R.I.P.

My mom's best friend died Friday night.

Everyone, I think, no matter how old they are, has a friend like Kay. They're loyal, always there when you need something, always ready to include you in their plans, and you'd appreciate these sterling qualities more if they didn't have so many habits that drove you stone-cold crazy. They second-guess your driving or pick lint off your carpet or display an astonishing ability to ignore the clock and always, always arrive late. They sneeze dramatically in restaurants and blame it on the air-conditioning vent, even in high December; when they're in your house, they're constantly twitching their noses as though they smell something disagreeable, but they'll never tell you what it is.

Kay was one of these friends. I would call my mom and listen to another Kay story--what she'd done, what she'd said, how annoyed my mother was by it--and I'd know that advice wasn't what she wanted; she wanted a listening ear, someone to tell her that she wasn't wrong to be annoyed. I didn't always give her that; sometimes, if I thought she was blowing something out of proportion, I'd just tell Mom, "I find it discouraging to have absolute PROOF that--even at seventy-five years old--we never really mature past junior high." She would laugh, usually, and always add, "I shouldn't complain...she's such a good friend."

And she was. Kay had five sons and daughters; the youngest, a girl, had been in grade school a year ahead of me. Some of them lived out of town, some in the area--I never did get them all straight in my head: who was one of Kay's kids and who were the sons- and daughters-in-law, which grandkid belonged to which parent, who lived where. But all of them, when they invited their mother somewhere, almost always invited my mom too. Baptisms, birthday parties, anniversaries, First Communions--my mom was always invited to come along with Kay. ("I wonder if they think we're lesbians or something," my mom laughed once.) Kay's kids treated my mom better than her own family treated her, something for which I was always grateful.

Mom and Kay were part of a larger group, a loosely-knit bunch of older ladies. There was always drama in this group--who had insulted whom, who hadn't been properly glad to see whom, all sorts of intrigue--but at least my mom wasn't sitting home alone on the weekends. I often said half-jokingly, "Mom has a better social life than I do." They went to dinner, celebrated each others' birthdays, dressed up together for Halloween parties at the widows-and-widowers club. And once a month, they played poker.

It was at Wednesday's poker game that Mom first noticed something was wrong with Kay. "She looked pale," Mom told me Thursday when I called, "like maybe something was wrong. And then this morning when I called her...she sounded..." She paused, fishing for a description of how strange Kay had sounded. "She sounded like she'd had a few, actually," Mom said. "But I know Kay's not a drinker..." She'd had bronchitis, Mom said, and as usual she was refusing to go to the doctor. "She doesn't even HAVE a primary-care doctor! When she gets sick she goes to the Doc-in-the-Box..."--Mom's name for the urgent-care clinic in our neighborhood--"and they give her antibiotics or whatever. But she hasn't had a full medical workup in probably twenty-five or thirty YEARS." Though I share my dad's antipathy toward medical attention, even I thought a quarter-century gap between appointments was a bit extreme; to Mom, the retired nurse, it's heresy. "I hope everything's okay," Mom said.

It wasn't. Thursday night Mom called me and told me she'd had another strange conversation with Kay; she was slurring her words, Mom said, and losing her place in the middle of sentences. "I called Tracy," she said, naming one of Kay's daughters, "and I said to her 'I don't mean to be nosy or anything, but I'm really worried.'" Apparently the rest of the family was worried too, and tried to talk her into going to the hospital, but Kay was adamant. "I'll go to the doctor on Monday if I don't feel better," she told them sometime Thursday.

Friday afternoon Mom called me again, even more worried. "I called Rae-Ann,"--Kay's daughter-in-law--"and she's going over later to check on her and see if she can't drag her to the hospital. I talked to her again this morning and she just sounded terrible--like she wasn't all there!" Under the edges of the worry, I could tell she was annoyed, too. "What can you do with someone so stubborn?" she asked.

Friday evening, Mom called again, just before 7:00. "They just took Kay to the hospital," she said. "Rae-Ann and Tracy said they went over at about 6:00 and they found her on the floor, unresponsive. They called the ambulance...I told them to call me as soon as they knew anything," she said.

