What We Learned From Each Other
-- The Dallas Morning News Viewpoints page, July 28, 2002:
Who knows why you become close friends with another person? Is
it chemistry? Are you drawn together by your differences or your
commonalities, your strengths or your weaknesses?
You don't know. What you do know, though, is something about yourself
and your own expectations about life. You are the kind of person who
has always known life is not fair. Maybe you were born knowing it or
you learned it at an early age, but you can never remember not knowing it.
If life were fair, then your close friend would not be dying at the
age of 44. In fact, if anyone deserves to live, it would be Martha
Hale. She is smart, funny, warm, talented and charismatic, deeply
loved by her family and friends. She is full of life and hope. You
never realize how much hope has defined her and guided her life till
she finally loses it.
Martha has lived with metastatic breast cancer for more than three
years. She has endured so many treatments that you and her other
friends have lost count - repeated surgeries, chemotherapy regimens,
radiation to her neck, brain and chest, steroids to control the
radiation's and chemotherapy's side effects, drugs to control the
steroids' side effects, scans, X-rays, blood tests, doctors' visits,
hospitalizations.
But she does so much more than endure. She lives as fully and joyously
as she can. Throughout the past three years, no one who did not know
her would have ever thought she was sick. When her hair grows back,
she colors it a dazzling blond. Her face thins and her cheekbones
emerge and she looks beautiful.
At the long lunches you have together, she talks and laughs. She
wants to hear your stories and your friends' stories - all those silly,
everyday problems and dilemmas the rest of you have. She talks very
rarely about what she is going through. She doesn't want to be a poster
child for breast cancer, someone to be pitied. She is simply doing what
she has to do to live.
But slowly, the treatments begin to wear out and fail her. When she
is hospitalized for the last time, her room is on the seventh floor.
As the elevator doors open, you can turn to the left and go to the
maternity ward or to the right, to the oncology ward. You can always
tell which direction the other elevator-riders will turn in; it is
that clear, that easy.
You turn right, of course, since you are the close friend of someone
who is beginning to die of cancer. You know which direction to turn
and which room number to seek. You don't know much more than that
- what you should do or what you should say.
Martha has lived so brilliantly, so stubbornly and optimistically.
Now she has to learn to die. She knows this, but she refuses to believe
it. It is wrong, it is unfair, and she is furious about it. She has
a genius for life, not death.
She comes home. Her husband, Phil, nurses her tirelessly and devotedly.
Her parents, Nancy and Mac, come to stay and help. Her close friends,
like you, come and go. You bring her favorite pistachio cookies from
the restaurant you used to go to for your long lunches. You know you
will never go there with her again. Your lives and your immediate
futures have now diverged: Martha's task is to die, and yours and her
family's and friends' is to help her.
"Just think," her good friend, Diane, tells you. "We have to let
Martha go - and it's so hard. But think of what she has to do. She
has to let go of all of us - of her whole world and everything she
loves."
You know that's true. What Martha must do is infinitely harder than
what you must do. In fact, you have so little to do and yet you are
doing it so badly. Martha is angry about dying and sometimes she
seems angry at you. You are angry at her for being angry - so what
kind of friend are you? Would a good friend want to scream, "You have
to learn to let go"? Wouldn't a good friend understand that the
qualities that helped her live so well - the tenacity, the dogged
optimism, the grit - are making it harder for her to die?
But why is it so difficult for her to understand that yes, life is
not fair? Why can't she understand the one thing you have always
understood?
One day, you notice the anger has drained from her as completely as her
hope. Her eyes are deep-shadowed and peaceful. She will die and, for
the moment, you will live. Originally, this seemed to be a betrayal.
Now, it is a simple fact.
The betrayal is not to go on living without your dear friend, Martha.
You understand that, finally. The betrayal would be not to live as
well as you possibly can. She taught you that with her own life
- with the long, funny lunches, the exuberant conversations, those
wild snorts of laughter and grief.
Who would have thought that you, the slow learner about life's joys
and pleasures, could have been taught so much by your friend? All
that time, all those riotous hours, you could have sworn you were
only having fun.