WP: Through Thick and Thin
They'd grown apart as one chose family and the other a career. Would cancer bring them back together?
By Pamela Toutant
Sunday, October 8, 2006; W24
My old friend Miriam died recently. Although we had been close for two decades, we hadn't spoken during the last five years of her life, since shortly after her cancer diagnosis. According to those who were with her, her death was not a peaceful one. Along with the agonizing pain of cancer, she had to face leaving her 5-year-old daughter. She was 49 years old. But this is not an elegy; it is the story of a friendship that ruptured at the worst possible time.
Miriam and I met at a college party in Ann Arbor where she held court in a tube top, talking politics inside a circle of smart, smitten men. I had never seen it all in one package: the diamond-bright mind and the flaunted female form. My upstairs neighbor Carol had brought me to the party and, convinced that her two friends would like each other, introduced Miriam to me. Carol was right. While we settled happily together on the host's stained, lumpy couch, Miriam entertained me with the first of her many hilariously astute relationship critiques -- this one about her short and abruptly ended liaison with one of the men at the party, who had become insanely jealous when she received a teaching assistantship and he did not.
When we circled back to each other at the end of the evening, she invited me to her apartment for dinner the next night, which turned out to be her typical fare: an avocado and bean sprouts sandwich. Until the end of our graduate school days, we spent hours together every week over muddy coffee at the Blind Pig Cafe, or sitting around her dusty, cramped apartment with her ancient lapdog, Paco, surrounded by her odd and enchanting knickknacks, talking politics, laughing and analyzing our relationships with men.
After graduation, we moved to the District together, where we took an apartment at "The Elaine." From there, Miriam began her ascent up the steep male face of Washington's political establishment. Finding myself in the right place at the wrong time, I became a consultant; the Reagan era in Washington did not offer much opportunity for a liberal who was trained to run federal programs for the disadvantaged.
Miriam had a buoyant blond charisma and often brought tales to dinner about the discreet invitations of prominent married men. Whereas she bobbed quickly to the surface after disappointment, I often worried out loud and at length about, among other things, whether my consulting contract would be renewed. I came to rely on Miriam's response: "Don't worry. If it isn't, we'll figure something out." She laughed at my jokes and knew I was a writer long before I felt free enough to become one. She became one of the few people in my life who understood exactly who I was.
I eventually got married, and, for the next decade, mostly raised children and gladiolas. Giving birth to a daughter and a son in three short years fundamentally changed the architecture of my life and my psyche, and, as often happens, the spontaneity of my friendships was radically curtailed. Though Miriam tried to be patient, her exasperation about my unavailability and fatigue often came through in her tone and, finally, her comments, such as the time she snapped, "You are taking motherhood too seriously!" This was true, though I would have been the last to admit it. Meanwhile, Miriam dated, made her case on the country's op-ed pages and worked to meet the deadline on her hefty book contract.
Intent on keeping her close, I had chosen her to become my daughter's godmother, with the hope that two people I loved would develop a rich relationship. I invited her to all holiday and family celebrations. But while she often came bearing gifts for my daughter and sometimes played giggly games with her, she never initiated spending any time with her. I eventually became frustrated with the emotional distance Miriam kept -- both from my daughter and, more and more often it seemed, from me. But I also knew, from the few times in the past when I had even jokingly tried to discuss tensions in our friendship, that she was as uninterested in those discussions as any boyfriend of mine had ever been. "I really don't want to have these peculiar conversations," she told me at one point. "Friends should just accept each other, period." But then one summer weekend afternoon while Miriam was visiting, it turned out that she did have something to say. Tired from having been up much of the night before with my son, who had an ear infection, I asked Miriam if she would take my daughter to the park. "You made a choice to have children," she said. "I've made other choices. I'm sorry, but I just can't be involved with them in the way that you want me to be."
