a lesson on living
It was April, but winter refused to loosen its grip. The night air felt cold, and old, like a guest who is no longer welcome. We scurried across the dark parking lot—my mother, my husband, my two-year-old son, Jack, and me—hugging our coats around us and stepping around the small puddles that pocked the black pavement. We entered the country club’s front hall, shed our damp things, and headed for the dining room, pushing back our hair and adjusting our clothing as we went.
As soon as we got to the entrance, I saw Margaret standing behind the bar mixing drinks, and I headed straight for her. I love seeing Margaret. She radiates warmth and the most lovely sort of grace. Margaret is tall, has very blond, poofy hair, and wears thick black mascara. But the beautiful young girl she once was, 20 or 30 years ago, is still there, still apparent, beneath the years and the makeup. Margaret is the kind of person who lights up when she sees you, as if she has been missing you and is ever so glad to see you now, even though the truth is that she hardly knows you. And then, whoever you are, she listens intently to what you have to say as if it were the most interesting thing she has heard in some time. She laughs sweetly at your jokes and winks knowingly at your wisecracks and smiles at almost everything else, seeing whatever is good in you and, in doing so, helping you to see it too.
I love seeing Margaret because of all this, but mostly I love seeing Margaret because she did all of this for my father. She made him feel special. She made him feel young. She helped him sense the wonderfulness in himself. My father could be blunt and impatient and he could talk incessantly at times. Most people respected him as a doctor, and put up with him otherwise. But some people, like Margaret, saw beyond his prickly exterior to his soft innards. She saw a kind and sensitive man and she embraced him in his entirety. In doing so, in embracing this man, she embraced me too.
My parents used to go to this club on Friday evenings for the weekly cocktail hour and, in my single days when I lived nearby, I would sometimes meet them there. The drinks weren’t free, but the stuffed mushrooms and mini-meatballs and barbecued ribs were, and Dad would eat enough to call it dinner. Being quasi-retired and not completely sure of what to do with his workday, he was usually the first to arrive. He would settle himself on one of the five barstools and Margaret would plant a bowl of mixed nuts in front of him and then make a whiskey sour in a tall glass, shake it up with ice, and decorate it with a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry. When bar business was slow, as it often was early in the evening, the two of them would talk and laugh, and she would call him Doctor with enormous respect and look at him with the most tender eyes, and Dad would melt at having such attention, especially from a tall, attractive woman with very blond hair.
As I walked into the room on that drizzly night, Margaret was plunking lipstick-red cherries into three fruity drinks and chatting with my mom, who had walked in a minute before me. Margaret looked up and gave me her I’m-so-happy-to-see-you smile, and I started to return it when I noticed my mother’s stunned expression. Then I saw Margaret. Really saw her. It was a whittled-down Margaret. Emaciated. Anorexic. Her face was still pretty, but it was also gaunt. The thick blond hair that usually fell in waves around her face was now sparse and limp, pulled back with a hair elastic. The black bow tie of her uniform hung askew at her neck because there was nothing to hold it up. Her white shirt fell loosely on the bones of her narrowed shoulders, and tiny, angular wrists poked out of two open cuffs.
I knew what had happened before Margaret told me, but her explanation jolted me anyway because it was so blunt. “I have terminal cancer.” She said it without embarrassment. She said it without anger. She said it without self-pity. She said it simply and factually, with just a hint of shared sorrow, as in “Oh well, some bad news. But there it is. What are you going to do?”
Margaret explained that she had gone for her annual physical eight months earlier, in August, and the doctor had given her a clean bill of health. But as she was leaving she mentioned that her ulcer was acting up again. A routine ultrasound revealed a pancreatic tumor the size of a golf ball and follow-up tests showed that the cancer had spread to other parts of her body. At that stage, pancreatic cancer typically kills its victims within six months, which would have given Margaret until February—two months earlier. At 53, Margaret, dear, sweet Margaret, was living on borrowed time.
As my mother went to find our table, Margaret told me about her illness and about her impending death. I hadn’t mentioned my research; she simply had no qualms about talking about this subject. She was at ease, which put me at ease. I asked her what she was going through and she told me about her pain—minor, she said—about her chemo—she’d had some nausea, but not too bad—about her hair loss—thank God she still had most of it—and about her weight loss—“All my life I wanted to be thin and now I can’t put on weight,” she said with a chuckle. As she spoke, I stood in awe of her acceptance, her courage, and—as always with Margaret—her grace.
“I never felt, ‘Why me?’ ” she said. “I never felt angry or that this was unfair. Life has ups and downs and this is my down. This is my time.” She spoke softly and gently, as if not wanting to hurt me or jar me in any way. This illness, this dying, was something that she had accepted. These were the cards she had been dealt. She was not resentful or afraid.
