Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (13 page)

When we pulled onto the old friend’s street, she said, “Oh, Annie. This will be such bad news for everyone else but me.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I said. “Besides, your friend’s son can build a nice home for himself on the parcel.”

Everyone was waiting for us when we arrived, and managed to be giddy and gentle at the same
time. Gertrud was fussed over. These were not men in black capes with twirly moustaches, stealing her house away; they were dear friends. After a few minutes of small talk, she looked at the ground. Then she did not look up for a while. Everyone grew quiet, puzzled.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she then said, firm, clear, deeply apologetic. “I don’t want to sell my house. Only the parcel.” I held my breath. Old age on a good day is a dance we don’t know the steps to: we falter. We may not be going in the direction we’d anticipated, or have any clue at all about which way to turn next.

“Gertrud,” they said, “are you sure?” She nodded and said, “Yes, yes,” and held on to the arms of her walker so her knuckles turned white, as on the night of the meteor shower. Her voice was trembly. I remembered how she’d shivered from the cold. I remembered how the astronomer pointed out that the stars were not all one color: there are orange stars, red stars, pale yellow stars. Venus so close and bright I thought it was a plane, and through the telescope I could see fuzzy cotton balls hundreds of millions of miles away, stellar graveyards and stellar nurseries where stars were being hatched.

O
n an otherwise ordinary night at the end of September, some friends came over to watch the lunar eclipse, friends whose two-year-old daughter, Olivia, had been diagnosed nine months earlier with cystic fibrosis. Their seven-year-old daughter, Ella, is Sam’s oldest friend: they met in day care and have been playing together for so long that I think of her as Sam’s fiancée. Now the family has been plunged into an alternate world, a world where everyone’s kid has a life-threatening illness. I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked. They must live with the fact that their
younger daughter has this disease that fills its victims’ lungs with thick sludge, harboring infections. Two-week hospital stays for nonstop IV antibiotics are common. Adulthood is rare.

Twice a day, every day, her parents must pound her between the shoulder blades for forty-five minutes to dislodge the mucus from her lungs. It amazes me that Sara, the mother—fortyish, small-boned, highly accomplished—can still even dress herself, much less remain so tender and strong.

The night of the lunar eclipse, some of our neighbors were making little cameo appearances on our street, coming outside periodically to check on the moon’s progress, as if it were a patient: “How’s his condition now?” But Sara and I stayed outside and watched the whole time. It was so mysterious, the earth’s shadow crossing over the moon, red and black and silvery, like a veil, and then receding, like the tide.

Ella calls her little sister Livia; she stayed overnight with us the day Olivia was born, and we cooked pancakes in the shape of the letter O to celebrate the baby’s arrival. From the beginning, Olivia always got sicker than other babies; she caught colds that wouldn’t leave, which led to coughs that sounded like those of an obese
alcoholic smoker. But her doctor never found anything really wrong, and antibiotics always seemed to clear up the symptoms. Now she and I hang out together in her room and eat chocolate, and I tell her that in a very long time, when we both go to heaven, we should try to get chairs next to each other, close to the dessert table.

“Yes!” she agrees. She has round brown eyes and short yellow hair. What a dish! “More chocolate,” she cries, and throws me the ball she is holding—I tell you, this girl’s got game. I taught her to love chocolate, which her parents still hold against me.

Whenever I’m out of town I worry that there will be bad news when I come home, that friends will have come over to their house not knowing they were about to come down with a cold, and Olivia will end up back in the hospital on the two-week IV drip. She has a blue toy phone that she calls me on frequently. Sometimes when I am out of town, I imagine her calling me and chatting away on her phone. I was gone for a week of teaching at the end of summer this year, and I kept thinking of her. I almost called California to hear her voice. I was working too hard and staying up too late every night, and the people I was with were
drinking a lot. I started to feel like a tired, wired little kid at a birthday party who has had way too much sugar, who is in all ways on overload, but still finds herself blindfolded and spun around for a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, and then pushed more or less in the direction of the wall with the donkey on it. But I was so turned around, so lost and overwhelmed and stressed, that I couldn’t even find where the wall with the donkey was—or even in what direction it might be. I couldn’t take one step forward without the chance that I was actually walking farther away from it. And it took me a while to remember that for me, the wall with the donkey on it is Jesus.

