Here comes Jane.
Smiling so bright.
And I want to say sorry to her immediately because I know I’m not up for whatever she’s got to offer. The spreadsheet keeps sending dear friends my way, but I can’t say I am actually receiving them anymore. With Ann’s departure this morning, I feel I’ve lost all animation and motivation, and it shows.
Where I had been rising up eagerly for long, meaningful exchanges and reminiscences with friends in my hospital room, now I’m fine with silences and small talk. I don’t seize the opportunity to find humor anymore—the Dr. Lunchbox name has lost its mischievous gleam for me. Strolls in the hallway have shortened to just a few steps outside my door and back again. And when I manage somehow to slow-step some twenty feet outside my room to the giant scissor (the art poster that used to spur laughter because of its likeness to an upright penis), all it stirs in me is anxiety at how much more out of breath I am now than when I first stood in front of this image, laughing.
Being in my company is without a single bright spot, and this is why I worry about Jane’s arrival. As perhaps my most exuberant friend, with a can-do nature that rivals my own, Jane would be likely to seek out my spark and expect to light it—because she’s done so in the past, and handily. She’s got that rousing way about her that catches you up like a charm and makes you feel like you’re the reason for that special gleam in her smile, whether you’re a close friend or just a casual acquaintance. Watch Jane walk down the main shopping street in our town, and you might mistake her for a popular mayor; a one-minute stroll from the drugstore to the butcher shop turns into a fifteen-minute saunter for Jane because she will be stopped by no less than a dozen people along the way—Jane! Jane! Hi! I’ve walked down the street with her many times, so I know. Jane greets and is greeted by more people in five minutes of errand running than I am in two years of the same. Someone comes over to chat with her on our path, and I observe a lesson in affability, trying to put my finger on just what’s at the core of it. In the almost thirty years I’ve known Jane, I still can’t name it exactly. But whatever it is, I totally get the power of it—and the power has surely gotten me.
On many occasions, Jane has shown up to my medical smackdowns just in time to flick the switch that rebounds my spirit, getting me up and out for coffee, praising me for charging through yet another challenge with guts and smarts. Jane sees the best and the strongest in me, and heaps on the accolades in such a direct, assured way that I find myself agreeing with her: You’re right Jane—damn it, I really am optimistic and resilient!
But, see, I’m not anymore.
All Jane has built me up to be is likely to come tumbling down during this visit. And I worry her sparkle will have no effect.
And yet, look at this—Jane has actually got me walking in the hallway now, far from my room, which I’d rather not be. But it’s her second day here, and suggestion has turned to insistence. “Let’s go, okay, okay? You can do it, right?” she asked a few minutes ago, opening the closet to find my sneakers before I could confirm my willingness to walk. I felt the automatic rallying response trigger within me, as Jane must have hoped. But what’s different this time is that my body may not be able to accommodate my will—or hers. Last night was awful. Nearly constant pacing kept us up and anguished. Justin was off duty. There was nothing but pain and longing for sleep on both our parts, while Jane kept stalwart vigil.
I know this walk is beyond me. I’ve barely been able to make it ten steps from my door lately, and now, with Jane holding my arm, I find myself halfway around the square expanse of the sixth floor. Jane doesn’t seem to mind at all when I stop again and again to catch my breath; she talks animatedly through each panting pause, bringing me up to date on her kids and on the latest goings-on back home in our town. “They say Whole Foods is coming in. Supposedly, they signed a lease for the space near the high school,” she says, ushering me right along, even though the girls’ emails have detailed how weak my heart has become. Jane knows, and yet she moves assuredly—unhindered, undaunted—across the white tile floor because she has determined that it’s the right thing to do. Jane believes getting out of my room is good for my body and mind and will show me something that I need to believe right now, i.e., that I can still walk like I did when I first arrived here.
I’m not sure she’s right on this one, though. I look at Jane now—she’s got her face lifted, turning left, then right, as if checking out new shops on Main Street. She breezes along with poise and grace. An image comes to mind—it is perhaps one of the strongest memories I have of Jane, one that has left an unforgettable impression on me. We’re walking through an airport, my family and hers. We’ve just taken a ski trip. Scott and Casey move along fine, as do Jane’s husband and son. And then there’s Jane’s four-year-old daughter, who erupts into a tantrum and refuses to walk until Jane gives her something (what it was, I don’t know, but man, did that girl have a pair of pipes). The rest of us stand in place, watching and waiting for this parent-child standoff to resolve so we can continue on as a group. Jane renders a final, powerful no, causing her daughter to collapse to the ground and grab hold of her mom’s right ankle. “Okay, let’s go!” Jane calls out, and onward she marches, dragging her wailing daughter along the trodden terminal floor.