I learned later that long before she became ill, Margaret had spoken openly about death many times. She said the usual things about not wanting to be kept alive on life support or with other aggressive medical treatments, but she went further than that, talking about cremation, her funeral, how she wanted to be remembered, and her thoughts on an afterlife. “She was very open about what she wanted,” her daughter told me. “People would say, ‘Are you planning on dying sometime soon?’ And she would say, ‘No. But it shouldn’t be something that’s scary to talk about. It’s just a part of life. It’s just the next stage.’ ”
Death, she believed, delivered you to some sort of life beyond and a reunion with others. And Margaret had plenty of others she was looking forward to seeing. She had lost three of her six siblings and at least one dear friend. One sister, who was also her very best friend, had died only a month earlier, in March, of a heart attack. While obviously upset over her sister’s death, Margaret was also strangely soothed by it. It made her own death that much more bearable. As she explained it to me: “She’s up there now, making a path for me.”
No, Margaret wasn’t afraid of death and she wasn’t afraid of dying. Not really. She had cried a few times when she looked in the mirror and saw a face that she no longer recognized as her own. And she had been concerned about pain, but her doctor had assured her that he could keep her comfortable. She knew clearly where she was headed. Her concern was not for herself but for her 21-year-old daughter, Kim. Kim, she told me, was not taking this well.
In the time that I knew her, Margaret never spoke much about herself, but she spoke often about Kim, and when she did, she glowed. Kim was her baby, her pride, her reason for being.
Margaret herself had grown up in a basement apartment in the Bronx. Her parents were immigrants. Her father worked on the New York subways and her mother cleaned houses. Her family was poor and Margaret was deeply embarrassed by their poverty. So she worked hard to escape it, first by taking secretarial jobs, then through a modeling career, and eventually, after moving to Connecticut with her husband, at the country club. Her reward was a small house on the water, surrounded by roses, and a different kind of life for her only child.
Kim, who inherited her mother’s beauty and femininity, was about to graduate from Boston College and was planning to go on from there to law school. It was Kim’s graduation, this huge mark of success, that was keeping Margaret alive. She told her best friend that she was ready to die, but couldn’t. She had to hang on to see her daughter get her diploma. In order to do that, Margaret did the unimaginable: She opted for surgery and underwent chemotherapy and suffered its side effects. “Nothing was going to stop her,” Kim said. “My mom was not a physically strong person, but I didn’t realize how strong she was mentally. She told her doctor she was going to make it to my graduation. She said she couldn’t die without leaving me settled.”
Margaret and I were still talking when my little son, Jack, clambered up onto the barstool next to me. Margaret turned her attention to him, asking him about an oversized tie he was wearing (his grandfather’s) while she mixed up a Shirley Temple with four cherries and two straws. She catered to him and elated him and captured him, just as she used to do with my father, his namesake. As I watched the two of them together, I couldn’t help it, the tears began to stream down my face. My father was gone. Margaret was dying. She saw my face and turned to hug me. And then she looked into my eyes and said softly, “Maybe I’ll see your dad soon.”
I headed for the ladies’ room.
The following month, Margaret achieved her goal. She made it to Boston for her daughter’s graduation. Then it was just a matter of time. She had gotten her finances in order and redrafted her will. She was ready. She spent her final days tending to her beloved garden and enjoying the view of the sea from her porch. Slowly, she began to enclose her world, refusing to see most visitors and doing less each day.
One day in mid-July, Kim, who was spending the summer with friends in Rhode Island, noticed a change in her mother’s voice as they spoke on the telephone. She drove home as soon as she could and arrived to find her mother in bed. Weak. Small. Quiet. Sickly. Life was draining out of her fast.
“You actually watch the person die right in front of you,” Kim recalls. “You want to stop it but you can’t. I thought, when I die the best way would be to have someone hold me and just be there, and not judge and not cry, because you’re scared yourself. You don’t need someone else pulling energy from you. My mother and I were alone in the room together, I was lying on the bed, holding her, and we were sharing stories. I was there for 48 hours straight, brushing her hair or making sure her Blistex was on, and keeping people away. I was adamant about no one coming into the room. It was a very private moment. My dad was in and out, but I wanted to be there every second. We’d been through so much together.
“My mother wasn’t like a mom. We were so close it was amazing. Without a doubt, she was my best friend.”
At such a young age, Kim was watching her mother/soulmate/inspiration die, and was helping her to go. She watched death creep in, as her mother’s body became thinner, as her legs and arms became cool, and her breathing became heavier. She watched her mother depart.