Seemingly unaware of the tension building between us, or that I was exhausted from my domestic juggling act, Miriam often dropped by to sit on my kitchen bar stool and talk about her day, while I cooked macaroni and cheese and played traffic cop with my children. "When I got to the TV studio this morning, I was told that they were putting my rival on before me, even though he doesn't have half my experience or half a brain!" I would usually respond with some version of what I believed to be the truth: "If you were a man, you would be an undersecretary by now!" But because the realities of my life -- both my children's soft kisses and their needs -- were outside of her periphery, I felt invisible to Miriam, and my sadness and irritation about what I interpreted as her willful blindness only grew more intense with each encounter. At the same time, I felt uncomfortably exposed: my solid yet flawed marriage; my flawed mothering and the resulting flawed children; one messy, chaotic day bleeding into the next with nothing she would recognize as an accomplishment. Meanwhile, her life had become everything mine was not: income-producing, intellectual and tangible in its achievements -- fueled by, I bitterly noted to myself, eight hours of sleep. I began to wish that she would call before she visited.
I found myself thinking that if only our lives were more alike, the tension would go away, and Miriam and I could return to our era of easy rapport. "I can't wait until you have a baby," I told her one day. The truth of her retort stung. "How would you like it if I told you I can't wait until you get a job?" At one point during a conversation, when my eyes were glazing over, she commented, "You take no girl-friendly interest in my love life anymore." It was true that, more often than not, I couldn't remember her boyfriends' names: the congressional chief of staff, the antiques dealer, the tycoon. When she asked me several years after I had been raising my children, "What do you do all day?" I accused her of not "getting" my life, and of not really being willing to try. She accused me of the same: I had no real appreciation of what it was like to be the only woman in a room full of swaggering Washington pols, and what getting and keeping entry to that room meant to her or required of her. "And it is clear," she told me, "you take no real interest in it."
Ironically, as we saw less of each other, we each began to ardently pursue what the other had. I began to write and to get published; Miriam began fertility treatments and completed her application to adopt a child. A year before, she had fallen in love with a man whom she had hoped to marry and have children with. When it ended, it was one of the very few times I saw her cry. After that, she resigned herself to being "unlucky in love" and made a decision to have a child alone.
Following her doctor's advice, Miriam had surgery to have her uterine fibroids removed. When I visited her in the hospital, she told me her surgery, though more difficult than she thought it would be, was a great success. Then came the blow. A few days later she returned home, shaken and tearful, and called to tell me, "I have cancer -- leiomyosarcoma." I was stunned. Weren't 99 percent of all fibroids benign? "Are they sure?" I asked. They were.
"My doctor told me that, in all of his years of practice, no one in his office has ever seen a case of this kind of cancer." With a rueful laugh, she added: "It's the talk of his office. I guess I'm famous."
The doctor said Miriam would need to have a complete hysterectomy as soon as possible. "But I'm going to look into alternatives," she told me. After we commiserated and before we hung up, she softly said: "Please don't tell anyone. I don't want to have to deal with people's reactions." When I researched her illness on the Web that night, it became clear just how lethal her cancer was: Even with a hysterectomy, she would be lucky to be alive in two years.
Like the rest of her close friends, I was shocked. But unlike her other friends, once my shock wore off, a disturbing dilemma set in: How could I help Miriam through her crisis when our relationship was in the process of dissolution? How could I say to someone I had for many years been so close to, someone who at one time knew the contours of my inner landscape better than anyone, "I'm sorry that you are in a fight for your life, but I can't fully be there for you because, even though we haven't said it out loud, and even though I haven't admitted it to myself, our friendship is dying." I couldn't. Instead, I told myself, I would resurrect our friendship by force of will.
A few weeks after miriam's diagnosis, we had lunch in her newly renovated kitchen. While Miriam ate her diet of raw cabbage and bean sprouts, she told me that she would not have the hysterectomy her doctor insisted was critical, but would instead pursue alternative treatments. After all, she had never felt better; she had a new nutritionist and a great masseuse. And besides, even though she had applied to adopt a child, she hadn't given up on having a biological one as well, and would need her uterus. While she talked, I felt spooked that her natural optimism seemed to have crossed over the line into denial. She jumped up to show me her new couture purchase: a sexy black silk suit with small ruffles on a low-cut neckline, the kind of womanly armor she felt gave her power in a room full of powerful men -- the kind of power her male doctors, if she let them, would destroy.
