Yesterday was one of the worst days I can remember.
It started out great. I made major progress on J4's messy room. DOTR took me to lunch at Sweet Tomatoes (third time this week) with a 'buy one get one free' coupon. Then he came home and put in our new toilet in the powder room. He was going to stay home, but thought he should just run back to the office and check to see if there were any calls.
There were.
One of my very best friends died yesterday.
She'd been bunkered down at home for the past few months, not returning phone calls to let anybody know what was going on. (when I talked to another one of our friends who actually lives right near her and their two daughters are the very best of friends, she said "don't feel bad, she wouldn't return my calls either"). So basically, this hit us all out of the blue.
Ten years ago, when she was 38, she had breast cancer. She had a double mastectomy/reconstruction and was clean for five years. Then she had some problems with her back and evidently they found something in her bones, although we never got the whole story. She had surgery 5 years ago to reconstruct some vertebrae. Then a couple years later she got some freak virus that threw her in the hospital for a couple of weeks, it settled in her eye and she had to have recontructive surgery on her eyelid. Then about a year and a half ago, she was picking up her son from church camp and she stepped wrong and broke her hip. She actually drove home (an hour and a half away) with a broken hip and ended up in the hospital for a couple weeks. And they didn't call anybody....her parents would come from Indiana and his would come from Pensacola to help out. The help that we all offered when she had cancer the first time around was not soothing to her, it made her feel guilty, so she never told us what was going on until after the fact.
This whole time she was raising three great kids who were in hyperdrive on the activities front....travel baseball, competitive gymnastics, club swimming. Her husband has been employed in the computer industry for years, so he had periods of being out of a job, too. And all the time, she went on with a smile on her face never letting us know exactly what was going on. We'd get together for lunch or brunch and spend a good bit of time catching up on the phone, but we were both "busy".
I guess that earlier in the week, she got news from the doctor that there was nothing else they could do and she was looking at about 30 days. Her parents came because her husband had to go out of town to take care of some business before he took some time off to be at home with her. He was in Texas yesterday afternoon when she died around 1:00. The kids were at school. Her parents were with her. Her husband called a friend and asked him to call us and a guy from the Sunday School class at church (our old church--that's how we became friends in the first place) and ask them to be pallbearers. The friend only had DOTR's office number, so that's how we got the news on our office voicemail.
I'm trying to get a ticket for BFF to come back from Texas. The "Three Amigos", as we used to call ourselves, are now down to two. I don't know if she'll be able to leave, since her ex-husband does his best to make her life miserable. So who knows if he'll help her with arrangements for care of their 6 year old son--I can only hope he would have some compassion, but I'm not counting on it. (
ETA: not gonna happen, her a-hole of an ex would probably use it against her for "abandoning" her son when he was supposed to be at her house, so she can't risk it.)We all have our own way to live and die. I have to say, I think I'd be much the same. I detest people hovering. If you need somebody to sit at the hospital with you and hold your hand, I'm not your girl. If, however, you need your tupperware washed and leftovers stashed in the fridge while you sit with your family or your front steps swept off so the old people coming to the house after the funeral don't fall, then give me a call. I guess I show my love with a dishrag or a broom.
She chose the funeral home here on the Square instead of the one people who live in her area use that's out on the highway. To me, it makes perfect sense. She loved the Square, and the old fashioned funeral home with rocking chairs on the front porch looks like the one in her hometown in Indiana (or like the one in any hometown, for that matter). I live just down the street, so after they make the arrangements this morning, I'll offer to have people over to my house after the visitation if that's what they want to do. I'll sweep, wash dishes, bake a cake, make coffee.
I think she'd understand.
