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Where do we go when the whole thing is over? Roof-brain chatter flooded Norah’s mind as she ambled down the stone path leading the way to Cassie’s office. Walking the halls of St. Andrew’s College was almost a spiritual experience for Norah. The Catholic campus oozed grace and dignity. The classic architecture—with its vaulted ceilings, wide corridors, Carrera marble floors, and white stone columns—provided a sacred atmosphere that glorified the values of academia. It was a testimony to the evolution of human intelligence.
Her career as a professor had hardly made her rich, but it had afforded her a distinguished and meaningful lifestyle. Her body never failed to quiver with joy when she reminisced about the ceremony that transformed her from Miss Mayer to “Dr. Mayer.” Dressed in full regalia, her robes flowed as she strode down the aisle to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.” Yellow and gold hues vibrated in her visual field as her gilded tassel glided from side to side. She trembled with excitement as the university president passed the miter above her head. And just like a fantasy, her dream had come true; shortly after graduation, she became Assistant Professor Mayer. She loved her life as a professor of psychology, a role she had played for decades, and hackneyed as it sounded, fulfilled her mission to pursue the truth, increase knowledge, and improve the quality of human life.
Norah emitted a deep sigh as she reminded herself how the current culture was traveling in a disastrous direction. Sadly, intellectual bashing was trendy among today’s millennials. The professor’s role was trivialized. People poked fun at ritual, and denial of scientific findings was assuming epidemic proportions. Even politicians could be favored for their ignorance, lies, and boorish behavior. She felt frustrated yet challenged.
Norah was eager to share her thoughts with Cassandra, her lifelong friend. They had met in grade school, attended college together, were maids of honor at each other’s weddings, graduated from doctoral programs at the same time, found tenure-track university positions within 75 miles of each other, and collaborated on academic projects. Now they both pondered retirement.
Norah wondered why she had begun to obsess over the topic of death and an afterlife. A few years ago such thoughts had been few and far between; they sprinkled on her brain periodically, like raindrops from a gentle sun shower. Recently, these ideas were coming faster and faster, picking up power, becoming a torrential flood in her head. Was it being in her sixties that made her acutely aware that her time was limited? Was it an alert to invest her remaining life energy wisely? Norah reminded herself to stay in the moment and be mindful of her surroundings as she approached her best friend’s workplace.
Arriving at Cassandra’s office, Norah beamed as she knocked on the formidable-looking wooden door. A familiar voice called out, “Please come in.”
As Norah swung the door open, her heart pounded when her eyes fell on Cassandra. She was seated behind a mahogany desk in the large office, framed with bookshelves haphazardly cluttered with classic works of English, French, and philosophical literature. Sunlight streamed through the floor-to-ceiling leaded glass windows and surrounded Cassandra with a shimmering light that gave her a pure and saintly look. Norah chuckled. Cassandra embodied the quintessential female professor. Her long, graying hair fell back from her face and her near-perfect complexion, now penetrated with age lines, gave her the appearance of a wise and knowledgeable scholar. Her soft blue eyes peered over the top of her cheater glasses.
Cassandra broke into a big grin. She hurriedly rolled her chair back from the desk, jumped up, and held out her arms in an inviting embrace, finally squeezing her visitor tightly and emitting a tiny squeal of delight. “Oh, Norah, it’s been too long.”
“Yes, I know. We let a whole semester pass without meeting up in person. Phone calls are not enough, Cassie.”
“Never again,” said Cassie wistfully. Her eyes teared up.
“How are you, Cassie?” asked Norah.
A long pause was followed by a heartfelt groan. Cassie tried to choke back her grief, but suddenly tears flowed down her cheeks and words stuck in her throat. “It’s difficult to believe it’s been nearly a year. I’m adapting to being husbandless after thirty years of marriage, but it’s so hard!”
