I’m scrubbing; I want to get a spot out of a shirt I like. What difference does a spot make? It doesn’t matter, does it?
My friend Eva is dying, and spots aren’t life and death issues. Unless they’re on the lungs. That was Eva’s downfall, a ten centimeter spot. I checked my yardstick after her son mentioned the size.
I’m planting seeds, Chinese greens, dropping miniscule orbs into a lumpy furrow, in the hope of a meal two months down the line. And it seems strange: I’m trying to create new life while one of my closest friends is dying. That’s all I’m thinking about. She’s 69. I just turned 70; no one expects her to get there. I’ll probably be around for the greens, if they grow, though of course I can’t be sure.
Bits of her wisdom frequently pop into my mind. “Put it on the back burner for awhile, then take another look.” It’s like the New York Times crossword. The answers you don’t know at first glance are suddenly there the next time you look; your mind’s been working surreptitiously.
“Behind every face, there’s a tragedy.” People are great deniers, but in the end we’re all mere humans, traveling a difficult road.
When I received Eva’s Email in June, I allowed myself a day or two to digest the information, contemplated our 52 years of close contact, often on a daily basis, so close she read my personal journals. Then I called her.
“You’ve been on my list of people to tell, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, as you can well understand,” she said.
“I want you to know what a difference you’ve made in my life. You represent a turning point. My parents tended to look at people from the outside, you looked at them from the inside.”
“Someone else said that to me recently, but I can’t remember who, maybe it was Jim.”
“I’m sure you’ve affected a lot of people that way.”
Eva, Jim, and I were in the same dorm freshman year at Oberlin in 1955. They fell in love, but each married someone else.
She told me she sleeps all the time, that day and night are the same. And I soon learned the significance of that. When I called her a week later, I woke her up, and she didn’t have the energy to talk. And now, she’s always asleep, and Jim answers.
So that’s it. I’m thankful she was in my life for over half a century. She was
beautiful, brilliant, observant, insightful, and cared about others, and about the world. It was she who convinced me to go online so we could Email back and forth, and we did, thousands of Emails. She critiqued my work, and I critiqued hers. And she was my lifesaver in times of crisis. I wish I could be her lifesaver now.