I didn’t call Olivia, but I kept her in my prayers. I said to God, “Look, I’m sure you know what you’re doing, but my patience is beginning to wear a little thin. . . .”

A few days before the eclipse, I arrived home but only after Sam had gone to bed. I lay down next to him and watched him sleep. There was an ordinary moon in the sky; I studied Sam by its light and felt entirely pointed in the right direction. Olivia’s father, Adam, had left a message on our machine, letting us know that Olivia had been sick again while I was gone. They had managed to keep her
out of the hospital, but it had been touch-and-go for days. Watching Sam sleep, I kept wondering, How could you possibly find the wall with the donkey on it when your child is catastrophically sick? I don’t know. I looked up at God, and thinking about Olivia, about how badly scarred her lungs were already, I said, “What on earth are you thinking?”

The eclipse moved in such peculiar time. Maybe it’s that I’m so used to blips and sound bites, instant deadlines, e-mail. But the shadow of the earth moved across the moon in celestial time, somehow slowly and fleetingly at the same astronomical moment. It seemed as if the moon were being consumed, and as if all the moons that ever had been were being consumed all at once. As if, in its last moments, you got to see the moon’s whole life pass before your very eyes.

On New Year’s Day, before her diagnosis, I was out at Stinson Beach with Sam and with Olivia and her family. They have a huge German shepherd, who is always with them; he hovers over Olivia, looking very German. He was with us on the beach that day, chasing sticks that Adam threw. It was one of those perfect Northern California days when dozens of children and dogs are running on the
beach and pelicans are flying overhead, and the mountains and the green ridges rise behind you, and it’s so golden and balmy that you inevitably commit great acts of hubris. Olivia seemed fine—happy, blonde, tireless. Just a few days before, her parents had taken her to the doctor for lab work, because of her severe colds. But she didn’t have a cold on New Year’s Day.

Then two days later Adam called with the news that she had cystic fibrosis. Now, seeing her the night of the eclipse, her upward gaze of pure child wonder, I find it hard to remember when she wasn’t sick and harder to believe that she is.

Olivia laughs at all my jokes. The night of the eclipse I kept pointing to our dog, Sadie, and saying, with concern, “Isn’t that the ugliest cat you’ve ever seen?” and Olivia would just lose her mind laughing.

After the diagnosis, we were almost too stunned to cry. Olivia’s family has a tribe of good friends around them, and everyone wanted to help, but at first people didn’t know what to do; they were immobilized by shock and sadness.

By mid-January, though, I had a vision of the disaster as a gigantic canvas on which an exquisitely beautiful picture had been painted. We all
wanted to take up a corner or stand side by side and lift it together so that Olivia’s parents didn’t have to carry the whole thing themselves. But I saw that they did in fact have to carry almost the whole heartbreaking picture alone. Then the image of a canvas changed into one wall of a barn, and I saw that the people who loved them could build a marvelous barn of sorts around the family.

So we did. We raised a lot of money; catastrophes can be expensive. We showed up. We cleaned, we listened, some of us took care of the children, we walked their dog, and we cried and then made them laugh; we gave them privacy; then we showed up and listened and let them cry and cry and cry, and then took them for hikes. We took Ella and Olivia to the park. We took Sara to the movies. I took Adam out for dinner one night right after the diagnosis. He was a mess. The first time the waiter came over, he was wracked with sobs, and the second time the waiter came over, he was laughing hysterically.

“He’s a little erratic, isn’t he?” I said, smiling, to the waiter, and he nodded gravely.