Oh, how much easier it would have been just to let the kid have her way, right? That’s what I would have done—I, who stuffed a quick Popsicle into toddler Casey’s hand in the park years earlier, just so other mothers wouldn’t judge my railing three-year-old. But Jane held firm—she was not going to cave to a tantrum, not even in the airport. She made a quick determination of what was right and acted fully in line with it, because the best outcome for her daughter (and, perhaps, herself) was not to heed this kind of behavior. And Jane carried it out seamlessly; not only did she walk with aplomb while lugging forty pounds of a kicking and screaming child who had hold of her ankle, she also did so with head held high, looking ahead for a kiosk where we could buy water bottles and magazines.
Jane is the calm, resolute mother, sticking to her plan of action with awe-inspiring confidence and competence. And she is doing the same here with me today, I realize, as the exceptionally self-assured friend who carries out with determination what she deems best under trying circumstances: getting me the hell out of my room.
I have to stop for breath again. “Whole Foods! You’re—gasp—kidding me?” I finally answer, once I’ve got enough air. “Really? I’m going to—gasp—die, and now they put in a Whole Foods?” I say this in fun, but the disappointment beneath it is real; all the years I’ve lived in the suburbs, I’ve haven’t had a good place to buy fresh fruits and vegetables. I’m actually annoyed at the thought that my ill-timed demise will mean missing out on this new development. “Of all the luck,” I add, kidding just a little bit.
“Oh, stop it. You’ll be pushing your shopping cart through the aisles like the rest of us.”
If Jane had said this to me even two weeks ago, I would have jumped on it and forcefully impressed upon her how the odds are stacked against me. Up to now, I’ve been quick to shoot down optimism from any visiting friend who dared toss it cheerfully in my direction. But there’s no point in keeping this up anymore. My ending is all but assured. And while I wondered plenty in March and April, when friend after friend flew home, whether it was the last time I would see them, now in early May this thought has become a certainty: I will never see Jane again.
Sorrow stings in my throat as Scott’s words rise up in me again. They ask a question that begs to be answered this minute—not in a general way, but with regard to the friend with whom I stroll right now and for the last time: How do I want Jane to remember me?
With my arm linked through hers and feeling the struggle in each step forward, it occurs to me that maybe by insisting on this challenging walk, Jane is actually helping me project an image that will remain after I am gone. It’s as if she is determined to flick on my light switch and illuminate the attributes she has long admired in me: resilience, audacity, guts . . .
But if I appear to glow here in this hallway with the best in me on display one last time, it’s because of Jane. Not me.
“You’re unbelievable,” she said to me earlier this morning, and so many times in the past, and yet she has the utmost belief. I don’t want her to find out that, truly, you can’t believe what you see about me.
I pull back my shoulders, trying not to drag so much on her arm for support.
“Hey there, you! On a morning stroll—I like it, I like it!” a nurse calls out, waving as he comes toward us with steps so quick that I feel a rush of air as he passes. A doctor in a sleek suit and tie stands at a hallway computer and looks up at the sound of the nurse’s voice. His eyes fall on Jane and rest there with a twinkle for a few seconds. I’m not surprised.
“Did ya catch that doctor checking you out?” I ask her once we’re far enough down the hallway to be out of his earshot.
She pulls me closer to her and laughs.
“I’m serious. The guy we just passed. In the beige suit. He took a long, good look at you, boy—”
She waves me off. “Get out . . . maybe he was looking at you!”
“In my yellow germ mask? I don’t think so, Janie. Even without the mask, no one’s lookin’ . . . I’m death walking.”
“There you go again. Stop it, would you? You happen to look pretty darn fabulous—considering. Yeah, you’re a little tired around the eyes, but I gotta say, you don’t look anything like I’ve read in those nightly emails—which I chose to take with a grain of salt, by the way. I appreciate the girls’ sending them, but I’m my own person, you know, and I’ll evaluate the situation myself when I set my eyes on it, thanks very much.”