Norah sensed Cassie’s forlornness. Over their long friendship, Cassie had suffered many bouts of depression. Norah’s mind flashed back to graduation as Cassie stood by her side and received her doctorate in theater and English literature. While Norah beamed joyfully, Cassie complained that it had taken her too long to graduate because her professors had been unsupportive and unavailable when she needed them. Cassie had always been moody and prone to melancholy. Certainty was her goal. Her relationships, work, leisure, exercise, diet—all had to be predictable and neat. When any of these was not what she expected, Cassie felt out of sorts. And when she was on edge, she was irritable and lashed out at others sarcastically or launched into a tirade of insults. As her long-time friend, Norah had salvaged Cassandra’s psyche, and by teaching her some cognitive therapy techniques helped her focus on the positive rather than dwell on the negative.
Norah had worried that Bill’s death would send Cassie spiraling into deeper depression. Bill had been her staunch protector, providing the patience of a saint. No amount of phone conversations had steadied her after his death. She could see the lingering pain in Cassie’s eyes.
“And how are you dealing with Bill’s death these days?” asked Norah in a soft and gentle tone of voice.
“It’s been awful, absolutely agonizing, unbearable.” Cassie sobbed. Looking directly into Norah’s eyes, she whispered, “You know, both of us are widows now, but it does not feel real. It feels as if it is not us—widows.” Cassie blew her nose and tried to regain her composure. Smiling a bit, she attempted to make light of her outburst. “Widow—a weird, old-fashioned word. I actually looked up its etymology. There’s disagreement about its history. Some offer the idea of a straw widow, a woman who lost her virginity before the wedding; others say it’s a woman whose husband went away to work, forcing her to go to the straw fields in the summer to cool down. Who knows which is correct? Look at the Greek widows shrouded in their black fabric, symbolizing the loss of their men—that they are man-less.” Both Norah and Catherine laughed. Like old times, they loved to play with words.
Norah empathized with Cassie’s plight. Norah had lost Larry two years before Cassie lost Bill. Bill had succumbed to lung cancer after a long and desperate fight to cling to life. But, unlike Cassie’s stable relationship with Bill, Norah’s connection with Larry had been volatile. Larry’s death had been sudden, abrupt, and shocking. The end took only twenty hours from start to finish. After a lifetime of inveterate drinking, his arteries had exploded in a massive stroke. Norah’s stomach churned when she recalled his last hours in the emergency room. Indelibly imprinted on her mind was Larry’s face contorted with rage as he struggled to say something to her. His fiery eyes penetrated hers as he desperately tried to deliver a message, although he could only spit out guttural grunts, sounds that were reminiscent of a wounded animal. Norah was so distressed to see this big, strong, manly-man reduced to a pathetic beast moaning inhuman noises.
She hated having this final memory of Larry stored in her brain and burned into her soul. She fantasized about how to ablate the area that physically stored it. But she also rationalized that during her long and unhappy marriage, she had never been able to decode what Larry really meant. His inability to deliver his last message was the final end to their story. Norah was of two minds. She wanted to know what he would have said to her as he departed this world. On the other hand, not knowing was a relief; some issues are better left unclarified. Regardless of how much she reviewed and ruminated, the mystery of those unsaid words remained.
“Well, perhaps we’ll see them in the next life,” Norah said teasingly.
Cassie rolled her eyes, smirked, and with an edge in her voice said, “Nonsense. How many Napoleon Bonapartes can live on the planet at the same time? Make the most of what you have now. After a lifetime of studying Victorian spiritualism, I have not found even a shred of believable evidence that anyone comes back. Please don’t start with that nonsense. I cannot cope with it today. You know we are the closest of cronies, but I just can’t listen to any spiritual bullshit.”
“You’ve always been the skeptic,” sighed Norah.
“And you have always been the romantic!” Cassie chided her.
“I like to keep an open mind,” quipped Norah.
The two women became silent. It was a lifelong dispute. They usually avoided heated discussions in order to preserve their friendship. The reality of their spouses’ deaths made the topic more salient, and both women wondered if they should call a truce and speak about the unspeakable.