Given her poor prognosis, I argued energetically against her plan to have or adopt a child. The second and third medical opinions, including one from the national expert at Sloan-Kettering, had delivered the same message: She needed to have surgery as soon as possible to have any chance of surviving. "Why are you not taking their advice?" I pleaded. "This is cancer. Now is not the time to be a hippie!" Her family members and other friends all supported her decision. She was getting "energy treatments" from a guy who worked out of his mother's basement in Baltimore.
"Don't try to talk me out of it," she insisted. "I want to have a baby. I don't need anyone else telling me I can't." In that moment, it became clear that I no longer had any influence with my friend. Miriam had already gone to a place I had never been and didn't understand. A pink blizzard of crab apple petals streamed past her window in the silence. When I turned and looked in her eyes, I saw a hard, black pit of terror. I also sensed that she would die. While she took a phone call, I wandered slowly through her house, taking in the sweet, musty smell of her old furniture and books, and lingering over her provocative art collection. Alone in her living room, I caught myself rehearsing for the emptiness that would come.
For the first few weeks after our lunch, I went through the motions of offering support -- running errands, bringing her food, bolstering her spirits. She was understandably preoccupied, but also distant and, most difficult of all, seemed unappreciative of my help. I took little solace from our encounters, and I wondered what it said about me that I couldn't locate the love, the strong attachment I once felt for her.
The next time she called, Miriam had news: There was a baby girl at an orphanage available to adopt. Elated, she would be flying out in three days to pick her up. While she was gone, she asked me, could I buy the furniture and set up the nursery if she gave me a check?
Stunned, I tried to make sense of the news. Was her plan to adopt a child an act of faith and hope, and was I just too pessimistic a person to see it that way? Or was it a sign of denial and desperation? Worse, given her poor prognosis and the fact that the child would have no other parent, was her decision to adopt a child under the circumstances a colossal moral failure? Whatever the truth, I couldn't help but feel a surge of harsh judgment toward Miriam. At the same time, I knew how much my children meant to me and sympathized with her plight.
After we got off the phone, I anticipated the conversation we wound up having the next day, during which she asked me to consider raising her child if she were to die. I counted everyone who might feasibly step into that role if that sad day were to come. All of her other close women friends were unmarried and childless by choice. And according to Miriam, her family members were not good candidates. After raising my own children for a decade, I was intellectually starved, ready to free up time and energy for work. Panicked at the thought of becoming attached to her child and then being put in the position of having to adopt her or send her back out into a world of strangers, I decided to eliminate myself as a candidate, as well.
When Miriam and I spoke the following day, I tried to talk her out of her plan. Then, partly out of concern for her, and partly because of years of pent-up frustration that she had never seemed to comprehend or appreciate my life as a mother, I got angry. "You just have no idea how much physical and emotional energy it takes to raise a child, Miriam. It is 24 hours a day. You don't know what is going to happen with this cancer. Please don't do this to yourself or to this child." She got angry back. "I'm pissed off about this illness, and I'm not going to let it ruin my chance to become a mother," she argued. "I need all the positive energy I can get right now. The last thing I need is your judgment." Though I had been dreading a showdown, I told her that I couldn't support her decision, and that if her illness progressed, I wouldn't be able to pick up the pieces with her child.
"You have cut off my trust in you at the roots," she said, then punctuated our 20-year friendship with the sound of a dial tone.
Over the next couple of years, I thought about Miriam often, so much so that I sometimes glimpsed her phantom between the aisles at the grocery store or scurrying down the stairs of the health club locker room. Yet each time I discovered a look-alike in her place, I felt relief about not having to face her again. For a couple of years, I occasionally called one of her close friends to see how Miriam was doing; the friend always welcomed my calls and never gave up hope that Miriam and I would find our way back to each other. Sometimes I missed Miriam so badly that I wondered if I had burned the bridge between us because I couldn't bear to walk across it with her to the end. But then time went by, and life accumulated without her, and I woke up one day and realized that I was no longer a part of Miriam's life, nor was she a part of mine. I never called to ask about her again.
One Saturday afternoon years later, after a frenzied morning attending my children's sporting events, the phone rang. My husband brought it upstairs, his eyes soft and sad, and hesitantly handed it to me. When I heard it was the friend of Miriam's whom I had stopped calling a few years before, I braced myself.