Jane is, for sure, a straight shooter. I like this about her. “Grab that door!” I call out. “Let’s go in there!” A nurse has just stepped out of a key-only entryway, and Jane catches it adeptly now before it closes. “Check this out. I’ve only been in here a couple of times, mostly with Leja when I first got to Cedars and was able to walk this far.”
“You walked just fine,” Jane says. “You’re doing great.” I ignore that comment and focus instead on the exceptional surroundings. Jane and I find ourselves standing alone in the middle of a glass overpass that connects two Cedars buildings. The view on either side is wide-open—the Hollywood Hills stand out in the distance against blue sky while, closer in, tall palm trees line San Vicente Boulevard as far as I can see toward Melrose. I can even make out the nearby corner where our bungalow sits: a white dot nestled within tall walls of greenery. The feeling of this hallway is exquisite spaciousness, quite unlike the more contained sense I got when I stood in the courtyard with Scott a couple of days ago. Looking far and wide now, I can almost imagine being able to breathe in all that air—there is so very much of it between ground and sky. “I want to be out there,” I say, not realizing I’ve spoken this thought aloud.
“You will be.”
“It’s not looking that way, Jane.”
“Far as I can tell, you’re not going anywhere. I know what the doctors say and what the waiting list challenges are, but I’m sorry . . . I just don’t think it’s your time. Look at you! You’re full of vitality, Ames.”
So I can’t die because of how I look?
My breast doctor, whom I met at Starbucks just a few months back in order to get her to call off the cops, said something remarkably similar to me. When our discussion hit its critical point that day, just minutes into our peppermint teas, my doctor articulated the reason she thought most salient and vital for not letting breast cancer be the end of me: “Amy . . . you just have too much vitality to die.”
“Oh?”
“You know, I see patients with no hair, looking so ill and wasted away. But you—for all you’ve been through—you’re still so very, very full of life! You look too good to die.”
That was her best argument?
As Val would say, Good grief!
What should it matter how I look on the outside?
Here was this renowned breast surgeon sitting across the table sans white coat in a crowded Starbucks and unwittingly showing me the downside of my insistence on always looking my best whenever I go to the doctor. It had long been my self-imposed rule that sickbed pajamas and matted hair must always give way to jeans, a flattering sweater, and some well-placed makeup. Lights, camera, action: it’s doctor time! Decades of medical experience have taught me that doctors tend to have a greater affinity for patients who look like they’ve got a good shot at a favorable outcome. It is a double-edged sword, though, because the more life a doctor sees in you, the less he or she can imagine you without breath and heartbeat. Even doctors with a wealth of knowledge in their brains and years of experience on their side tend to be more swayed by what they see with their eyes.
Appearances are, I’ve come to understand, that powerful.
I tell Jane I need to start heading back to the room. “But thanks for pushing me to get all the way here today. Great to feel my legs moving again. And I forgot how much I love the view.”
“See that? It’s great. Maybe you’ll do it again when Joy comes.”
“Maybe,” I say, trying to sound breezy about it. But right now, I’m feeling a distinct pulsing in my neck—I imagine it’s the vein that Dr. Kobashigawa has been using as a teaching tool to demonstrate my “restrictive allograft physiology” (as he calls it, enthusiastically). I’ve glimpsed the very apparent, bulging purple protrusion every time I brush my teeth in front of the mirror, but I’ve never once actually sensed its thumping. Overly aware of it now, I feel instantly dizzy and hot, but I force a smile; I don’t want to disappoint Jane by stopping in my tracks and whimpering for a wheelchair.
Perhaps picking up on my sudden preoccupation, Jane cozies up to me with that sense of can-do support, and so I push on—small steps, frequent stops. I spot a few white-coated gazes gravitate in our direction as we make the trek back; my sparkly friend Jane is a sight for sore hospital eyes. She also achieved an incredible feat with me today—the sixth-floor hallway loop.
If I can make it back to my room.