As they looked at each other, their attention turned to sizing up the changes that had befallen them over the past semester. Each passing year brought another physical alteration such as a new wrinkle, a dark age spot, or a sagging body part. What was once a smooth and tight forehead with shining skin was now a tangle of creases. The cute little micro expressions that were so sexy in youth had taken their toll on their fatigued skin. Smooth to wrinkles; that was the norm. There were options to artificially enhance the cheeks and forehead—just a couple of the numerous body parts that could be injected, lasered, bombarded with pulsating light. Both had explored the options but neither had chosen to pursue what now passed for “eternal youth.” Norah had taken a crack at one Botox injection, but she panicked when she found that she couldn’t feel her forehead or flex her brow. She searched the literature to discover that the consequences of Botox paralysis were destroyed nerve cells, resulting in a lack of facial feedback to others. The unintended aftermath? People misinterpreted the lack of facial expressions as a lack of empathy. Thus, Botox could unsettle social relationships. Her ability to communicate her sentiments to others took priority over looking younger.
Norah had struggled as she stood on the precipice between middle and advancing age. She had weathered the middle age changes successfully and was able to cope with and cover up a few wrinkles here and there. But approaching her seventies was different. She felt less able to accept the wrinkling of the hands, the blue veins showing through the thinning skin, the dark mottling of spots up and down her arms, and the chicken neck. But ultimately her attitude had become one of acceptance with serenity.
Cassie was less tolerant of aging. She despised its unpredictability as she despised any unplanned changes in her existence. The wrinkles, the changing contours of her body, the aches and pains that popped up out of nowhere threw her for a loop. Norah had discussed this many times with Cassie after Cassie had taken out her frustration and dismay not only on Norah but on her family, friends, colleagues, and, at times, even her students. After these moments of catharsis, guilt overwhelmed Cassie and engulfed her in a cloud of deep depression. She would take to her bed, pull the covers over her head, and languish in harsh self-criticism.
Endlessly ambivalent, Cassie found decision making painful, arduous work. It had been that way since she could remember over every year of her life. Her mind was a series of endless loops that played “yes I can, no I can’t; yes, I should, no I won’t.” Trapped in obsessing about all possibilities, exhausting herself by examining every permutation and combination of infinite probabilities meant she often suffered intense psychic pain. Laughter was an infrequent but sought-after friend. She searched for happiness in others. She had found it in Norah, who always seemed to be smiling and consistently on the brink of merriment. Cassie craved Norah’s contagious laughter, which could change her disposition from sour to sweet and from hopeless to hopeful. She often felt she could not go on and wondered if her life were pointless. Now that Cassie had lost her husband, she felt even more intensely aimless.
Norah saw the wistful look in Cassie’s eyes. She decided to snap her out of it and said, “Well, I want to discuss my recent obsession with limited time left in my life. Things like what I want to accomplish before I leave the planet and what legacy I want to leave. What did our husbands leave us? And I mean their emotional bequests more than their material bequests. We can discuss this over lunch. And another important item to discuss centers around our workshops. I think it’s time for us to run another group. My patients are insisting, and I tell them I can’t do it without your creative theater and writing skills. Patients aside, I’m feeling an urge to redesign myself. Running a group keeps me on task, so I don’t feel like a ship without a rudder,” Norah said, laughing.
Norah and Cassie’s intellectual synergy united them. Working as a team, they had designed a group therapy that they named “Self-Authoring Your Life.” They both loved working with motivated clients who wanted to better their lives and were proud of their successes. People in their workshops learned quickly how to enhance the things they liked about their lives and to work on the things they wanted to improve.
Norah shifted in her chair. “I need to remind myself of who I am and what I’m doing, so I feel in much better control of my life. What about you?”
Cassie nodded. “That works for me.” She felt a sense of warmth and comfort. Bill would want her to run a self-authoring group again. “Yes, I’m ready. Something to look forward to.” Cassie felt relieved to be back in the loop with Norah. Her gloom lifted a bit.
“And we are pretty lucky to be able to run the group in Provincetown at the Cape Cod Psychological Symposium headquarters,” said Norah. “Purrr-fecto location. We’ll be in that Norman Mailer house on the beach. It’s filled with good spirits. Pardon the pun.” They laughed as they headed out for lunch.