What Survives of Us
Pam and me at my book launch party, September 2010
“What will survive of us is love.” -Philip Larkin
Pam broke the news on December 9th, over dinner at our house for an early Christmas celebration. She had stopped all her cancer treatment because her oncologist, who cried breaking the news, told Pam there was nothing more they could do for her. She was calm when she told us how she could feel her body shutting down. My brother-in-law Jeff, his partner Eddie and I cried. Bruce, my husband, did not, but he got a huge lump in his throat.
And then Pam did something I will never forget. She talked about how grateful she was for the life she had and for everything she had been able to do in 40 years. She talked about what a wonderful vacation we had together in Napa in October and about how much fun we were going to have that weekend.
And we did have fun. We went to the Old Market the next day and watched the Dickens carolers. We had lunch in our favorite French bistro. We sipped chocolate martinis in our favorite bar. We toasted being there, in that moment. Our standard toast two years earlier was “Here’s to getting to.” We had started counting toasts in Napa with ridiculous numbers; toast 4,205 or 5,622. We kept that going now.
In the breast cancer Twitter community we talk about being fearless friends. I am so far from fearless. I was scared for Pam all the time, and so was Bruce. We were afraid of what might go wrong when we were traveling together or she was visiting. Jeff was driving her somewhere one day toward the end and she suddenly went “Oh! Oh!” and scared the daylights out of him, but she had seen some fast food drive through she wanted to stop at for iced tea or a shake or something. What allowed us to be there for her was her incredible strength and steadfast refusal to let that thief cancer rob her of her joy in life. If she was tough enough to handle it, so were we.
She never stopped being interested in life. She wanted to know everything about our lives. She wanted to hear about school and work and food and wine. Bruce and I spent the weekend with her in her Kansas City home in early March, a month before she died. She said if you want to come, you should probably come sooner than later.
She took us shopping and to lunches, to a speakeasy and dinner with her parents. We got pedicures and she brought champagne in her tote bag. She cooked. She drove–like a bat out of hell. She hugged me so hard when we left it was like being hugged by my cowgirl cousin, who throws hay bales. I could feel her spine. When we called to let her know we got back to Omaha, she was at her son’s baseball scrimmage, in spite of pain that had kept her on the couch. None of us will ever know what all that effort cost her. When the hospice nurse started coming to her house, she told Pam she wasn’t taking enough pain medication, but Pam had to do this her way. She put off the shrinking of her world as long as she could.
After she went to hospice, she was talking to my sister-in-law Anita about something Anita had made for dinner and said, “I want that recipe.” She knew she was never leaving the hospice; she was tough enough to make the choice to go there. You need to know this isn’t denial. This is insistence on being alive.
One of my favorite stories about Pam was from the night of my book launch two years ago. She bought a carrot cake at the restaurant where we had dinner because I mentioned I liked it. (She was like that. If you liked something, she remembered it and you ended up getting it as a gift.) We brought it home after the party and she set it on the kitchen counter. Jeff and Bruce and Eddie and I were all dithering–too late, too many calories, blah blah blah. Pam didn’t say a word. She pulled five forks out of the silverware drawer, came back to the cake and stabbed all the forks into it. We mauled that cake.
That was how Pam lived her life, and how she faced death. Straight on, no dithering, no excuses. If I can be half the woman she was when my time comes, it will be because she taught me how to live with joy and light and love, and how to face death with grace.
Here’s to you, Pam. Toast 10,373 and counting. I’ll raise my glass to you for as long as I live.
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