When Endings Can Mark Beginnings

It’s not that I was going to be surprised. I just was unsure of precisely when it would arrive. A close friend of more than 25 years had been struggling with Stage 4 lung cancer for more than four years. The last six months were a horrific struggle. I was dreading the news of her passing.

Lisa, who was never a smoker, had been through years of treatments and now there were tumors in her brain, liver and throughout her body. I felt useless to be of significant help. She lost her hair; I sent her hats. We texted back and forth, but her last text just two weeks earlier was that it hurt too much for her to type.

As she lived in Virginia outside of Washington, D.C., I had not seen her since the fall of 2019 when we attended a conference together and I stayed at her home before flying back to Chicago. The pandemic hit in early 2020 and because she was immunocompromised, she was extremely cautious. She washed all the groceries before bringing them inside her home. She was not taking visitors.

We kept up on zoom, e-mail, phone calls and texts. She was working on a book and trying to finish it — she needed all the time to write, so I could not visit. I started asking when I could see her in September of last year. It was never the right time. She could not risk infection.

“Is your book almost done?” I asked. “When is it due to the publisher?”

“Six months,” she responded.

“Good, you can get it done by then,” I reassured her.

“I don’t think I have six months.”

I couldn’t respond right away because I needed to cry.

On our last text thread before her passing, she wrote that she loved me, was grateful to me and knew I cared about her.

Still, I wasn’t ready. Are we ever ready?

Intellectually I think I can convince myself of almost anything, but the emotional reality is that grief and loss are creatures operating on their own timeframes. I may perceive my grief recovery as deliberate and well-planned but the inconvenient truth is that I am expecting my grief to absorb quickly. But grief has the temperament and agility of a stubborn sloth.

Every spring — when I am not dodging hail, rain or mixed snow — for a dose of mental health relief, I plan and dream about the annuals I will feature in front of my house and the accents to punctuate my garden. I plot what pots to place where. I think about plant heights, colors, the fullness of leaves, what will absorb strong sunlight, what will fill out the corners of the porch.

Lisa loved anything and everything that has to do with the outdoors. When we traveled to work conferences together — which we did for 25 years — we went for long hikes. She was an avid bicyclist and did one 500-mile trip from Amsterdam to Paris, and also the RAGBRAI bike trip across Iowa.

My bicycle sits unused in the garage.

We were so much alike, and so not alike in many ways. She was far more daring in her work and in her life than I ever have been or will be. She and her husband took their 1-year-old son on a sailing trip across the South Pacific for three years before stopping in Japan for another two years. She lived in Afghanistan for two years working as a journalist and later for the United States Agency for International Development.

It’s not that she wasn’t careful, it’s that she wasn’t afraid. Perhaps I can begin to emulate her.

With the pandemic that laced the world with its dangers mostly over, the daily bracing for trauma has mostly subsided. We speak of renewal and revitalization, new beginnings. I think we do that because we need to, in order to feel hopeful that everything does not end all at once.

So many of us lost loved ones to COVID, departures we did not expect to endure. At the same time, loss from all other sources of tragedy continued. And continue still.

I know it is a choice to retain the value and blessings of what is lost in the face of sorrow. I can take in the enormity of the loss of a friend I have cherished for nearly half of my life. And I can decide to begin each new day trying to be a bit more like her, so I hold close the memories of her that fill me.

I can start by going for a long bike ride. And then coming home to plant exuberant flowers that she would love.