Jane’s cell phone rings. She retrieves it from her back pocket. “Oh, look, it’s Rob . . .” (her husband). “Hi, honey, I’m just here taking a nice walk in the hall with Amy. Yeah—she’s a walkin’ machine, doing pretty darn fabulous, considering . . .” She gives my arm a squeeze of encouragement. Seconds later, she wraps up the call and tells me, “Rob sends his love . . . and he said he just wrote you an email . . .”
“Oh, okay . . .” I’m concentrating—right foot, left . . . right foot, left . . . Just then, we pass an empty stretcher parked in front of the nurses’ station, and my thoughts shift—I gotta lie down, I gotta lie down . . .
But just a few steps more and, look at that, we’ve reached the door to my room. I pull off my yellow mask. Jane walks to the chair and falls into it with a contented thump. Within seconds, I’m settled in bed and feeling safe again amid the Hawaiian leis, the streamers, the tie-dye. My body tingles with the strangely pleasing aftereffect of exercise. The pulsing in my neck vein quiets. I look over at Jane, who’s smiling as she taps the keypad of her iPhone.
I exhale. Slide my feet under the fleece throw blanket. And in the peace of this moment, it dawns on me—How lucky I am . . .
The harrowing hallway loop looks different from here—more like a small victory, or even a big one. A final hurrah orchestrated by my amazing friend Jane. She helped me do my best. Gave me something to be proud of.
From: Rob Keller
Subject: A few things
Date: May 5, 2014 at 2:54 PM
To: Amy Silverstein
Dear Amy:
I know Jane is with you now, and while I fully expect to see you again, I didn’t want to risk not telling you directly a few things. (Does email count as “direct”? I guess it’ll have to, for now.)
You have lived a great life. It is in many ways heroic and historic. But while your disease has occupied so much of your time and energy, I don’t think of you as defined by it. I think of you as Amy, period: your sense of humor and irony; your creativity; your quick and distinct laugh; your generosity and friendship; your truth telling, even when it isn’t convenient.
You’ve touched many people in ways you’ll never know. You’ve forced us to examine our lives and ask, What would we do if we were Amy? And I don’t mean if we faced your health issues; I mean, in our own lives, with our unique challenges: Why can’t we be more courageous? Why aren’t we more demanding and more direct? Why aren’t we more loving or more giving, in the face of struggle and pain?
I don’t know why. But I think about it a lot and I assure you, so do your family and friends.
You’ve lived a life that matters, one of great consequence. You’ve made people take notice. We are profoundly the better for it.
But when I think of you, my enduring thought is that you’ve clawed your way to a thousand ordinary moments with Scott and Casey, and your friends. Much of them, far as I can tell, with an abundance of love and happiness. That’s the stuff of an extraordinary life—the ordinary is what’s extraordinary. It’s what any of us would want.
It’s those countless moments that stitched our friendship and our lives together, Amy, and it’s why I love you.
I will see you soon.
Rob
Jody comes in a little while later. Scott and I drafted her to help with a sneak-out today, and we’ve got an eleven o’clock rendezvous plan. He is going to meet us downstairs in fifteen minutes; it’s Jody’s job to deliver me there. Jane is today’s trusty lookout.
I talk my trainees through the procedure that Scott and I put in place when Ann was here. We go over each step with grins on our faces. “This is fabulous,” Jane says.
“I was pretty scared the first time, but now I figure, what can happen to me?” There are only eight days left on my wall, I want to add, but I don’t. I’m conscious of the unfortunate fact that Jane, whom I respect and love a great deal, landed a spot far into the spreadsheet order and so has come at a late point in the game, where I am focused on nothing but turning off my pacemaker. I have to try hard not to bombard her with it.
I give the countdown to action. “Okay, girls, three . . . two . . . one!”
Jane dashes down the hall and gives us the all clear. Jody and I follow—onto the elevator we go, down to the lobby, and out to the courtyard.
Bliss.
I sit on the ledge, close my eyes, and put my face up to the warm sun. “Jody,” I croon, “this is heaven on earth.”
“I’m so glad, Ames.” I hear the scuff of her sandals against cement ground; Jody is pacing, nervous. It is one thing to sit alone in my hospital room with me when no other friend is there and Scott is caught up in a business call back at the bungalow (as Jody has done nearly every day since I was admitted to Cedars in March), but to be my lone company out here on the plaza, breaking hospital rules, leaving my heart unattended by a telemetry monitor—this feels like an enormous responsibility. And a dangerous one.
