started waiting tables with all the other over-educated who got hit in the post 9-11 upheaval. I thought working at the local Irish pub would give me – newly single – a safe place to hang out and meet people. Jon was a regular. He wasn’t hot, or tall, or even age-appropriate. He was just always there with his caustic wit at the end of the bar. I thought it was odd that someone so young could spend all his days at a bar but I didn’t wonder why.

Jon organized the music for the pub and he and his brothers had a band that would play on our small stage from time to time. My favorite though was Sunday afternoons. Jon would bring a song book and his acoustic and we’d all loll around on the back patio of the bar picking songs for him to play and us to sing.

At some point, I realized he was brilliant. One of the most intelligent people I’d ever met. It must have been around then that he made a song mine. “There She Goes” by the La's. I’d ask him to sing it and he always did, his bright tenor unfailingly hitting the chorus high notes.

It must have been not long after that that I’d found out. Wendy, the bartender, was on a break with me in the back alley.

“I’m so relieved to hear his new treatment’s going well. Think they’re onto something.”

“Whose treatment?”

“Jon’s cancer.” She must have seen the stricken look on my face. “You didn’t know? Everyone knows. It’s not like it’s a secret.” His long days at the bar made sense.

She finished her cigarette and went back in. I bent double and hugged my knees. How could this amazing man have cancer? How could this friend of mine be dying? Why did this news hurt so much? I realized then that I loved him. I just didn’t know how. I mean, he was fifteen years my senior. Shorter than me. A bit pudgy. Nothing I said I was looking for in a mate. So maybe it wasn’t romantic love. But it wasn’t like an older brother either. I stared at the pavement and ached.

Over the next year we were part of the same circle. I wanted to be close to him but I thought he’d laugh at me – just a silly girl. When I had an art gallery opening, he charged in, swept over my pieces with one glance, pointed at one and handed me his credit card. “You can bring it and the card to me later at the pub.” And he was gone again. At the time, I think that was as much love as he could allow himself.

I made my decision to move to LA and a few nights before my departure, Jon and a few friends from the bar were sitting around my packed-up living room. And there he sat, denying wanting any more love in his life than he already had. It was clear that the opposite was true but he would never admit it. I packed my u-Haul and left.

In LA I wrote my first screenplay about him. It was trite and melodramatic. About an artist who finally opens himself to love although he’s dying. Home on my first visit, I found Jon in the bar and told him about it. I felt silly offering him this tribute. He seemed unsure of how to take it. I promised to let him read it but I never sent it. I couldn’t bear to disappoint him with my first thin effort. I didn’t know what to say about the fact that in my script, his character died.

The years went by and Jon had ups and downs but more or less kept up his fight. He started an annual benefit concert at the bar for cancer research. I couldn’t afford a plane ticket but I promised to come next year.

He and his brothers recorded and album called “The Big C” about his experience living with cancer. Not satisfied with that, he created an in-home editing suite and made a documentary about people dealing with cancer called “The Cancer Journey.” Proceeds from both went to cancer research.

I stopped going home so much as more of my family moved away. My email contact with Jon was spotty at best. I always wanted to matter to him more than I did. I was always scared somewhere he’d say “Why does this girl keep writing me? Why does she think we’re such good friends?” I didn’t want to bother him.

Last month I went home to help my mom pack her house up for sale. I got a few hours’ break from the boxes to go see Jon. He wasn’t well enough to meet me at the bar. Something about a treatment he’d had that morning. So I went to his house.

He was on permanent oxygen assist now. But the sores he’d had on my last visit had healed and his eyes were bright and his hair thick and brown. I told him he looked good. He did.

“Hair. It’s like some sick consolation prize with cancer,” he quipped. He told me that it was in his lungs and his brain now.

He went to his room for pills and I looked around. Pictures of him when he was young, holding a baby nephew, smiling with his brothers – never with a woman, nothing romantic. It dawned on me I never knew if he’d had a great love. A marriage. Kids. Had be been left? Anything. I knew so little. He shuffled back into the room.

“Snooping around on me, eh?”

I wanted to know everything.

“Jon, is there anyone, you know, here with you?”

He talked about his brother across town and otherwise evaded the question. It ate at me that no one was there with him full-time taking care of him. We kept chatting about our lives.

After half an hour he sighed.

“Time for me to go?”

He nodded wearily. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be back in September for my cousin’s wedding. I’ll see you then… if not before.”

He nodded and opened his arms to hug me.

I squeezed him as hard as I dared. “I love you, Jon.” I still didn’t know what it meant but I’d said it.

“I love you too.”

I cried all the way back to my mom’s house.

It gnawed at me that he was alone. I felt a pang in my heart that I couldn’t just let this be. I got home and started working it out: Would he be OK with my dog in the house too? What about my cat? My school year was almost over and I could finish teaching and go spend the summer with him and after that we’d see. My professional life wasn’t working anyway so what was I really giving up? I thought all these things but was afraid to tell him. What if he rejected me? What if he didn’t want help and I was just being over-dramatic? What if I was just running away from my own failure? Was that still altruistic? Did I just have a Florence Nightingale fixation? What if taking care of someone dying of cancer was really hard?

For two weeks I tried to work all this out on my own and I finally gave up. I emailed Jon. I said I knew it was a crazy idea but I hated the thought of him alone and I didn’t know if me helping him was a terrible idea nor did I know how to work out all the logistics but there were my thoughts and he was welcome to them.

A day passed. Then: an email that he was trying to digest everything I said. I said I knew it was a crazy idea and not to worry. I comforted myself by talking to my friend Kim. She had just lost a friend to cancer and she said to help someone you care about is never crazy.

He emailed me back that he’d kept the art piece of mine in his room. It was a black and white photo of a rock jetty in Ireland reaching out to an empty, bright sea. He told me it gave him peace to look at it.

The next day another email came. He said he was scared half to death by the whole thing. The idea of opening himself up to another person. Being vulnerable. And he was ready. Maybe, he suggested, I could come and just hang out with him for a week or two and we’d see how things went. That let us both off the hook.

I wrote back that I was leaving town for the weekend but I couldn’t wait to talk more about it with him on Monday.

The next morning Bridget, the pub manager, called. My heart thudded heavy. My ears rang and I missed most of the details. Just that he’d passed away in the night.

It was Coachella Music Festival weekend and there were plans. I hung up, cried for a while and we went to the concert. That evening, the Verve came on for their set. When they hit the opening chords of “The Drugs Don’t Work” I sobbed and thanked goodness it was dark already. A few verses in I suddenly remembered “There She Goes” and I could only hear Jon’s voice singing it to me. What would I do the next time I heard it? I clamped my hand over my mouth and sank to the grass in the swaying crowd.

I wept for the loss of a friend and the loss of what that time would have been like. It was like I was finally going to get to know someone I’d made up in my writing and my mind forever - this amazing, beautiful man. I cried for the five years we’d known each other that could have been so much more than the six weeks I’d scolded him with before I moved to LA. I still don’t understand if it was romantic or platonic love. It was just love. Is.

As I sat crouched on the dark grass listening to the Verve, something else hit me. His unwillingness to let love in was what I’d harassed him for that night before I left. His last message to me was that he was finally willing to be open, as much as it scared him, he was ready. Maybe that was the last thing his soul needed to do here.

It seems Jon had gone to the pub after he’d finished emailing. It was the first time in a while he’d been up for it and no doubt everyone was glad to see him. He’d had a few beers with the crew there. Early in the evening, he walked out to his car in the alley and had a seizure. Someone found him and called the paramedics but they were never able to revive him. He died in the hospital that night.

The thought of spending a few weeks with him next month never quite had seemed real to me. Now it fades to another scene in a script. I am grateful that he went quickly and painlessly after being surrounded by friends who love him. I am so thankful I said ‘I love you’ while I had the chance. I am so honored that his life touched mine for a while. I am so sorry that I didn’t give more.

Miss you, Jon.

love, h

Scraping the Foundations

I started with the cabinet in my bathroom. I went through my house, methodically and slowly. Room by room, drawer by drawer, thing by thing. And I got rid of everything I could; all the expired goods, the unworn clothes, the unread books. All the unnecessary furniture, the well-intentioned gifts, the once-critical collectibles. Stuck in a darker place than I have been in a long time, I was at a loss on how to manage my days. So I cleaned.

I didn’t know if it was to prepare to move or to prepare a new work surface for living. I thought about calling my mom to tell her I was considering moving back home. But then I thought I couldn’t take her relentless optimism about my life here.

I worked my way into a closet and the phone rang. Naturally, it was her.

“Guess what I grabbed from the old house last week,” she gushed.

We’d just shut down and sold her house of ten years. We’d spent an afternoon tersly shoving boxes at each other, crying for the past – and crying we were laughing so hard reading my sister’s first grade stories and plays. I read them aloud in her phonetic seven-year old spelling and sounded like Borat.

Like me, my sister came to her writing early, left it and only came back to it recently.

“I didn’t think we were both allowed to be writers and that was your thing. Our brother did art so I couldn’t do that,” she’d explained.

“So you became a dancer instead,” I concluded. I understood how she felt. After a thirteen-year swim career, I’d quit the team when her times got too close to mine. We both agreed we couldn’t be great in the same arena.

We’d both been infected by that thinking for far too long. Now with me talking of leaving LA, she wonders what will become of our sitcom we are developing together. I think maybe it’s time for me to step aside for her to be the writer now. After all, I came here because I wanted to be able to say I’d given it a shot. I didn’t want to go on living a small life and wondering what might have been if I’d only tried. Well, I’ve given it a shot and it hasn’t turned out. So far.

Then - back to scene - I’m sorting my closet and mom calls.

I tell her, yes, I know she saved some of my sister’s elementary school writing from the trash heap. The stuff we’d been reading and laughing about.

“No, no. Well, yes. But there was yours too.”

I haven’t told her about my current personal distress, what I am considering or what I’m in the middle of doing.

“You know what? You’ve got to never give up on your writing. Listen to this…” and she proceeds to read me my elementary school teachers’ comments on various stories I’d written. “Heidi, even then…” She concludes.

How does she do that? She doesn’t read my blog. She hadn’t talked to my sister. She had in no way been told that I was rifling through my belongings considering chucking this whole Tinseltown life and moving home where life would be “easier.” Yet here she was, answering the unasked question. Like a perfect Act Two turning point. Just when you thought all was lost for our heroine…

OK so it’s cheesy and overly sentimental. But so like life. And movies.

I grunt but otherwise don’t really acknowledge what she’s said.

“What are you up to?”

“Cleaning…” I find a stash of mittens. I’d need these back home in the mountains.

“Oh. Well I just thought you’d want to remember what Mrs. Walsh said about your writing when you were eight. I’m so glad you’re out there, honey. It’s meant to be and it was from first grade.”

My mother, the deus ex machina.

I can’t say my faith is restored but I do know that sometimes you’ve got to go on other people’s perceptions of you when your own becomes dimmed. So for now, I’m just holding onto the fact that I don’t want to have to wear mittens in May. At least not this year.

Cosmos

“Billions and billions and billions of stars…”

Carl Sagan’s oddly comforting voice introduced his weekly PBS show. I sat watching with my step father. Sometimes it was boring to me. I was more excited about Knight Rider coming on later that night. But I sensed that it was important to watch if it was something John valued. I sat and we traveled through the stars.

The unseasonably cold wind whips a snowflake across my cheek and I snap back to the present. John’s been dead for ten years. I’m standing in our old drive-way as my mother, sister and I pack up the house we’ve been renting out to a stranger for the last five years.

John’s old hardcover copy of “Cosmos” sits on the garage sale table and I keep staring at it. I have been pushing my mother hard all morning to let go of things. Stop hording and move on. It’s just stuff. I’m wondering if I should grab the book.

I can remember it as far back as I remember John. It sat on the top tier of the built-in book shelves by his desk. “Cosmos” was part of the set of the movie of my life as long as it took place in that house.

It sat there as John taught me how to draw and write. It was there when my sister and I made up silly games running back and forth in front of the shelves. It witnessed the arguments, the nights John slept on the couch in front of the shelves. It saw me and Ted pretend to fall asleep on the couch so we could spend the night together without admitting we actually liked each other.

“Do you remember dad always watching this show?” I ask my sister as I cradle the book in my arms. I remember how fiercely we fought over his stuff when he died. A part of me wants her to fight me for this. I want this object to matter.

She grunts vaguely and continues sorting stuff. Granted the book was on a high shelf back then and she was much shorter. It’s a big, heavy book. I put it back on the sale table as neighbors and sale-cruisers mill around.

John’s “Cosmos” doesn’t sell. The sale pile becomes the Goodwill pile - except not really for Goodwill. For the Vietnam Vets Association since John was one. We are locking up the house to leave it for the last time. The house sale closes tomorrow and we won’t come back here again. The garbage truck will take what’s left tomorrow.

Will I regret not taking this book with me? I stare at it for a long minute. Then I close the garage. I continue to think about the book with its tattered cover as I fly home, back to the sun. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. It was John’s after all. I imagine it being chucked into the donations truck with all our other old left-behind things. Things that used to matter to one or another of us.

I get home and sit with the books of John’s that I do have. The ones I took when we divided his stuff up after his death ten years ago. I wonder why my sister and I fought over some of them as though we could hold onto him through his things. We both had to have this one or that one. And now we just give them away.

I pull off my shoes and walk past my own book shelves filled with my books and John’s. The memories are not lodged inside them.

RIP

Norman Mailer

Thanks for all the words.

Your Task For Today

Jon was sitting in my living room in my little cottage house with the mountain view. Over the last few months he’d become a better friend of mine. In truth I adored him. An amazing guitarist with a biting wit and an encyclopedic knowledge of seemingly everything, he was easily the most intelligent man I’d ever met.

“You’re being a selfish jerk,” I told him.

Across the couch, Shevaun’s shot warning looks at me: don’t talk to the guy with terminal cancer like that!

“I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Just because you THINK you know when you’re going to go, you shut yourself down from love?”

Jon shrugged. He didn’t see anyone wanting to be with someone with the Big C. “Who would take that on?”

“I would. I’d rather be with you for six weeks than with some schmo for sixty years.” It was the truth. I’d never really thought of Jon like that. But honestly, if given the chance at a relationship with him I would have taken it. He’s that great of a guy.

I looked forward the Sunday afternoon sing-a-longs at the Irish bar where I worked and where he was a regular. I loved to banter with him in my downtime or listen to him eviscerate debate opponents. On Sundays, he’d bring his guitar and a song book. We’d all get tipsy and sing and laugh. My song was always "There She Goes" by the Las. He and his brothers had a band that played each week on our small stage. Every so often, they'd play my song too.

For a while I ran an art gallery with some friends and Jon came to one of our openings where I was exhibiting some of my own photographs. He breezed in, glanced around, pointed to one of my favorite shots and handed me a credit card.

“Taking a break from band practice,” he shrugged. He tilted his head at the print. “I’ll pick it up later from the bar.” And he was gone as quickly as he came.

I left him back home a long time ago and moved out to Tinseltown to seek my fame and fortune. But I never got Jon out of my head. He was one of those extraordinary human beings that we all get just a few of in our lifetimes.

The first script I ever wrote was about him. It was a drama about an artist diagnosed with terminal cancer who rediscovers the possibility of love with a waitress who doesn’t believe in the stuff. Like all first scripts, it needs a lot of work. I never had the guts to show it to Jon, let alone tell him he inspired it. But he did.

Five years later, I’m proud to say Jon is still inspiring. Talk about opening yourself up to life. This is a man who kept playing his guitar even when the cancer drugs so numbed his fingers that he had to tape the pick to them to keep from dropping it. When other cancer drugs made his fingers split open, he relearned guitar with band-aid-covered fingers. This is a man who will not be stopped. At least he’ll go down strumming.

His band just put out a CD to benefit cancer research. A documentary is forthcoming as well. Do one good thing today and go buy it.

The Last Time Around

I was shot down over the Pacific.

When I hit the blue water it was over in an instant. I knew it would be and it somehow seemed right. Like it was supposed to end that way. I don’t remember who I left behind but I know I was where I wanted to be. Not for some political agenda but for my own journey. I loved to fly.

Sometimes it comes to me now. In flashes. But not visuals. More like sensory flashes. Driving down Sunset early in the morning when the curves draw me in and the cylinders are clicking. How I can almost see around the corners. I’ve always driven with blind, animal instinct. Like flying. It’s where I’m most at ease. In the machine. Most in control and also most zened out and let go.

I was in an air museum last month. There to see a Da Vinci exhibit but drawn as always to the World War Two planes. Admiring a P51D Mustang. Always been my favorite. Always felt like I have an inherent right to climb up into that cockpit – though I never have. A bright-eyed docent struck up a conversation with me. He was 82. “Flyboy” said his blue cap. His clear, aqua eyes bored into me past this body. He sought me out in between helping tourists. We wandered among Da Vinci’s machines talking about flying for the short winter afternoon. I was completely at ease with him. Like I’d missed him. I knew him.

It began to make sense. My affinity for these beautiful machines – a harmony of engineering and design. My fearless, intuitive driving. The calm knowledge that I won’t be going out that way because I already have. I am curious to know if I can find the life of that young boy, the friend of the aqua-eyed docent. I want to know who I was.

I was shot down over the Pacific. It was a sunny day. Morning. I was perfectly at ease. It fit, like the closing of a chapter. I am still in my Mustang at the bottom of the ocean. Home for coral and flying fish.

On the Tenth Anniversary

When I was five, my mother married my stepfather, John, a quiet, artistic man. The first man she’d dated that I hadn’t chased out of the house.

I sometimes look at skittish dogs and I smile and hold their gaze. They sense they can trust me; I love them just because, even though I don’t know them. They come over and let me pet them. I think John had this same animal ken with me; a defensive, hard little kid.

That first week we started our new family unit, I climbed into his lap in our new house and asked:

“What do I call you?”

“Whatever feels right to you,” he responded in his even tone.

“OK. I’ll call you dad.” I scooted off to play with my toy cars

My mom tells me she saw his eyes well up before he went to make a ham sandwich.

John had his office in the basement of that house where we would grow up. He’d stand at his drafting table late into the night pasting up ads and product campaigns the old fashioned way.

He was always creating. I’d find him typing away at our brand new Commodore 64. Or at his workbench in the garage. His work always had a certain wry sense of humor. Once he decided to make a shrine to the ham sandwich. For years, an embalmed bun with meat sat in an airtight, glass-fronted, wooden box in a place of honor in the living room.

From John I learned my craft. I learned to sit in a room full of people and watch them reveal themselves. I learned the value of the well-placed witty remark. I learned not to give my dignity away by writing “please love me” letters to the boy who’d broken my heart one summer.

Though it’s technically my sister’s, I currently have custody of what I consider to be one of his greatest works. A monument to his life philosophy.

“What the heck is that?” Is the most common reaction it elicits followed by “Why do you have a giant, white painting?”

Mom was creating a white and off-white living room and wanted a painting to match. So John, a classically trained artist, finished painting the fireplace mantle and took the house paints into the garage. He laid a big, old, much-painted canvas on the floor, set his beer can on it and slapped interior semi-gloss all over it.

“It matches,” he told her as he hung it in the living room the next day. She thought it very avant garde.

He had a way of chuckling under his breath. I know in his way he teased any of us who took it seriously. Trying to understand the painting was like trying to understand him. Was it full of serious content or a joke?

It’s only the people who bother to look, who spend time with it, that begin to see everything. There are tones in the white, textures. Some tell me they see faces, some see city skylines. And they are all there. All that and less.

I usually just let it ride when someone asks me about the painting. Let them come to their own conclusions. That’s what John did. I’m sure he felt criticism of it only belied the artistic ignorance of the speaker. Or their pretentiousness. But sometimes, when comments feel derisive, they hook me and then I play the death card.

“My step-dad painted it," I explain, "…before he died.”

Then the critic squirms: the uncomfortable shifts, the backpedaling, the apologies. It makes me laugh when they then come up with an ad hoc compliment. I think John would laugh too. But then I think maybe he knew it was really about nothing, a giant white painting, no need to compliment or analyze. Maybe he’d be laughing at me for caring so much. Maybe it was the joke he played on all of us.

Of the three of us I was the only child not his blood. Yet in some ways I feel I got the best of him. My sister whom he had with my mom was just a little kid. I’m not sure if he knew how to relate to my brother whom he brought from his first marriage. I was new to him and I’d like to think he recognized a kindred spirit. Yet in death, I am the one with the least claim on him. People don’t get it. They say he was just my step-dad so of course my brother and sister are entitled to more. Not that he had much to leave us. But he shaped such a large part of who I am. He was an equal parent to me just like my own father or my mother.

“Yeah but you still have a dad, they don’t,” is the counter.

Of course that’s true. But does that lessen my loss?

How can we determine who is entitled to grieve the most?

Fortunately, that is a question most dealt without outside our family. Or in my own heart. Among my siblings, we never use the words step or half. For now, I study the painting until my sister gets a permanent home or for as long as she lets me keep it. My favorite part is the ring from his beer can. I trace my fingers around the circle raised in the paint wondering if he sees me and still laughs with that under-toned chuckle. The one I hear in my brother’s voice now.

I can’t believe it’s been ten years. I miss you, dad.

A Guardian Butterfly

Part of moving to a big city like L.A. is having a more diverse community, meeting people you just wouldn’t have access to at home. People besides Brad Pitt. I have lived in a lot of places and have met all kinds of people. Even living in New York and being engaged to a Jewish man did not prepare me for Aidel.

During my first month here, I spent one of my pre-employment days of leisure at the DMV switching my license and my plates to the California variety. I was thumbing through a friend’s script in the waiting area when a soft voice at my side asked “what’s that?” Surprised to meet someone in this town who didn’t recognize a script at fifty paces, I spent the next two hours discussing life with this tiny, orthodox Jewish Israeli woman with the impish glint in her eyes.

Only a few years older than me, she told me about her four children and her American husband. She told me about the crazy way her parents had met in London high society and fled to Israel during the war. She told me about some cousin or other that was supposedly a big deal producer in town.

For some reason I felt completely at home with her. I told her about everything. She seemed genuinely delighted to get inside my life and not in the “what can you do for me?” way of LA. But in the way a child listens to you read a story because you are giving her access to a new world.

After that day at the DMV, we’d meet every month or so and sit and talk. It was always at her house.

“I need time with my friend,” she’d shoo her kids out of the room.

It was early in these meetings that I began to realize Aidel was different from me in ways other than her Jewishness. I’d tell her I’d spoken with my mom about my latest script idea and she’d tell me that my mother was about to go through a big change and that she’d make a move that would surprise us. Later that year my mom went through a divorce, radiation, and then moved to New York City, a place she’d professed too big a fear of to visit when I’d lived there just a few years earlier.

I hate to use the word ‘psychic,’ especially in conjunction with the word ‘friend’ as that conjures up visions of Dionne Warwick. Later, when I finally met her sister, she referred to it as Aidel’s gift. Whatever it was, it was at times unsettling and always accurate.

Usually the first thing she’d ask me about was my love life. I had told her about my Jewish ex, the Agent Man, and my time in New York.

“I was his shickza” I laughed.

Her face clouded. “Don’t use that word. It’s not kind.”

For as much as I’d learned about Judaism, I knew so little about Jewishness.

I remember later reporting excitedly to her about a man I was dating. He was European - always a source of points with me - and from a very rigidly ethical background.

She sighed and without ceremony said “No, he’s not the one for you.”

I sputtered and protested that yes, I thought he was. She calmly waited until I was done and then proceeded to tell me why he wasn’t the right one.

“He doesn’t appreciate your humor or your sense of life.”

I got quiet and we talked about other things. I felt like a petulant teenager.

I stopped calling or coming by so often. I told myself it was because I felt like such an outsider in her world and I didn’t want to upset things by calling on a day I didn’t know was a Jewish holiday or come by not dressed conservatively enough. But really, I didn’t want her to be right anymore.

One day this boyfriend and I were driving and, as usual, I was singing along to every song and doing goofy car-dance moves. I thought it would make him laugh. My sister and I always cracked each other up this way. Instead, he reached over and slammed the radio off. I froze and heard Aidel’s voice in my head. He may as well have told me to stop being me. The relationship held on for a few more months but I think I knew it was over right then. I called Aidel and she told me she couldn’t see me, she was sick.

It was a while before she called me again. Finally, she was well enough and wanted to see me. I came over and told her she’d been right about the boyfriend. She smiled quietly. She was bony and rail thin and I worried my hug hurt her. She never spoke to me of cancer. For as much as she wanted to delve into my life, it seemed she felt there were parts of hers she needed to keep from me. She dodged my questions after her well-being and asked about my life. I said my sister had met a guy. Aidel told me she’d move somewhere hot. A week later, my sister called to tell me she was moving to Arizona for this guy.

I saw Aidel less after that. It depended if she was well enough. I would never have minded to see her in any health but I think it embarrassed her to be seen so frail when she’d been so vivacious. She never wanted to need help.

She called me one Monday. She needed to go to her doctor. It was a Jewish holiday: Shavuot. This meant no one but a non-Jew could drive her. When I pulled up to the door, I was greeted by looks of distrust by the neighbors. It had only been about a month since I’d last seen her but the Aidel that emerged from the building made my voice catch in my throat. Her husband did not smile at me as he helped her into my low sports car. I wondered if it was from his own distress watching his wife waste away or the same distrust of outsiders I’d read on the neighbors’ faces.

As we drove to her doctor’s clinic she explained that they’d disagreed about her even going to the doctor or riding in a car on the holiday but she felt her life was more important than the holiday. God would understand. I cursed my sport suspension which jounced her birdlike body over every bump.

“It’s fine,” she soothed, “with the morphine I don’t feel it.”

She would not let me carry her up the stairs to the clinic though she could not have weighed more than eighty-five pounds. She insisted she could do it herself. I steadied her and she did a sideways shuffle up the wheelchair ramp since she couldn’t get her legs to lift forwards. I watched them inject her with an experimental stem cell potion. After, she seemed to walk more steadily, clinging to my arm as we made our way back to the car.

At this point in our friendship, I saw no point in sugar-coating anything. “Are you scared to die?”

“No.”

“Are your kids scared?”

“They are prepared.”

There was so much I wanted to understand about her life and her spirituality. So much I wanted to apologize for in my absences. How could I tell her how much I valued her when I’d never really shown it?

“Any new men?” she asked as her head lolled on my passenger seat.

“No.” Then I told her about letting go of my delusions with the Director.

“He’s British,” she smiled, “and tall, yes?”

“Yes, 6’4””

I held my breath. I hadn’t wanted to bring him up. I didn’t want to have her tell me what I already knew: move on.

“He is the one for you. It will be a good life together. Just give him space”

My vision blurred and I had to focus on gripping the steering wheel. A few months before, that news would have been welcome but now it was like a punch in the stomach. Dreaming of him had suffocated me. Was I supposed to open back up to that hope and hurt? I concentrated on the road.

We arrived at her door and I wanted to tell her I loved her. But I didn’t. She brought me inside and insisted on peeling me a grapefruit for helping her. I cried all the way back to work.

The next phone call I got was not from Aidel. A month later I turned my phone on as my flight from New York landed. I’d been visiting my mom in her improbable new life. A voice I didn’t know told me that Aidel had passed away and there was a memorial that night if I could make it.

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed a large scarf out of my suitcase and wrapped it around my head and shoulders. I stood in the back of the Yeshiva and listened to the soothing sounds of the Hebrew prayers. I really had believed that she would get better and always be there to talk to as I grew my Hollywood life. I was in shock.

Later, a woman I’d met at the memorial called to tell me when the family was planning to sit Shiva. I panicked and called all my Jewish friends. What do I bring? What do I wear? How do I act at an orthodox Shiva? Even my least reformed Jewish friend didn’t know. I worried I’d offend the family by showing up as an outsider. Then I decided I had to go just out of love for Aidel.

The only death ritual I know is the Catholic wake where everyone needs to eat. I bring a bag of fresh fruit with me, the only thing I can be sure is kosher. I enter their modest house and find the men and women gathered in separate rooms. I sit with the women, awkwardly holding my fruit until someone takes it and puts it on a table.

We are silent for a while until Aidel’s sister sits on the couch facing me. She looks at me with the same wide grey eyes as Aidel; still and glinting at the same time. I introduce myself.

“Oh, you are Heidi.”

She explains to me that when they asked Aidel to make a list of who she wanted at her Shiva, mine was the first name she had said. Me. Why? What had I given her? Not half of what she had given me. I breathe through my mouth to keep from crying.

We sit for a while longer before another friend prompts Aidel’s oldest, a twelve year old daughter, to ask me about her mother. The girl takes up a pad and pen.

“I’m making a memory book,” she explains. She looks like she’s tired of people waiting for her tears.

I tell her about how I’d met her mother in the DMV and the unique friendship she’d brought to my life.

I talk about Aidel always lending me books she wanted me to read. Most had been about Jewish history. She’d been torn about lending me one because “the narrator had some anger at the Germans he escaped from.” She knew I had a German background.

“I think he had a right to be angry,” I’d told her.

Aidel had lent me the book, laughing about all the Germans in her life now and how she never would have imagined she would have Germans as friends; people who helped her family’s well-being rather than hurt it.

The women laugh as I come to a stop. How could I explain to this girl what her mother had given me? How Aidel’s gift terrified me, challenged me and thrilled me all at once? Her earnest grey eyes fix on me, pen poised.

“She was a butterfly,” I finally say. “She was a beautiful soul that flew into my life for little while.”

She nods and writes. How can I tell her I feel just as lost without her mother as she does?

Her sister watches me watching Aidel’s daughter write.

“Did you know her Hebrew name?”

I shake my head.

“Schlomit,” the sister tells me. “It means ‘Complete’.”

I start crying.

As the months have passed I have thought of Aidel on nearly a daily basis. I wonder how her family is managing without her. No doubt they’ve been embraced by their community and though they surely miss her, they are managing. Selfishly, I wonder how Aidel could have left me with so many questions unanswered. The most burning of them: how could she have been wrong about the Director? I tell myself the morphine must have scrambled her reception.

Sometimes I talk to her. I ask her if she sees things I see. I tell her I miss her. I ask her what I should do about whatever is going on today. Last night, I watched a fluffy love story where the lovers loved passionately but had to go through trials of fire to finally be together. It was silly overall but I was inspired by the main idea of a love like that…that does not alter when it alteration finds.

Later, I turned off my bedside lamp and asked Aidel if she was there. I asked her what fires I have to go through to find that love. In the next moment I heard a faint but clear whisper:

“You are burning now.”