Welcome to American Writers Review; a multi-genre literary and art journal. Though we've been in print for a number of years, we are still searching for the best work to share with our readers.
Welcome to American Writers Review; a multi-genre literary and art journal. Though we've been in print for a number of years, we are still searching for the best work to share with our readers.
That particular week between Christmas and New Year’s was meant to be about painting, not the loss of my friend Susie. We’d decided to forgo our traditional Twilight Zone marathon, mostly prone on the couch, inhaling Ring Dings. Guilty pleasures and expectant vigils would have to wait. We had a room to paint.
I had harbored secret plans to convert my son’s room to an office since he had left for college nearly 10 years ago. It was time to accept how our lives were changing, that the little boy was a man, and the mother in me might make more room for the writer I wanted to be. The room remained adorned with high school awards, posters of Green Day and Jeff Buckley. A faint scent of old socks lingered. The ceiling glowed at night with a universe of stars, installed randomly, to help my then five-year-old boy conquer the dark—and to stop his forays to my room in the middle of the night with fear writ large in his china blue eyes.
We started by scraping off those luminescent stars one by one. Some gave up without a fight, others were stubborn. We passed a screwdriver back and forth to pry them off.
Once the ceiling was a blank canvass and the walls were spackled and sanded, we went to the hardware store. Drop cloths, brushes, edger tool that never worked, paint to match the color in the rest of the house and white enamel to transform the natural wood trim. We found the claim of “primer included in paint” to be a lie. Not one, not two, but three coats were required to cover the wood grain. So, things don’t always work out as you plan, big surprise, I thought, as I spread a third coat on the closet door; wide strokes finally covering the grain with a solid gloss sheen. And little boys grow up.
As we finished up the trim, my cell phone rang in my pocket. I fumbled to answer, my latex gloves sticking to themselves and the phone. When I saw Annie’s name on the display, I knew before she said, “I have some sad news,” that our dear friend Susie had passed away. I held the phone against my chest trying to summon my words and breathe. “We’ll talk later,” I was able to say after a few moments of silence. Still unable to move, I mumbled, “She’s gone,” to my husband. He understood, sliding his arm around me. We had known it was a matter of days at that point.
Later that night, Annie and I met at her house to hug and drink Susie’s favorite wine. Our own Irish-Jewish mash-up of a wake and sitting Shiva.
For forty years, four of us, one who had since moved away, would meet for “girls night” dinners, drinking more in our twenties, less in our thirties with kids waiting at home, and leveling off in our forties and fifties. We laughed when one of us mistook bright red lipstick for a Chapstick in her purse and, without looking in a mirror, drew a large circle around her mouth. We lamented when one of our kids had a heartbreak. We cried when parents passed away, when siblings had hardships, when our marriages weren’t perfect. We gave advice freely, freely accepting or ignoring it. Mostly, it was important just to show up for each other.
When we couldn’t manage evenings, we switched to lunches at a Thai place where your name went up in lights for your birthday. We went for each of our birthdays to see that spectacle. Feigning surprise that our pals had put in the request. Pointing and laughing at a misspelled name, which seemed to happen every time.
My relationships with these women would be the longest of my life.
I remember a conversation discussing an article we had read about breast cancer. We were young, just on the cusp of 40. All healthy without a cloud on the horizon. One in four women, it warned. We looked at each other and waved off the thought. When Susie was diagnosed, we remembered the statistic. She recovered and stayed with us for another eight years before a new cancer was found in her lungs. Then a little over a year before this last phone call.
After crying on the couch for 20 minutes, I returned to help my husband work on the room. I tugged my work gloves on, thinking she would want this. What better homage to a woman who built her house, with her husband, with her own hands. From the foundation to framing walls and laying flooring, they built an amazing home on a hilltop in the Connecticut woods for themselves and their three children. I was a suburban Jersey girl who had never heard of such a thing. I could barely hang curtains. Later, Susie went on to show me that people could actually make baby food for their infants, and sew their clothes from scratch. She was our super Earth Mother.
When my sister died suddenly a few years ago, I went to Susie. We sat on her porch, looking out at the lush woods, two cups of tea getting cold next to the cookies I had brought. She listened while I rambled about my sister’s death, talking non-stop for an hour. “I’m sorry I’m boring you with all this,” I apologized. “All these details over and over.” Susie simply laid a hand over mine and I began to cry. I cried for many minutes as she held my hand, feeling no expectation that I needed to stop.
Now, I taped up a window and went to work on the frame. The tape made it easy to paint the white enamel around the glass. We sailed along, thinking we were brilliant not to hire anyone to do this obviously simple job; congratulating ourselves on saving the money.
