Cambridge: to the dying
Cambridge: to the dying
April 7
Charlotte Amalie Harbor
An almost full moon over the hills to the east. A starry sky. A warm breeze.
I have risked everything for decades and somehow grown old, and I have known so much beauty.
Two thousand miles north a woman is dying. She has had cancer for almost a decade. It runs in her family. Her mother died of it, although at a more advanced age. She herself is now 51.
In the course of her disease she took part in several experimental treatments that slowed, but ultimately did not eliminate the cancer, which recently has become rampant.
I know her only indirectly. She is a friend of Carol’s.
Until she was diagnosed with cancer, I though her superficial. Her values seemed based mostly on money. But her response to her disease has been exemplary. As far as I know she has handled herself with dignity and shown no self-pity, though she might have been entitled to such, if anyone is, because during the course of her disease she has also gone through a divorce. Perhaps in the long dark nights she has cried out to the nonexistent gods, “Why me?” But she hasn’t during the day or to others. She has travelled. She has read. She has played tennis. She has followed sports and music and made plans. Once she asked where would be the best place on the east coast of the United States to throw a bottle in the ocean so it might end up in Brittany, France. I studied the currents and suggested Palm Beach, Florida, or Beaufort, North Carolina.
I don’t know if she ever tossed her bottle into the sea, or what message it might have held, or who she hoped might find it.
I wish I had some Laphroaig, but I don’t. She is deserving of a toast of what I consider the best. So I’m going to stop writing and pour some Jamesons in a crystal glass and go up on deck and look at the stars and the moon and drink a toast to her, to all the dying, to us.
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Cathy came through the crisis in April and had a few more fair months, in and out of hospitals, until a recent rapid decline. Like me she did not want to die in a hospital, and for the last few days has been at home here in Cambridge, cared for by Carol and two other friends. She died this morning. She was noble to the end.
A few days ago I thought of her asking about where to throw a bottle into the Atlantic so it might end up in Brittany, and it occurred to me that what she might have wanted to put in that bottle was herself.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009