"I thought that you would want to know that Miriam passed away yesterday," she gently told me. "She fought it until the end -- she didn't want to go." Even with so much time having passed between Miriam and me, the news landed hard. We cried together, and I told her how sad I felt that I had caused Miriam pain during the most difficult time in her life. It was small comfort when she told me that Miriam had let go of that hurt when she let go of me.
A couple of hours later, I went to the little park behind Miriam's house and sat on a bench dedicated to the memory of a person whose name I can't remember. The day was achy and bleak; a weak gray light squeezed out of a low-hanging sky. Still dazed by the news of her death, I stared down for what seemed like an hour at the park's frozen mud and cracked the small pools of wrinkled ice with a stick I'd found along the way. I thought of our once-cozy daily phone calls, our loopy hilarity, the time she dragged me to Neiman Marcus and talked me into buying a red spandex dress with rhinestones, and the many evenings we took refuge spilling
secrets in front of her fire, each of us curled into one of her tattered blue-velvet wing chairs. Now, loneliness swooped down on me.
At her funeral, I sat with my husband and children toward the back, away from her family and friends, some of whom would likely remember me as the one who let her down. Moments before the service started, Miriam's 5-year-old daughter, an exquisite little girl dressed in a frilly pink dress, walked into the chapel between her new adoptive parents, a couple who already had two children.
Although my feelings for Miriam were muted by five years of absence, I grieved during the service as much for the loss of our once-vital friendship as for the end of her life. As the heartfelt eulogies unfolded, I brooded: Perhaps if I had tried harder to steady the boat, been more understanding, ignored more, had been more forgiving.
Miriam and I used to joke that after the men in our lives had died of heart attacks, we would grow old together. She would wear lilac and her large aquamarine jewelry, and keep her fake blond hair. I would wear a navy blue velour sweat suit and an exasperatingly practical haircut. We would drive around in her gas guzzler, a car I would loudly disapprove of while sinking comfortably into its deep leather seat. But that is not how it turned out, and now I have the rest of my life to make peace with what it became instead.
Pamela Toutant is a freelance writer in Chevy Chase.
©
By Pamela Toutant
Sunday, October 8, 2006; W24
My old friend Miriam died recently. Although we had been close for two decades, we hadn't spoken during the last five years of her life, since shortly after her cancer diagnosis. According to those who were with her, her death was not a peaceful one. Along with the agonizing pain of cancer, she had to face leaving her 5-year-old daughter. She was 49 years old. But this is not an elegy; it is the story of a friendship that ruptured at the worst possible time.
Miriam and I met at a college party in Ann Arbor where she held court in a tube top, talking politics inside a circle of smart, smitten men. I had never seen it all in one package: the diamond-bright mind and the flaunted female form. My upstairs neighbor Carol had brought me to the party and, convinced that her two friends would like each other, introduced Miriam to me. Carol was right. While we settled happily together on the host's stained, lumpy couch, Miriam entertained me with the first of her many hilariously astute relationship critiques -- this one about her short and abruptly ended liaison with one of the men at the party, who had become insanely jealous when she received a teaching assistantship and he did not.
When we circled back to each other at the end of the evening, she invited me to her apartment for dinner the next night, which turned out to be her typical fare: an avocado and bean sprouts sandwich. Until the end of our graduate school days, we spent hours together every week over muddy coffee at the Blind Pig Cafe, or sitting around her dusty, cramped apartment with her ancient lapdog, Paco, surrounded by her odd and enchanting knickknacks, talking politics, laughing and analyzing our relationships with men.
After graduation, we moved to the District together, where we took an apartment at "The Elaine." From there, Miriam began her ascent up the steep male face of Washington's political establishment. Finding myself in the right place at the wrong time, I became a consultant; the Reagan era in Washington did not offer much opportunity for a liberal who was trained to run federal programs for the disadvantaged.
Miriam had a buoyant blond charisma and often brought tales to dinner about the discreet invitations of prominent married men. Whereas she bobbed quickly to the surface after disappointment, I often worried out loud and at length about, among other things, whether my consulting contract would be renewed. I came to rely on Miriam's response: "Don't worry. If it isn't, we'll figure something out." She laughed at my jokes and knew I was a writer long before I felt free enough to become one. She became one of the few people in my life who understood exactly who I was.