Next was the color. But when we opened the can, it looked pink. Not the subtle neutral beige of the rest of the house. The setback suddenly brought tears to my eyes. Nothing is what it seems, not what we think it will be.
After her second diagnosis of lung cancer, Susie had begun planning her death. I was recovering from surgery and she was visiting to keep me company. She’d asked me what she could do and I told her to cook me some risotto, not expecting her to do it. After stirring the mixture of rice and onions and broth for a full half hour, she sat on my green velvet couch perched against the purple wall and told me she was sifting through her belongings. Giving things away. Tossing others. Deciding what to save for her two daughters. She was still fairly healthy, breathing easily and making it hard to believe she was even sick. A hiker, skier and snow-shoer, she still exuded health and strength. I even entertained the idea, or was it magical thinking, that her doctors were completely wrong. Who cooks risotto and then dies? But she was being practical.
“I was saving baby clothes I made for my grandchildren. I don’t even know if there will be any grandchildren.”
“You don’t know what will happen,” I had said, trying to convince her to put aside the baby clothes. I vaguely remember making her laugh at some aspect of the dilemma, and I hope that memory is true. She had one of the most joyous, raucous laughs of anybody I’ve ever known. Her husband said he could find her in a crowd by listening for her laugh. If I concentrate now, I can still hear it rolling up from her belly and attaining a near-operatic pitch.
When we’d let the paint dry on a patch of wall, it turned out the color was right. Thank God. My relief was all out of proportion. Then, as we started painstakingly edging the baseboards, molding, and ceiling with color, we remembered why we had hired professionals to paint the bulk of the house. This was impossible to get right. Not one edge was even. It looked like a kindergarten project.
Then, in a burst of confidence, I thought I had it. Steady hand, tip of the brush, heavy paint cover. Zip zip zip! Voila! Until I stepped back and saw the ragged edge of paint on the edge of the window. Why am I always so sure I know what I am doing, doing it right, until I find out I am not? “I suck at this,” I announced, and went over to paint the corners of the wall where I could do no harm.
When Susie had learned that any treatment would likely buy her only a few months at best, she refused it. The cancer was in both lungs. She’d had chemo for her breast cancer and it had torn at the fabric of her. Her quality of life, not the length of it, was her criteria for any treatment. She even used the initials QOL when talking about what she would or would not tolerate. Chemo was non-QOL. Mobile oxygen allowed for better QOL. A moderate amount of painkillers were QOL.
When we’d met for lunch at a local café, which turned out to be our last, I tried to encourage her to stay with us for as long as possible, begging her to reconsider, to go to New York or Boston for another opinion. I was my pushy best, believing that I might be saving her life. “We don’t want to lose you,” I said, “Your family needs you here.”
She was already feeling crappy, but at that moment her annoyance was with me. Pivoting to brutal honesty, she told me to stop making her feel guilty about her decision to forgo treatment. She needed me on her side. My shrimp piccata turned to cardboard in my mouth.
“It’s out of love,” I pleaded.
“It doesn’t feel that way,” she said. Which broke my heart.
After that, I tried to be fully supportive of her decision, though I’m not sure she believed me. Looking back, maybe I was being selfish, wanting to stave off the changing landscape of my own life. Children leaving, friends moving away—and now Susie dying.
The room in the small chapel was crowded with perhaps 200 people. Susie’s daughter spoke of her wish that her death be celebrated. A release. A happy occasion freeing her from pain. Laura Nyro’s song “I’m Not Scared of Dying”—one of Susie’s favorites—played, but I was upset that it was the Blood, Sweat and Tears version, not the original, which she liked better. The mourners were asked to give her a hearty AMEN as a bookend to a life well lived; to clap or dance as we felt so moved. Annie and I looked at each other and shrugged. We did not feel moved into celebration. I let myself be sad, selfishly, for the loss of a beautiful soul, a wonderful friend. I looked around at the many people she had touched both as a spiritual advisor, and simply as a good friend who listened with her whole heart. We were all evidence of her life’s work. Susie had taught me a great deal in her life, and now with her death.
I was determined to fix the lines I had blurred in our re-born room. With an eyeliner makeup brush, I concentrated on painting a deliberate straight, clean line. I steadied my hand, leaned my palm and held my breath with each stroke. I lay flat out on the floor to get the top edge of the white baseboard as even as I could, wondering why I hadn’t done this to begin with.
Looking around the room, I was proud of the work we had done. But when I glanced up at the newly white ceiling, I missed the stars.
Judy Mandel