We kept on cooking for them and walking the dog, taking the kids to the park, cleaning the kitchen, and letting Sara and Adam hate what was
going on when they needed to. Sometimes we let them resist finding any meaning or solace in anything involving their daughter’s diagnosis, and this was one of the hardest things to do—to stop trying to make things come out better than they were. We let Sara and Adam spew when they needed to; we offered the gift of no comfort when having no comfort was where they had landed. Then we shopped for groceries. One friend gave them weekly massages; everyone kept giving money. And that is how we built our Amish barn. Now things are sometimes pretty terrible for the family in many ways, but at the same time, they got a miracle. It wasn’t the kind that comes in on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day float. And it wasn’t the one they wanted, where God would reach down from the sky and touch their girl with a magic wand and restore her to perfect health. Maybe that will still happen—who knows? I wouldn’t put anything past God, because He or She is one crafty mother. Yet they did get a miracle, one of those dusty little red-wagon miracles, and they understand this.

Sara was in a wonderful mood on the night of the eclipse. The viral cloud of autumn was about to descend, though, and this meant the family was
about to find itself more exposed to danger, to cold germs, flu bugs, and well-meaning friends. There would be constant vigilance, fewer visits, endless hand-washing, extra requests for prayer. There are a number of churches in the Bay Area and in fact around the country whose congregations pray for Olivia every week. And maybe it is helping. Still, the specter of the cold season hung above Olivia’s parents that night like the mysterious shape-shifting moon. Sam and Ella stood off by themselves like teenagers, Olivia hung out with her mother and me. We all stared up into the sky for a long time, as millions and millions of people everywhere were doing, so we got to feel united under the strange beams of light. You could tell you were in the presence of the extraordinary, peering up at the radiance beneath the veil of shadow, the intensity of that rim of light struggling through its own darkness. Olivia kept clapping her hands against the sides of her face in wonder, as if she were about to exclaim,
“Caramba!”
or “Oy!” When the moon was bright and gold again, she ran up the stairs to join her sister and Sam, who were cold and had gone inside to play.

Sara had very calmly watched her girls go, and I could see that these days, her daughters were the
wall with the donkey on it. We stood outside for a while longer, talking about this last flare-up, how frightened Sara had felt, how tired. And I didn’t know what to say at first. Except that we, their friends, all know that the rains and the wind will come, and they will be cold—oh God, will they be cold. But then we will come, too, I said; we will have been building this barn all along, and so there will always be shelter.

L
ast year, a few days after Easter, I was invited to Park City, Utah, to give some lectures, and had scammed a free ski week out of the deal. Sam had invited his friend Tony along, and I invited my friend Sue Schuler. She was a great companion, younger than I, but already wise, cheeky, gentle, blonde, jaundiced, emaciated, full of life, and dying of cancer.

She said yes. She had always loved to ski and was a graceful daredevil on the slopes. I started skiing only six years ago, and tend to have balance and steering issues. I fall fairly often, and can’t get up, but I enjoy the part between the spills, humiliations, and abject despair—sort of like real life.

No one in her family, including Sue, was sure
whether she would able to ski, or if she would even make the trip at all. Except for me. No one could have known that she would die one month after my invitation. At any rate, I thought that if she saw those Wasatch Mountains, she’d at least want to try. I invited her because otherwise I was never going to see her again—she had cancer of the everything by then—and because she was distraught on Easter when I called to say hello. I felt she ought to have one last great Easter before she died. I felt that that would make up for a lot. Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, “martyred plants rising up from their shrouds.” Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.

Sue said yes, she’d meet me in Park City.

I’d only met her over the phone, through her sister, an old friend of mine. Barb was a kind of matchmaker, who recognized kindred souls in me and Sue, believers who loved to laugh. Barb had known me when I walked my friend Pammy
through her last year of life. And call me crazy, but I did not immediately want to be friends with another dying blonde babe just then. However, I felt God’s hand in this, or at any rate, God’s fingers on the Rolodex, flipping through names to find a last-ditch funny left-wing Christian friend for Sue.

It was March of 2001. The wildflowers weren’t in bloom yet; the bulbs hadn’t opened. A month before she called me for the first time, Sue had been told that her liver and lungs had developed tumors. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but the reason she finally followed Barb’s advice to call me was that various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy because she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the sort of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this.