I eventually got married, and, for the next decade, mostly raised children and gladiolas. Giving birth to a daughter and a son in three short years fundamentally changed the architecture of my life and my psyche, and, as often happens, the spontaneity of my friendships was radically curtailed. Though Miriam tried to be patient, her exasperation about my unavailability and fatigue often came through in her tone and, finally, her comments, such as the time she snapped, "You are taking motherhood too seriously!" This was true, though I would have been the last to admit it. Meanwhile, Miriam dated, made her case on the country's op-ed pages and worked to meet the deadline on her hefty book contract.
Intent on keeping her close, I had chosen her to become my daughter's godmother, with the hope that two people I loved would develop a rich relationship. I invited her to all holiday and family celebrations. But while she often came bearing gifts for my daughter and sometimes played giggly games with her, she never initiated spending any time with her. I eventually became frustrated with the emotional distance Miriam kept -- both from my daughter and, more and more often it seemed, from me. But I also knew, from the few times in the past when I had even jokingly tried to discuss tensions in our friendship, that she was as uninterested in those discussions as any boyfriend of mine had ever been. "I really don't want to have these peculiar conversations," she told me at one point. "Friends should just accept each other, period." But then one summer weekend afternoon while Miriam was visiting, it turned out that she did have something to say. Tired from having been up much of the night before with my son, who had an ear infection, I asked Miriam if she would take my daughter to the park. "You made a choice to have children," she said. "I've made other choices. I'm sorry, but I just can't be involved with them in the way that you want me to be."
Seemingly unaware of the tension building between us, or that I was exhausted from my domestic juggling act, Miriam often dropped by to sit on my kitchen bar stool and talk about her day, while I cooked macaroni and cheese and played traffic cop with my children. "When I got to the TV studio this morning, I was told that they were putting my rival on before me, even though he doesn't have half my experience or half a brain!" I would usually respond with some version of what I believed to be the truth: "If you were a man, you would be an undersecretary by now!" But because the realities of my life -- both my children's soft kisses and their needs -- were outside of her periphery, I felt invisible to Miriam, and my sadness and irritation about what I interpreted as her willful blindness only grew more intense with each encounter. At the same time, I felt uncomfortably exposed: my solid yet flawed marriage; my flawed mothering and the resulting flawed children; one messy, chaotic day bleeding into the next with nothing she would recognize as an accomplishment. Meanwhile, her life had become everything mine was not: income-producing, intellectual and tangible in its achievements -- fueled by, I bitterly noted to myself, eight hours of sleep. I began to wish that she would call before she visited.
I found myself thinking that if only our lives were more alike, the tension would go away, and Miriam and I could return to our era of easy rapport. "I can't wait until you have a baby," I told her one day. The truth of her retort stung. "How would you like it if I told you I can't wait until you get a job?" At one point during a conversation, when my eyes were glazing over, she commented, "You take no girl-friendly interest in my love life anymore." It was true that, more often than not, I couldn't remember her boyfriends' names: the congressional chief of staff, the antiques dealer, the tycoon. When she asked me several years after I had been raising my children, "What do you do all day?" I accused her of not "getting" my life, and of not really being willing to try. She accused me of the same: I had no real appreciation of what it was like to be the only woman in a room full of swaggering Washington pols, and what getting and keeping entry to that room meant to her or required of her. "And it is clear," she told me, "you take no real interest in it."
Ironically, as we saw less of each other, we each began to ardently pursue what the other had. I began to write and to get published; Miriam began fertility treatments and completed her application to adopt a child. A year before, she had fallen in love with a man whom she had hoped to marry and have children with. When it ended, it was one of the very few times I saw her cry. After that, she resigned herself to being "unlucky in love" and made a decision to have a child alone.
Following her doctor's advice, Miriam had surgery to have her uterine fibroids removed. When I visited her in the hospital, she told me her surgery, though more difficult than she thought it would be, was a great success. Then came the blow. A few days later she returned home, shaken and tearful, and called to tell me, "I have cancer -- leiomyosarcoma." I was stunned. Weren't 99 percent of all fibroids benign? "Are they sure?" I asked. They were.