At one point Margaret awoke, slightly anxious. Her breathing was rapid. She pointed toward the corner of the room and said, “Look, look! It’s so beautiful.”
“I was like, ‘Mom, I can’t see anything,’” Kim said. “She was trying to share something with me and I couldn’t see anything. Some people think that you hallucinate on morphine, but she was so convinced and she was so fully conscious that I can’t believe it was a hallucination.” After that vision, Kim said, her mother was much calmer and slept for longer intervals. She realized then that her mother was ready to go.
Late in the afternoon a day or two later Kim was lying with her mother while a few family members milled around. They started to talk about Margaret’s death and Kim balked. “Hearing is one of the last things to go, so don’t talk like that when you’re in this room,” she said. “Kim,” they said to her, “maybe you have to let go.” There was a frozen moment of silence and then Margaret, who had not moved in 24 hours, pulled her frail body on its side and lay one thin arm around her daughter’s shoulders.
“It was amazing, how she got those long arms wrapped around me. I don’t know how she did it,” Kim said. “But that was my good-bye.”
That night, when everyone was asleep and the house was quiet, Margaret took one last breath, paused, and then exhaled the last bit of air in her body. With that, she was gone.
“She looked absolutely beautiful,” Kim says, sitting on her mother’s porch, looking out over the gardens and seascape that her mother so loved. “She was in her own bed. She had this peaceful expression. She was beautiful.”
Heeding Margaret’s detailed instructions, her family cremated her and on the following Saturday, they held a party. Margaret did not believe in funerals, and especially disliked the idea of wakes. She wanted a party. She wanted people to celebrate. She wanted people to remember her as she was, alive and exuberant, not as someone dead and made-up to look alive. At the party, she insisted, there were to be no “funeral sprigs.” People could bring a single yellow rose or make a donation to hospice.
Although Kim and her father expected a crowd, they never anticipated the hordes of people who came to celebrate Margaret’s life and bid her farewell. Nearly 300 people jammed into her tiny house, most of them carrying a single yellow rose and a photo of Margaret.
“We had pictures of Mom and yellow roses all over the house,” Kim recalled later. “It was definitely something she would have enjoyed. People were hanging out windows. There were limbs everywhere. There was laughter. People were sharing stories. It was an extreme tribute to her. The cards still haven’t stopped. We have boxes upon boxes and we’re trying to respond to them all but it’s impossible. She touched a lot more people than I ever knew.”
Obviously, Margaret’s death changed Kim’s life, but not simply because she lost her mother. The death itself, being part of that passage, was a turning point. “The whole experience gave me strength,” she says. “There are some things you can’t fight and the more you fight, the more miserable you’ll be. I think that being close to someone and being there through the whole process helped me so much. It sounds eerie, watching someone die, but it was the best therapy for me. Facing it, what it brings. I know a lot of people saw my mom, a skeleton, saw her discomfort and then left the room and didn’t know anything else. The only picture in their heads is, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to deteriorate and be in such discomfort.’ But when you’re there through the whole process, you see that that is just a minor part of it. The rest of it is coming to terms and having your good-byes.
“The best therapy for us was the laughter. She and I loved to laugh together. Even toward the end, we were laughing. Those are the memories that we share.”
My own final memory of Margaret was that night at the country club. We spoke by phone after that, but I never saw her again.
After dinner, I went to say good-bye to Margaret while my mother took Jack exploring. The two of them found a doorway behind the bar which led to a large hallway with a grand chandelier. They decided that they were in a ballroom and began to dance. Jack’s striped oxford shirt hung out on one side, one of his red Keds had come untied, and his green baseball cap was turned sideways on his blond head. Holding hands with his grandmother, he swirled and laughed and pranced wildly about the room.
Margaret and I stood together, watching them. “My mother taught me that you have to become innocent again,” she said, not taking her eyes from the dancing pair. I looked at her for a moment, confused. “You have to bring yourself back to your childhood,” she explained, “to get that innocence, to accept people fully, the way children do.”
“Do you have to see death, be close to death, before you can do that?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “You work your whole life trying to do that.”
Margaret did it. She achieved that innocence, and in doing so was one of the most accomplished people I have ever met. She accepted people, found the good in them, and relished life. She was pure and unfettered.
Someone once told me that some people are like shooting stars. We look out and see them for a moment against the dark sky and we say “aahhh.” And then they are gone. A life so brief, and yet so brilliant. Margaret was, for me, a flash of starlight, a wonder and an inspiration. I don’t know if she is reunited with her siblings and friends, handing out maraschino cherries at a party of the everlasting—I certainly hope she is—but I know for a fact that she lives on, lives on and on, in all that she was and all that she gave to others. A life well lived; a death full of love. What more can we ask for?