Also, some of her evangelical friends had insisted sorrowfully that her nieces wouldn’t get into heaven, since they were Jewish, as was one of her sisters. So I said what I believe to be true—that there was not one chance in a million that the nieces wouldn’t go to heaven, and if I was wrong,
who would even want to go? I promised that if there was any problem, we’d refuse to go. We’d organize.

“What kind of shitty heaven would that be, anyway?” she asked over the phone.

That was the beginning of our friendship, which unfolded over a year and some change, a rich, condensed broth of affection and loyalty, because there was no time to lose. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was when we met: I hadn’t expected that earthy, dark irreverence to belong to such a beauty. She started coming to my church soon after, and we talked on the phone every week. I had one skill to offer, which is that I would just listen. I did not try to convince her that she could mount one more offensive against the metastases. I could hear her, hear the fear, and also her spirit.

Sue called on New Year’s Day of 2002 in tears, to say she knew she was dying.

I just listened for a long time; she went from crushed to defiant. “I have what
everyone
wants,” she said. “But no one would be willing to pay.”

“What do you have?”

“The two most important things. I got forced into loving myself. And I’m not afraid of dying anymore.”

She got sicker and sicker. It was so unfair—I wanted to file a report with the Commission on Fairness, and I still want to ask God about this when we finally meet. That someone so lovely and smart and fabulous was going to die, and that horrible people I will not name were going to live forever—it broke your heart. At the same time, she had so much joy. She loved her family, her friends, and eating. She ate like a horse. I have never known a woman who could put it away like Sue. Her body was stick thin, and on top of it all, the skin on one leg was reptilian with the twenty-two skin grafts from her knee up past her hip—which she’d needed after contracting a flesh-eating disease at a hospital after one of her countless cancer surgeries.

I ask you.

This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing—another thing I’d like to bring up with God. Bodies are so messy and disappointing. Every time I see the bumper sticker that says “We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,” I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car.

Sue and I met one last time, on the Thursday
after Easter of 2002, in Park City, to celebrate the Easter holiday privately, a week late. We shared a king-size bed in the condominium. Sam and his friend Tony took the other room, reducing it to Pompeii within an hour. Then, their work completed, they shook us down for sushi money and headed out for the wild street life of Park City.

The thing about Easter is that Jesus comes back from the dead both resurrected and broken, with the wounds from the nails still visible. People needed to see that it really did happen, the brutality, the death. He came back with a body, not like Casper or Topper. He didn’t come back as the vague idea of spirit returning. No, it was physical, a wounded body. He had lived, He had died, and then you could touch Him, and He could eat, and these four things are as bodily as life gets.

The first thing Sue and I did was locate a beautiful Easter Week service online, and we followed it to the book. Well—sort of to the book, in the reform sense of “followed” and “book.” The first night we celebrated Maundy Thursday, commemorating when Jesus had Passover with his disciples before his arrest and gave them all communion. We used Coca-Colas for wine and Pepperidge
Farm Goldfish for the bread broken in remembrance of Him.

Then we washed each other’s feet. Jesus had washed His disciples’ feet, to show that peace was not about power; it was about love and gentleness, about being of service. Washing Sue’s feet was incredibly scary. I did not feel like Jesus at first. I felt very nervous. I don’t actually like to wash my own feet. But we put some soap in a Tupperware dish tub, and she sat on the couch, and I lifted her feet into the warm water and then washed them gently with a soapy washcloth. And then she washed mine.

I watched her sleep beside me in bed off and on all night. Sometimes she was so still that I was sure she was dead. She looked like a beautiful corpse, slightly yellow, slightly smelly, ethereal. And then she’d snore softly or open her eyes and look at me. “Hi, Annie,” she’d say in a small voice.

In the morning after breakfast, the four of us took the ski lift to the summit. The boys disappeared. Sue was wearing a lavender ski jacket, and she weighed 110 pounds, on a five-foot-nine-inch frame, and she was wobbly and trembling. People turned to stare at her, because she was yellow and
emaciated. She smiled; people smiled back. She had great teeth. “Oh yeah, and I used to be
built
,” she said, as we got our bearings in the snow. “I used to have a
rack
on me.” We stood together at the summit, staring at the mountain range and an endless blue sky, and then I suddenly fell over. She helped me up, and we laughed and then headed down the mountain.

