June 18 (excerpt from "Continent of Judy")

 

June 18 

I called in sick to work today and visited Judy at the hospital instead. Her diagnosis/prognosis, Terminal, was too unbelievable to comprehend at my hospital visit last night; I needed more proof that her life was cut short by a doctor’s verdict 24 hours ago.   Because I was an auditory, kinesthetic, and visual learner I needed to see, hear, and feel and then process that all parts of my world were slipping away, even my beloved friend’s life.

Now, I was in the continent of Judy.

 When I arrived at the hospital, she was alone.  She looked comfortable propped up against white, fluffy pillows and covered with a light, white cotton blanket.  If nothing else, she made sure the nurse delivered her Vicodin for pain every six hours. 

I stood at the entrance to her single occupancy room, but Judy did not notice me. Her attention was focused solely on a park across the four-lane highway and viewed clearly from the large clean windows of her 5^th story room.  

In the morning, the park was empty of people. Only the Ibis, blue jays, roc doves, white herons, vultures, European starlings, crows, boat-tailed grackle, purple gallinule, limpkin, anhinga, northern mockingbirds, and short-tailed hawks looked for food or action amongst the live oaks, cypress, palm trees, hibiscus bushes, robust lakes, and tall grasses (I visited the park on weekends in the early morning hours when my children were still sleeping).  Contrasted with the clinical white and sterility of the hospital floor and room, here was a lush and living canvas of the Everglades of long-ago.

For a moment, I thought of turning around, leaving, and not letting Judy know I was there. I was not good with words of consolation; I did not know how to slow down. I forgot we were friends. I DID NOT KNOW HOW TO TALK ABOUT TERMINAL CANCER. The words got stuck in my throat.  But she did not talk about it either.

When she noticed me, she called me over, placed a kiss on my cheek, and asked me to take a seat. Then she continued staring out the window.  There was no need for formalities or discomfort, silence was calming and comforting, but I hated silence.  My mind scanned the horizon for a topic of conversation, something appropriate to the moment, something about friendship, faith.  God, I was baffled. I started perspiring.  Still, Judy was silent, regal.

Unlike her, I was not experienced with life’s meandering journeys and stops. I did not appreciate the value of silence--the way it embraced us on its ride to her room on the 5^th story cancer ward at Memorial West where the sunlight glowed translucent, lake waters across the street lapped robustly, street cars glided across highways, and yellow roses bloomed as if for the first time, which I would all notice if I only stopped fidgeting.  I did not know that sharing silence with a friend was an honor.

When I settled down, Judy had something important to say.  This moment was her deathbed confession to me, at least the one she shared with me.  I thought it was too soon to share such a thing; yesterday, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. My sense of time and time-appropriate actions governed my thoughts. Yet, from the moment she was diagnosed, Judy directed time as she saw fit: pushing it back, speeding it forward, stopping it in the moment.  She had a lifetime of dissection to do from her bed, if she wanted to leave the world on her terms.

Even now, she played at life, hitting the ball, swinging with concentration, making the game exciting and unforgettable, even as she exited its court.  Further proof that Judy was larger-than-life, a grand woman in every sense of the word, bigger than the great 20^th century spy Mata Hari, who faced her death by blowing kisses to the men in her firing squad, but even Mara Hari’s exit was quick and clean.  

She remained silent still while gazing at the park.  I looked around nervously, taking in the clean sanitized room in all its white and off-white walls, bedding, flooring…  

She waited patiently for me to calm down.

I did not know what Judy shared with others, but she knew what she needed to share with me. I had been at other’s death bed confessions (my ex-husband’s grandmother and mother). Maybe, I misunderstood the situation or their confessions:  My former mother- in- law talked about designer purses, but she might have been delirious from the pain medication; and my husband’s grandmother mentioned her famous key lime pie, but someone might have asked her for her recipe.  Maybe, I misjudged these women or the moment, but I know that what Judy told me that day resonated with me until I understood and applied it, many years later.