When it comes to illness, I am a relentless, rose-colored optimist, a slave to the literal meanings of words. To me, "unresponsive" is a very bad thing, but not irrevocable; it means "not communicating, not answering questions, not awake." "Unresponsive" doesn't mean "dead". So I expected to hear later that Kay was in the I.C.U. and would be there for a while, but she'd be okay.

Right after I got off the phone with Mom--"Keep me posted," I told her--my friend Debbi called. We talked for a long time, probably 90 minutes or so. We've always been able to do that, Debbi and I; we don't talk daily, but we find a lot to talk about when we do finally call. And after I finished talking to Debbi, I went up to my room and was picking up a little when the phone rang again.

"Hi," said Mom. Over the years, I've learned: volumes of information are revealed by the tone of my mother's "Hi". I can tell in just that one word if everything is fine, or if she's angry or worried....or sad. This was the sad "hi." "Kay died," she said simply. "I just got back from the hospital. Apparently she was dead when Tracy and Rae-Ann got there..."

Mom says the whole family is feeling the same guilt she's feeling: what if we'd just gone over there earlier and MADE her go to the hospital? We all knew something was wrong... "She wouldn't have gone," I tell Mom. "Maybe if three or four of her kids showed up all at once--but they would have had to pick her up and carry her to the car to get her to go." I know enough about guilt to know: it may be true, but it doesn't help.

I knew Kay through my mom's stories, through her descriptions of phone-calls and poker nights and New Years' parties. I probably couldn't have picked Kay out of a crowd, to be honest; I'd only seen her a few times. But she was my mom's best friend, and that was enough.

We both have a lot to think about now, my mother and I. "Next time you come over," she tells me, "I want to sit down and go over where everything is." "Everything" means all her important papers: the will, the insurance documents, the deed to the house, the keys to the lock-box at the bank. And other things, too; names of people to call when she dies, the list of songs and readings she'd like at her own funeral. I think about what that time will be like; realizing that unlike Kay's kids, I will face the tasks alone. I alone will be responsible for picking the clothes, the casket, the wording of the obituary. Even though I've been a part of this process before, first with my father and then with both of my grandparents, I can't imagine doing it for my mother--or even doing it without my mother. "I'll go with you," Tim says, when I tell him this. "I'll be your brother." I'm grateful for even the intent; still, it's not something I want to dwell on for long.

"I don't know what's wrong with me," Mom says. "I can't cry. I mean, it's not that I'm not sad about it, but....I don't know, maybe my brain is just wired differently or something," she finishes. My mother, the stoic; instead of remembering all the times she tried to teach me the same kind of "strength", for the first time I wonder who taught her to be this way--and more importantly, why. Who thought it was more important to be "strong" and tearless than to show what you feel?

It's a lesson that's been handed down pretty well, no matter where it originally came from. Over the phone, I try to play off the strange sound of my voice. "Oh, I'm just stuffed-up" or "it's just cold in the house, that's all." I don't tell her--even though I think she knows--that I've been crying, even if she can't, yet. For Kay, who I really didn't know; for her kids and their families; for my mom, who wonders if she could have changed things; who wonders if maybe she should have done more. I tell her You did everything you could. Even if you'd done something different, who's to say it wouldn't have turned out just the same? I tell her what she's told me, many many times--you have nothing to feel guilty about--knowing that it will probably take time for her to believe it too.

Mostly I just watch out for her, from a distance; call her a few times a day, "just to see how you're doing," I tell her. "It hasn't sunk in yet, I don't think," she says. "But it's going to be really strange without her." And though I know she's been through this before, that Kay's not the first close friend she's lost and that she won't be the last--even still, I wish she didn't have to deal with this. Like her, I wish there was something more I could do; like her, I know there isn't anything, really...nothing except to be there as much as possible, to give her as much moral support as I can. I know a little bit of what she's said to me so many times when things haven't gone right in my life: I wish there was something I could do, something that would make it easier.

And, just as when she wishes it for me, there isn't.