Sue hadn’t been on the slopes for years, and she moved gingerly at first; the air was thin and she had cancer in her lungs. Then she pushed down hard on her poles, and took off farther down the mountain. At some point she turned around and waited for me, and as soon as I saw her, I stopped and fell over. There I was, sprawled in the snow, with my skis at an angle over my head, like Gregor Samsa in “The Metamorphosis.” She waited for me to get up and ski to where she stood, and then she taught me one of the most important things I’ll ever learn—how to fall better. She pointed out that when I fell, I usually didn’t fall that hard. “You’re so afraid of falling that it’s keeping you from skiing as well as you could. It’s keeping you from having fun.” So each time I fell, I lay there a minute, convinced I had broken my hip, and then she would show me how to get back up. Each time, I’d
dust the snow off my butt, look over at her, and head down the mountain. Finally, after she saw that I could fall safely, she tore off down the slope.

We celebrated Good Friday that night. It’s such a sad day, all loss and cruelty, and you have to go on faith that the light shines in the darkness, and nothing, not death, not disease, not even the government, can overcome it. I hate that you can’t prove the beliefs of my faith. If I were God, I’d have the answers at the end of the workbook, so you could check to see if you’re on the right track as you go along. But nooooooo. Darkness is our context, and Easter’s context: without it, you couldn’t see the light. Hope is not about proving anything. It’s choosing to believe this one thing, that love is bigger than any grim bleak shit anyone can throw at us.

After the Good Friday service, Sue wanted to show me her legs, the effects of all the skin grafting. The skin was sort of shocking, wounded and alien as snakeskin.

“Wow,” I said. She let me study her skin awhile. “I have trouble with my cellulite,” I said, guiltily.

“Yeah,” she answered, “but this is what me being alive looks like now.”

She had fought so militantly for her body over
time, but she was also tender and maternal with it. She took long, hot baths at night, and then smoothed on lotions.

We slept well. The next morning we celebrated Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, when Jesus is dead and hidden away in the tomb, and nothing makes sense, and no one knows that He’s going to be alive again. His disciples had left Golgotha even before He died—only a few women remained at the cross. So the disciples skulked off like dogs to the Upper Room, to wait, depressed and drunk—or at least, this is what I imagine. I certainly would have been, and I would have been thinking, “We are so fucked.” Father Tom adds that there was a lot of cigarette smoke that night, and Monday-morning quarterbacking.

One thing Sue wanted to do before she died was to get a massage, to be touched sensuously again, so we decided to get massages on Holy Saturday.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, as we walked to the salon. “You don’t see a lot of bodies like Sue Schuler’s here in Park City, Utah.”

She got a gorgeous male Indian masseur. He looked like Siddhartha. I got a tense white German woman. Sue and the Indian man walked off
together, and she looked over her shoulder with such pleasure that they might have been going to their bridal suite.

My masseuse looked like she was impatient to start slapping me.

When I saw Sue again, an hour later, she smelled of aromatic lemon oil. I asked, “Did you feel shy at all?”

“Nah!” she said. “Not after I gave him a tour of the Bod.”

Sue got up early on Sunday, the day we were leaving. The sun was pouring through the windows, the sky bright blue. She no longer looked jaundiced. She was light brown, and rosy. She made us her special apricot scones for breakfast. I tried to discourage her at first, because I didn’t want her feelings to be hurt if the boys turned up their noses. “The boys won’t eat apricot scones,” I insisted. “They eat cereal, Pop-Tarts . . . traiiff!”

“Oh, the boys’ll eat my scones,” she said slyly. And they did. They ate all but four, which she packed up for us to take on the plane. Two actually made the drive to the airport in Salt Lake City. They were small, pale yellow, flecked with orange apricots, gone by the time we arrived
home.