Saying Goodbye

I met J more than 55 years ago when we were carrying our first-borns. Several years ago, she became my landlady as well as my friend when she and her husband, G, bought the house next door to theirs that included the attached cottage I rent. I have a screened gazebo in my backyard where I sit to read in the summer. I’d hear her back door close and she’d come down the path between our houses calling out, “Here I come with my tea to interrupt whatever you’re doing!” We saw each other almost every day until Wednesday, November 2nd, the day she died. 

 Though we had a lot of ideas in common – we shared political, religious, educational and philosophical views – she was much more pragmatic and practical than I, and I don’t think there was anything she couldn’t fix. Because of that, she made an excellent landlady. If I called in a dither because a radiator pipe sprung a leak, she’d call the plumber, then over she’d come with a basket of towels to mop up the mess. One day she grabbed the tail of a writhing snake that had somehow ended up in my bathroom and casually tossed the reptile into the woods. She helped me build bookcases and a patio fence, we Christmas shopped together, gardened in side-by-side plots, and always we talked, compared and shared viewpoints, and laughed. We laughed a lot. 

 Sometime around 2009, after declaring the two of us to be on, at best, a 20-year life plan, J and I decided to co-compose this blog we called Laughing On the Way Out. In it, we recorded some of the things that happened first to her, then inevitably to me, as we approached late middle age. We agreed the slope toward old age was slipperier than we'd thought. There was the morning she called me to tell me that she’d just spent 15 minutes trying to scrub a shadow from her kitchen counter that she’d mistaken for a stain, or that she’d been halfway to a town to the south before she remembered she was supposed to be going to a dentist's appointment north of home. So many things we'd taken for granted, like being able to notice whether we were groomed and dressed properly, or that we knew where our glasses and keys were, or we were sure, when we set out, that we knew where we were going - these suddenly became things we had to question. And so it went. Arm in arm, slipping and propping each other up and laughing hysterically at our failings, J and I were heading off down the hill. And if you’re sitting there reading in disbelief because these things haven’t happened to you yet, relax, there’s still time. 

 Today though, instead of J, I find a J-sized space in front of me. Though I'm missing her and feeling sad, I still get to choose how to fill that space. I can fill it with sorrow that she’s gone, bitterness and anger toward the illness she suffered, or I can fill it with joy that I knew her, pour all my memories of her into it until it’s full and brimming over. While she was here, J was so appreciative – she was happy with the life she’d made for herself. She appreciated her farm animals – the cows even when they broke the fence, the pigs even though they stunk to high heaven, the sheep though they ate every brussels sprout either of us tried to raise. She loved her chickens and especially her cats. And she was appreciated in return. She was civic minded, volunteering year after year at the voting booth and working as an aide at the school. She cleaned houses and polished silver and mowed lawns to supplement her income. She was valued and respected by a great many people. 

 There is so much we humans don’t know. We choose what we believe and believe in – we choose that which comforts us, that which gives us hope. But one thing I do know; while J was here, she loved -she loved her family and her home and her friends - and while she was here, she was loved in return. In the end, I believe that’s what matters most. 

 I leave you with this thought from JOHN O'DONOHUE, an Irish poet, author and priest: May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten. May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo. May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell.