Polly-Who?

It’s been a long time. I would love to say it was because I was busy being fabulous or shepherding a burgeoning career along. Anyone who has been with me from the start will know I had a fairly Pollyanna outlook on life and my career potential as a writer. My tagline: ‘for the naive and hopeful’ pretty much says it all. As the years passed by I’ve lived a sort of Hollywood-adjacent life. After a while, I didn’t have a very Pollyanna outlook anymore.

I recently spoke with an eternally optimistic friend about life in general. He shared how great life was going for him and I was genuinely relieved. It felt so nice to hear about good stuff happening for a good person. When I replied with my laundry list of life he said “Jesus, how do you get out of bed in the morning?” It finally dawned on me: it’s not just me being whiny. I’ve had a shit-pile of a year and since that's what is, that’s what I’m going to write. I promise not to be morose or self-pitying (as much as I can). I will look for the humor and snark whereever I can. I’ll look for the lesson and the growth.

I’m going to start with the hard stuff: my mother is entering hospice care in a few weeks. My family is braced for that end and dealing with the emotional roller coaster as it comes. How does one go about saying goodbye to the person who gave you life? My father is aging and it’s not easy to watch. He forgets our wonderful, long conversations and chastises me for never calling. He is in a world of pain of his own making I cannot seem to reach or help him out of.

My husband and I live in a dark, noisy condo with a crazy shut-in for a next door neighbor who verbally assaulted and threatened me for the fact that my husband and I apparently spend our free time standing outside her door meowing to try to make her dog bark. Really? (Yes, I see the comedy potential there and I DID get to make my first police report so that was exciting.)

That same neighbor led the charge against us this year when we got a new puppy who had severe separation anxiety. In the end, we were forced to return to the shelter a beautiful dog who could have been a great family member given enough time and training. His loss ripped open the scab that was still fresh from losing my beloved Simon last year.

I do rewarding, important non-profit work that doesn’t pay much. It occupies my scant waking hours. I do the job of at least two people and am never able to get ahead of my to-do list or do the outreach I need to do in order for our organization to thrive. I spent a good chunk of time this year dealing with a vengeful idiot who was more interested in being right (though she was wrong) than in taking responsibility for herself. She, more than anyone this year, made me lose faith in humanity.

Underscoring everything is the fact that I’ve been sick for the better part of two years with what has generically been dismissed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I’ve been poked and prodded by every specialist imaginable. I’ve been told I have cancer several times only to have the tests show nothing of the sort. (An “I’m sorry about the C word” would have been nice, Docs.) Most days I cannot function for more than four or five-hour chunks in between which I have to sleep. If I don’t, my body shuts down as in seriously: I crashed my car one day because I pushed too hard past shut-down.

I pretend that I am fine most of the time and people get irritated that I cannot be productive like I used to. They have no idea that it’s a struggle to be awake and that I can’t remember what I promised to do for them last week unless I wrote it down. Aside from the deep circles under my eyes, I don’t look sick so it’s hard when I find myself in the awkward position of convincing someone I am and not just making excuses for having neglected that to-do item. It has brought home to me the Philo of Alexandria quote that a friend signs her emails with: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.

Then there’s my life’s mission. To write. I don’t write anymore. Except for two weeks in the summer when we go on vacation, my life is absorbed by these duties, dramas and disappointments. I came here to write and I don’t. That, more than anything, breaks my heart.

When I did write something, it was stolen from me and produced without crediting me. Someone I’d known it was a mistake to trust had lied to me and I hadn’t seen it coming.

When I look at it all in a pile like this, it seems to be a year soaked in tears and heavy sighs. To put it succinctly, I can’t do another year like this.

So I am pulling myself out. My blog header used to say something about believing in the dream and the day I couldn’t say that anymore would be the day I’d pack up and leave. By all accounts I should have left by now. But I am choosing to stay. I don’t know why, really, except maybe force of habit. Maybe there is a tiny speck of me that does still believe.

I am working with a new doctor now who finally has me on a road to recovery. My mother’s hospice is twenty minutes from me so I will get to spend many more hours exploring the mystery of life with her. I have a beautiful new niece who reminds me of life’s joy every time I see her. I have some wonderful new friends of wisdom and integrity and am slowly culling the crazies out of my life. I have some wonderful old friends who’ve stood by me. I see my daily work rewarded in the smiles of my students who find their power and live better lives because of me. Despite my best efforts, I find myself married to a lovely man who adores me and makes my days warm and safe. Together we run a screenwriting intensive in Tuscany in the summers and being in Italy yearly feeds my soul.

And I’m writing again. I have a wonderful new creative partner and there are interesting things brewing for us. I’m thrilled to have the energy and will to sit and write this right now. I may be a little rusty. But I am making a commitment to be back in the blogosphere for 2012 – this month marks the seventh anniversary of this blog. It’s going to be a strange, heart-breaking, wonderful ride. I hope you will take it with me.

The Old Dog on the Stairs

“You’re crying at a dogfood commercial?”

“But look,” I gestured to the TV as I sniffled into a tissue.

You probably remember the one. It started with a kid at the top of the stairs hollering “Come on, Casey” to a red Irish Setter puppy who frolicked up the stairs. Then it moved to a teen calling “here, Casey,” to a healthy, adult Irish Setter who romped dutifully up to his owner. It finished with a post-college guy encouraging “atta-boy, Casey,” to an elderly, graying Irish Setter who struggled up the stairs.

I burst into tears every time it got to old Casey: He’s trying so hard to please his human. They’ve had such a beautiful, long friendship. Casey doesn’t have much time left. How can you not cry?

I would look at my robust, healthy Simon and be happy he hadn’t seemed to age a bit in all our years together. Always as eager for a hike as me, and just as willing to be happy with quiet time, for a decade this former pound puppy has been my perfect match. People have always stopped me on our walks and told me what a beautiful dog he is. I thank them as Simon smiles and nuzzles them for a pet. He knows.

Simon’s into his fifteenth year now. Old for a big dog. I believe it’s our active lifestyle and his not being a purebred got him this far, as well as the love of course. That and every time there’s been an injury or a sickness, I’ve always looked into his expressive brown eyes and said “you’re not allowed to leave.” He lays his head on my knee and somehow heals himself.

A few months back I noticed him panting all the time. He started to lose weight, drinking lots of water and not being able to hold it. I knew what it meant but I didn’t want to face it. With my limited salary I knew operations or chemo wouldn’t be an option. How effective could they be anyway at his age? I didn’t want to hear the words.

I took him in when he seemed to be in pain. Lymphoma, they said. They gave us antibiotics for infection, pain killers, and steroids to keep his lungs working. I went home and cried for days. So now Simon and me - a few weeks, a month, more? They couldn’t tell me how much time we have. I can only keep him comfortable and wait and watch.

The vet had chuckled, “Not a trace of arthritis or anything. Otherwise a totally healthy dog.” I want to scream that it’s not fair for his body to be in such good shape and still get taken down. It’s not used up yet. If the cancer just weren’t there…

Suddenly I have the old dogfood commercial Casey – the dog that makes me cry with his unsinkable will to please despite his infirmity. His ready smile breaks my heart.

After a few weeks on his steroids Simon started acting like a jerk. Begging incessantly, stealing the cats’ food, raiding the garbage – a doggie sin he’d never committed. I brought him back to the vet. He was down from his healthy 85 to 60 pounds, his spine and hind quarters skeletal. Quite simply he was starving to death. The cancer was stealing all his nutrients and he wasn’t getting any. We switched him to puppy food for greater nutrients and upped his feedings to three times a day. His walks to four. He stabilized and calmed down. Still smiling his happy dog smile. “But won’t that feed the cancer more, too?” my husband worries. I suppose it will but what can I do?

So we play our waiting game, enjoying whatever we have left. I tell him I love him a million times a day. I force his pointed steroid pills into bread slices that he eagerly gulps. I listen to his soft panting every night. I feel guilty that it irritates me and keeps me awake but I know it will be so much worse when it’s not there anymore.

Long gone are our wandering hikes in the hills. My once-strong dog shuffles behind me to the end of our driveway and back, his rear paws making a soft ‘shush-shush-shush’ as he fails to lift them. Sometimes, even moving slowly he stumbles. I modify my gait remembering not to rush and we amble along.

“What a beautiful dog,” people still croon on our short trips outside. I look at his emaciated rear and the visible curve of his ribcage. If you only knew, I think. Of course he’s still beautiful even as his eyes look sunken and his face fur grays. He wags his tail and nuzzles them for a pet.

Inside he struggles to get to his feet, his failing muscles fighting the slip of the wood floor. He can’t really hear anymore and I startle him if I come up behind him. I have to touch him or make vibrations to get his attention. And he smiles. Still that full-face, adoring-eye smile he’s always had for me, despite the pain, despite the fear he must feel at not knowing what’s going on. “The way that dog looks at you,” my mom always croons. It’s what unconditional love looks like.

He’s given me a decade of being the best dog ever. He’s always been there to comfort my tears or share my joys. I can’t imagine my adult life without him. I always thought he’d be around to help us raise kids.

He smiles, puts his head on my knee and nudges me with a nose that’s always hot and dry now. I give him whatever treats he wants. I stop myself from uttering my knee-jerk “you’re not allowed to leave.” It’s selfish of me and not fair to him. I tell him he’s allowed to leave if that’s what he needs. I bump my forehead onto his and tell him I’ll be OK but he has to tell me when it hurts too much; when it’s time. I pray I’ll have the strength to listen to him. Because otherwise I’ll hold onto him forever.

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

Gratitude

When you get down to point zero and are finally without ego, open, defenseless, help comes in different and sometimes unexpected forms. I've noticed even in good times that when I take a moment out of the frenetics to stop, center myself and say "thank you," I can physically feel a shift - an easing - in my body.

Thank you for all the support, comments and concern. I have been touched by the offers of job help, connection help, and sympathetic ear help.

One form help took was the loan of a book called "The Cancer Monologue Project" from a good friend. I was reading it yesterday as I try to process my thoughts and feelings about my friend who has cancer and this quote smacked me in the center of my chest:

When you come to the edge of all that you know,
You must believe in one of two things,
There will earth upon which to stand
or you will be given wings

-Author Unknown

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.

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.”