My Friend

My friend Marion died last month.  She lived alone.  I knew her for nine years and in that entire time her infirmities were never her chief subjects in conversations with me.  She loved life and inclined towards its rhythms, demands and especially the anticipation of its rewards: good fellowship, enjoying a laugh and the simple human pleasure of liking others and being liked. She, not surprisingly, enjoyed traveling and moping was not her style despite the sorrows and burdens that permeated many parts of her days.

In fact, I first met her on a day trip to southeastern Connecticut, one that was conceived by an old friend and his wife, together with her friend, a lady who was our mutual friend (Marion's and mine) and with whom I was becoming more and more attracted to. Arguably, I sensed even then the unrequited dynamics of this older friendship. It may have spurred the psychic energy that burst forth even more than may normally have been the case, when on that occasion of being informally introduced to Marion, we seemed to hit it off.  I quickly sympathized with her physical limitations through the calculation again perhaps, of my own circumscribed and forlorn hopes with the object of my desire. Simply,  I sought companionship with one who could well afford to respond to its offering. For starters, she could not keep up with the walking pace of the other four of us. She had had major surgeries in recent years and was a cancer survivor who ambulated in her own way, that is, with determination, but incapable of "snapping it up." Thankfully, no one boorishly urged her to step lively and I adjusted my steps in order to not leave her alone as we advanced to our touring destinations: a train ride, then a short boat cruise and finally an inviting seafood restaurant with its promise of the pleasant sating of our well developed appetites as the summer sun began its descent in the pinkish skies above us. 

Befriending Marion came rather naturally to me as I grew up doting on and being doted upon by my maternal grandparents whose gradual advancing enfeeblement was perceived despite my tender years. She wasn't quite yet seventy nine, but she seemed older even though her strivings to maintain independence were such (she worked full time until nearly the day she took ill) that one less than sharply attuned to her weariness could easily have assumed her efforts to have been routine rather than the heroic ones that hindsight now seems to indicate. Her uncomplaining ways were no doubt a part of that misperception and I was perhaps as guilty as anyone else of not considering her true situation.

The end for her began as it does for some of us (and as it ends for, arguably, all of us)….alone.  She awakened in the night with a confusing pain and then a tumble to the floor that her injured brain slowly gathered required the making of an emergency telephone call.  The stars were not with her as a chance breakdown in 911 communications that particular evening left her waiting for many hours before help arrived. The rest was perhaps unremarkable once the diagnosis and her condition were revealed. It was in no way less sorrowful for her family or for me and I visited her on three consecutive Wednesdays but not before puzzling for too long about her unreturned e-mail several days after the event.  She lived for twenty-five days. The day after my third visit was her last.  I wrote a letter to our mutual friend's brother in order to inform her without irritating anew the quiescent psychic wounds of our long ago falling-out.  The deafening silence that resulted intensified the grief, as one of an unshared nature is often shaped.

I attended the funeral at graveside as I was unable to make the wake. It was dreadfully short and seemed almost perfunctory. She was to be placed alongside her parents in a plot nearly against a point of the cemetery's perimeter's chain link fence. Mere yards away is a small airport where single-engined planes take off with surprising suddenness and as unavoidable reminders of and metaphors for ascending souls.

A mass, this blog entry and perhaps some other remembrance are all I can do. One of Marion's sons predeceased her and a tree in his memory was arranged some years ago. This is something I shall explore.