“Scott will be here in just a couple of minutes,” I say, bringing my head back to level, opening my eyes, and glimpsing her very troubled brow.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s all good,” she says, and I appreciate that she’s faking it. Because, for me, this is truly all good.
I lift my face to the sun again. “This is so fantastic. I could die right here and now, and it would be fine with me.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be fine with me—I’ll tell you that,” Jody shoots back immediately with all seriousness but, at the same time, tinged with that comedic edge that infuses most of what she says.
I laugh a bit.
“I’m not kiddin’ ya’, Ames.”
“I hear you, I hear you . . .”
Just then, I see Scott emerge through the lobby doors. He bounds toward me cheerfully. “I love to see you out here! It fills my heart . . .” He kisses me on the cheek and then reaches out to hug Jody. “Thanks so much, Jo.”
“I’d like to say it was my pleasure, but this, Scotty . . . this racks my nerves a little, I have to tell you. And then your wife, she says she could die right now and that it would be okay with her . . . I mean, I’m havin’ a real ball out here . . .” She’s joking again, and Scott and I get a good chuckle out of it. Our friendship with Jody—and with Jack too, who has been here almost every day as well—has come so far since we first arrived in California. Thrust into the highest-pressure circumstances of life and death, we’ve glimpsed one another in the extreme: the fury of my silence after the pacemaker procedure; the rare display of Scott’s last-straw loss of patience with me; Jody’s disintegration into fretful, wide-eyed pacing; Jack’s unabashed tears as he lay beside me one afternoon, realizing that our hallway strolls were no more. How could the clash of horrible ordeal and intense hope not speed us past the usual steps of relationship progression? With our deepest emotions laid bare, we couldn’t help but relate in a way that eludes even the closest of friends.
The strength of our new bond makes me feel happy and sad at the same time: I have come to love Jody and Jack just in time to start missing them.
“You want to head home now, Jo?” Scott asks.
“I do.”
“All right, then. I’ll take it from here. Hope to see you soon.”
“Yeah, I’ll be here in the morning.”
“Joy’s coming tomorrow,” I say.
“Great! I’ll email her tonight and see if she wants me to pick her up at the airport. Can’t wait to see her.”
Joy and Jody . . .
New friends.
Good friends, now.
Transformed by fate, it seems. There’s no escaping it. All the women who’ve spent long hours in this room have been sorted and realigned, awoken and opened up, challenged and embraced by this tragic and beautiful coming together. Our friends have expanded, and we are expanded as friends.
But to what end? Will the whole of us be undone when the countdown hits zero?
* * *
I stayed in the bathroom long enough for Jane to call out to me, “Everything all right in there?” and I told her I’m fine, just giving my face a good scrub.
“Today is exfoliation day,” I said, as if I actually knew what day of the week it was.
I wasn’t scrubbing. I was thinking.
Sitting on the shower bench and contemplating the day passing without a donor heart and the night of relentless pacemaker firing to come.
I didn’t want Jane to see my despair.
She piped up outside the bathroom door, “Well, I love the Bliss Fabulous Foaming Face Wash . . . It’s mild so I can use every day, but it’s also got a great . . .”
I stood up, walked to the mirror above the sink, and leaned toward it.
Man, I look like shit—dry, wrinkled, drawn, beaten down . . .
I sighed.
Then, in a flash, I lifted my forehead, eyebrows, cheekbones, and the full expanse of both my lips, and I forced a big, bright smile: this was me doing my I’m well face, as I’d named it long ago. I had amused myself many times with this trick over the years, catching my reflection in the mirror at random moments and seeing illness in such obvious display, and then erasing all traces of it—poof—by elevating every inch of my face at once, forcing a healthy smile upon a stricken droop.
Remarkable. I was still able to do it even now, just about one week before my dying day . . .
My dying day—for fuck’s sake.
I’m going to turn off my pacemaker in seven days.
And then what?
I pushed my face right up against mirror and gave myself an intense once-over—
Who am I?
What happens when there’s no me?
Giving palliative care a nod for sedation will be my last act . . . my last thought.
Stop . . . stop . . . stop!
La-la-la-la . . .
I shut my eyes tight and called out to Jane, “I use the Bliss face wash too! It’s the best.”