"My doctor told me that, in all of his years of practice, no one in his office has ever seen a case of this kind of cancer." With a rueful laugh, she added: "It's the talk of his office. I guess I'm famous."
The doctor said Miriam would need to have a complete hysterectomy as soon as possible. "But I'm going to look into alternatives," she told me. After we commiserated and before we hung up, she softly said: "Please don't tell anyone. I don't want to have to deal with people's reactions." When I researched her illness on the Web that night, it became clear just how lethal her cancer was: Even with a hysterectomy, she would be lucky to be alive in two years.
Like the rest of her close friends, I was shocked. But unlike her other friends, once my shock wore off, a disturbing dilemma set in: How could I help Miriam through her crisis when our relationship was in the process of dissolution? How could I say to someone I had for many years been so close to, someone who at one time knew the contours of my inner landscape better than anyone, "I'm sorry that you are in a fight for your life, but I can't fully be there for you because, even though we haven't said it out loud, and even though I haven't admitted it to myself, our friendship is dying." I couldn't. Instead, I told myself, I would resurrect our friendship by force of will.
A few weeks after miriam's diagnosis, we had lunch in her newly renovated kitchen. While Miriam ate her diet of raw cabbage and bean sprouts, she told me that she would not have the hysterectomy her doctor insisted was critical, but would instead pursue alternative treatments. After all, she had never felt better; she had a new nutritionist and a great masseuse. And besides, even though she had applied to adopt a child, she hadn't given up on having a biological one as well, and would need her uterus. While she talked, I felt spooked that her natural optimism seemed to have crossed over the line into denial. She jumped up to show me her new couture purchase: a sexy black silk suit with small ruffles on a low-cut neckline, the kind of womanly armor she felt gave her power in a room full of powerful men -- the kind of power her male doctors, if she let them, would destroy.
Given her poor prognosis, I argued energetically against her plan to have or adopt a child. The second and third medical opinions, including one from the national expert at Sloan-Kettering, had delivered the same message: She needed to have surgery as soon as possible to have any chance of surviving. "Why are you not taking their advice?" I pleaded. "This is cancer. Now is not the time to be a hippie!" Her family members and other friends all supported her decision. She was getting "energy treatments" from a guy who worked out of his mother's basement in Baltimore.
"Don't try to talk me out of it," she insisted. "I want to have a baby. I don't need anyone else telling me I can't." In that moment, it became clear that I no longer had any influence with my friend. Miriam had already gone to a place I had never been and didn't understand. A pink blizzard of crab apple petals streamed past her window in the silence. When I turned and looked in her eyes, I saw a hard, black pit of terror. I also sensed that she would die. While she took a phone call, I wandered slowly through her house, taking in the sweet, musty smell of her old furniture and books, and lingering over her provocative art collection. Alone in her living room, I caught myself rehearsing for the emptiness that would come.
For the first few weeks after our lunch, I went through the motions of offering support -- running errands, bringing her food, bolstering her spirits. She was understandably preoccupied, but also distant and, most difficult of all, seemed unappreciative of my help. I took little solace from our encounters, and I wondered what it said about me that I couldn't locate the love, the strong attachment I once felt for her.
The next time she called, Miriam had news: There was a baby girl at an orphanage available to adopt. Elated, she would be flying out in three days to pick her up. While she was gone, she asked me, could I buy the furniture and set up the nursery if she gave me a check?
Stunned, I tried to make sense of the news. Was her plan to adopt a child an act of faith and hope, and was I just too pessimistic a person to see it that way? Or was it a sign of denial and desperation? Worse, given her poor prognosis and the fact that the child would have no other parent, was her decision to adopt a child under the circumstances a colossal moral failure? Whatever the truth, I couldn't help but feel a surge of harsh judgment toward Miriam. At the same time, I knew how much my children meant to me and sympathized with her plight.
