Mortality

September 2020

My friend Chris died today.  His estranged wife called me to tell me the news before she posted it on social media.  He called me last Saturday and sounded happy for the first time in a long time.   These past few years have hit him hard with crisis after crisis, but it felt like life was looking up.  He called me his dear sister as usual and told me it has been way too long since we saw each other and had a nice long hug.  It had been much too long.  His heart attack was unexpected, but I knew when the text said it was bad news and to call that he had passed away.

He tried to impress me in the school cafeteria by showing off how he could eat a whole quarter of his club sandwich at one time.  I was kind and pretended not to notice when he nearly choked on the toothpick and laughed in secret.  He was eighteen and so young and happy. 

I was nineteen and had yet to find a boyfriend.  It was a tech school with very few girl students and even fewer straight girl students.  I was awkward and idealistic and refused to date anyone who wasn’t a Christian.  There were fewer Christians than girls in that place.  Still, there was a sense of potential availability about me and the boys liked me.  They opened doors when my hands were full of books and there was always a fellow to take me out to eat or go to a dance with when I wanted to go.  I once overheard to boys talking about me.  The first one said that I played hard to get.  The second boy corrected him, “She doesn’t play hard to get.  She is hard to get.”

One afternoon Chris cornered me in the Student Union Building.  He had worked up the courage to make me his even though no one else had succeeded.  It was written all over his posture and beamed from his face.

We had such a sweet time together I didn’t want it spoiled.  I wished with all my might that he wouldn’t do it.  He stepped forward arms open.

“Would you be my…”

I scrunched my eyes tight, balled my fists, and screamed in silent thought, “Don’t do it!  Don’t do it!”

He started again, “Would you be my sister?”

“Of course!  I was so happy that he hadn’t asked me to be his girlfriend that I gave him the biggest hug I could manage and was enveloped in his big bear arms.

He took me to meet his parents, and we spent the day driving around Albuquerque in his old, red truck listening to Simon and Garfunkel on CD.  I held his hand when his parents got divorced and was sad to see him leave school.  He became a truck driver and we lost touch.  A few years later though we met again.  He was back home working in a bookstore in Albuquerque that I frequented.  We exchanged numbers and never lost touch again.  He moved to Atlanta, Georgia and then to Colorado, and I moved all over the place and something always brought us back into each other’s minds.  One year when he was in Atlanta delivering pizza, he came to the door of one of Mike’s cousins.  We were always meant to be there for one another.  Twenty years passed and we were so thankful to have someone in our lives who remembered our time of innocence, how we were before adulthood caught up with us. 

When I moved to Fort Worth, I sprung into existence a woman in her forties with a huge family, but there are a handful of people who remember when I was the kind of girl who looked up gullible in the dictionary when told that it had been removed because they were there.  It’s sad to lose a friend.

After seeing Mom’s long decline, I would much rather die of a heart attack than a lingering illness.  I don’t want to die at all though as it turns out.  I had a telehealth visit with my doctor who put me on a statin to control my cholesterol.  I’ve decided to blame my lack of a gall bladder which was removed in 2000 on the cholesterol because it’s frustrating that it wasn’t lowered by a better diet, exercise, and the red yeast rice eye of newt herb combo I tried.

She also talked me into getting my first mammogram.  Last year’s referral sheet is still crumpled up in the bottom of my purse, so she scheduled it herself.  The problem with having a mammogram is that it is an acknowledgment that I’m the kind of person who might have breast cancer.  That’s as uncomfortable as admitting that I’m the kind of person who could die of a heart attack.  God may grant me many years.  My grandmother is one hundred and five and going strong, but some of my peers are dying of heart disease and cancer.  There are no guarantees.

I’d rather be the supportive friend or daughter in the waiting room than the person taken behind the closed doors of the imaging center.  Thoughts of my friends Kathy, Diane, and Tabby who are mammogram cheerleaders keep me from canceling the appointment and running in the opposite direction.  Medial procedures make me so nervous.  Please keep me in your prayers this week.