DIED 2008
MY SECOND MARRIAGE TOOK me from Austin, Texas, to rural Pennsylvania, leaving a twenty-year cache of friendships and a house near the neighborhood school for a hermit husband in a place so isolated I had to drive my kids to the bus stop. The only people he knew were his former neighbors, and the only reason he knew them is because he’d had to go over and tell them their barn was on fire. They were a family of six, and they hadn’t been in the area long. This meant they socialized with people they weren’t related to and were not afraid to try my spicy Thai noodles. Then my son formed a band with their son and I spent much of the next six years sitting in their kitchen. We were moms: we loved our chardonnay.
Our friendship had a certain counterintuitive magic. She was six years younger, with perfect nails and makeup, and tailored slacks—like a stewardess from the sixties or a dreamy first-grade teacher. She was Catholic, Republican, and pro-life, had married and had her first baby around twenty. When she told people we were like sisters, I felt a blush of pride. We had some fine times together as groupie moms, the two of us in our T-shirts at the so-called gigs, gingerly swaying due to our various back and knee troubles.
When her back troubles led to surgery, when the surgery didn’t work, when it turned out the back pain had only been camouflaging the kidney cancer—by then she had been in bed for months and it was too late. My mother was dying in New Jersey, my marriage was in freefall, my forty-three-year-old friend was in mortal agony: there wasn’t enough chardonnay or Vicodin in the world. I relentlessly cooked Thai noodles and pot roast and spaghetti, and I drove around in circles dropping them off.
So much of motherhood turns out to be about letting go. The way she had to do it, all at once and much too soon, is unimaginable and impossible and happened anyway. Eight years after her funeral, I saw her beautiful children assembled at her daughter’s wedding. Never have I seen more clearly how my world will go on without me.