After we got off the phone, I anticipated the conversation we wound up having the next day, during which she asked me to consider raising her child if she were to die. I counted everyone who might feasibly step into that role if that sad day were to come. All of her other close women friends were unmarried and childless by choice. And according to Miriam, her family members were not good candidates. After raising my own children for a decade, I was intellectually starved, ready to free up time and energy for work. Panicked at the thought of becoming attached to her child and then being put in the position of having to adopt her or send her back out into a world of strangers, I decided to eliminate myself as a candidate, as well.
When Miriam and I spoke the following day, I tried to talk her out of her plan. Then, partly out of concern for her, and partly because of years of pent-up frustration that she had never seemed to comprehend or appreciate my life as a mother, I got angry. "You just have no idea how much physical and emotional energy it takes to raise a child, Miriam. It is 24 hours a day. You don't know what is going to happen with this cancer. Please don't do this to yourself or to this child." She got angry back. "I'm pissed off about this illness, and I'm not going to let it ruin my chance to become a mother," she argued. "I need all the positive energy I can get right now. The last thing I need is your judgment." Though I had been dreading a showdown, I told her that I couldn't support her decision, and that if her illness progressed, I wouldn't be able to pick up the pieces with her child.
"You have cut off my trust in you at the roots," she said, then punctuated our 20-year friendship with the sound of a dial tone.
Over the next couple of years, I thought about Miriam often, so much so that I sometimes glimpsed her phantom between the aisles at the grocery store or scurrying down the stairs of the health club locker room. Yet each time I discovered a look-alike in her place, I felt relief about not having to face her again. For a couple of years, I occasionally called one of her close friends to see how Miriam was doing; the friend always welcomed my calls and never gave up hope that Miriam and I would find our way back to each other. Sometimes I missed Miriam so badly that I wondered if I had burned the bridge between us because I couldn't bear to walk across it with her to the end. But then time went by, and life accumulated without her, and I woke up one day and realized that I was no longer a part of Miriam's life, nor was she a part of mine. I never called to ask about her again.
One Saturday afternoon years later, after a frenzied morning attending my children's sporting events, the phone rang. My husband brought it upstairs, his eyes soft and sad, and hesitantly handed it to me. When I heard it was the friend of Miriam's whom I had stopped calling a few years before, I braced myself.
"I thought that you would want to know that Miriam passed away yesterday," she gently told me. "She fought it until the end -- she didn't want to go." Even with so much time having passed between Miriam and me, the news landed hard. We cried together, and I told her how sad I felt that I had caused Miriam pain during the most difficult time in her life. It was small comfort when she told me that Miriam had let go of that hurt when she let go of me.
A couple of hours later, I went to the little park behind Miriam's house and sat on a bench dedicated to the memory of a person whose name I can't remember. The day was achy and bleak; a weak gray light squeezed out of a low-hanging sky. Still dazed by the news of her death, I stared down for what seemed like an hour at the park's frozen mud and cracked the small pools of wrinkled ice with a stick I'd found along the way. I thought of our once-cozy daily phone calls, our loopy hilarity, the time she dragged me to Neiman Marcus and talked me into buying a red spandex dress with rhinestones, and the many evenings we took refuge spilling
secrets in front of her fire, each of us curled into one of her tattered blue-velvet wing chairs. Now, loneliness swooped down on me.
At her funeral, I sat with my husband and children toward the back, away from her family and friends, some of whom would likely remember me as the one who let her down. Moments before the service started, Miriam's 5-year-old daughter, an exquisite little girl dressed in a frilly pink dress, walked into the chapel between her new adoptive parents, a couple who already had two children.
Although my feelings for Miriam were muted by five years of absence, I grieved during the service as much for the loss of our once-vital friendship as for the end of her life. As the heartfelt eulogies unfolded, I brooded: Perhaps if I had tried harder to steady the boat, been more understanding, ignored more, had been more forgiving.
Miriam and I used to joke that after the men in our lives had died of heart attacks, we would grow old together. She would wear lilac and her large aquamarine jewelry, and keep her fake blond hair. I would wear a navy blue velour sweat suit and an exasperatingly practical haircut. We would drive around in her gas guzzler, a car I would loudly disapprove of while sinking comfortably into its deep leather seat. But that is not how it turned out, and now I have the rest of my life to make peace with what it became instead.
Pamela Toutant is a freelance writer in Chevy Chase.
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