She began her great confession with a simple question about my date a couple of weekends ago. 

“Did you have a good time last weekend?” she asked, slowly pulling her bewitched gaze from the park across the street.

“Yes, yes,” I said, excitedly, nervously, relieved but surprised about her topic of conversation.

“Why should my love life matter while she was dealing with life and death matters?” I thought to myself.

Still, I rattled on excitedly about the newspaper man I had met on the beach, a tall, thin, bespeckled middle-aged man who seemed to be as interesting as he was intelligent. He was walking along the shore gathering seashells with his son when my children started playing with the young boy.  I struck up a conversation with the father, who invited us to dinner at his condo overlooking the exclusive Brickell Bay.  Like me, he was also going through a difficult divorce. Recently, he moved to Miami after selling his newspaper company in Washington D.C.  

While the children watched television and ate the take-out pizza he had ordered, we shared a bottle of French wine and a passionate kiss on his balcony overlooking Biscayne Bay.  He said he would call me, but two weeks later I had not heard from him. 

Already, I harbored secret hopes he would be my next husband; I was desperate to find another relationship. Only Judy recognized the depths of my desperation, but she would never confront me with that truth because I would not believe her anyway.  Instead, she listened with her clear, blue, piercing eyes and calm expression. No judgement, here.  

Only she knew I was ripe for liberation from a new but similar relationship on the heels of my most recent breakup from a 16 year-marriage. A new relationship, so soon after the end of my marriage, would only mimic personal neuroses, desperations, and untoward passions that instead needed healing, forgiveness, and release. With her soft gaze and softer expression, she communed with me that big heartbreak was a rare invitation to excavation parties beyond the “No Trespassing” signs in my soul with only three requirements for travel: solitude, abstinence, and self-reflection. Something more soulful and compatible would show up if only I took time to heal the end of my marriage. No need for search parties, want ads, desperate hookups.   She had refused the “in-between moments” in relationships at her own peril, but she knowingly and willfully did so.

Maybe it was a sign of her love for me and the simultaneous release of her own demons, but I knew that what she confessed that day was a truth she cut with the proverbial knife; I knew it her more to admit this truth than the cancerous cells that speedily tracked their way out of her gall bladder, up to her breast, and into their final destination in her brain. 

“Barbara, never let a man determine your worth,” Judy said, her gaze gentle and hands, with the perfectly manicured red nails, folded softly on her white cotton blanket.  “I did,” she continued, “even though I knew I was worth more than my men could ever realize.”

She turned and stared out the window, her gaze on the park across the street.

I nodded gently, even though I was miffed by her confession. Many years later, I realized Judy’s confession applied to me as much as it had applied to her.

That night, I wailed into my pillow for fear of waking my children who were asleep in the rooms down the hallway. Wailing was my new norm, a discovery made after hours of basic crying provided no relief from my pain.

 After pushing my head into the pillow, I whimpered, flailed, and kicked the mattress until a maelstrom of violence made me red in the face, sweaty, exhausted, and gasping for air.  Still, I yelped, screamed, and howled like a wild animal until I reached the feeling place at the pit of my stomach, the same location my classical piano teacher advised I play from when performing Beethoven sonatas, Bach fugues, and Chopin waltzes: “the true home of all feeling,” said Clara Vasquez, trained in the best musical conservatory in Havana, Cuban.

I never accessed the pit of my stomach when I played piano as a young girl because I detested the instrument and was never any good at playing it anyway, but now I became expert at finding its doorway and feeling its thundering heartbeat slow down to a tranquil breath.  There, I entered a blue-black sky with twinkling stars where I dropped off my pain and gazed at the view until there was nothing left for me to feel.

That night, I returned to the to the present feeling new, invigorated, ashamed of my strange, spiritual experience, and relieved that it would never happen again, even though that was never the case.  I jumped out of bed, went to computer in the study, logged in online, and signed up for a local dating site.