"A Phone Call Away"
March 25, 2006
Seven a.m. and the phone is ringing. Never a good sign, I think, as I roll
sleepily out of bed to answer it."It's me," says a voice I know instantly.
It's my best friend, Sue, and I assume she's calling from Boston where we
used to be neighbors.
"How are you?" I ask. "What's up?"
"Dad died in the night," she says, a little shaky. "I'm in Omaha. I wanted
to call you right away."
I saw him only last month, when work took me to Omaha and Sue
arranged to be there too. Her dad was ailing from heart failure and memory loss, so the death was not a shock.
She gives me details. She flew out a few days ago with her husband, Bill. Their grown son Noah has flown in from California.
"We're so lucky," she tells me. "He died in his sleep."
"I wish I could come out," I tell her, "but it's just impossible. I have a deadline and two classes to teach that day." And there are meetings and commitments and on and on.
"It's OK," she says. "You were just out here. And anyway, there'll be
other times, in the future." We talk more but then the pastor arrives. She
has to hang up.
In the future. I know what she's referring to: the tough road ahead for
her mother, alone now, after 60 years, who has practically no short-term
memory left. For two hours after he died, she sat with her husband. I hope she's going to remember, but who knows?
Suddenly I think of a trip Sue and I made to Omaha over 10 years ago,
for her parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Everybody was sound and
happy. Sue jokingly introduced me to her parents' friends as "the family secret," the long lost sister nobody knew about.
We laughed then, but I'm not laughing now. We ARE sisters--even though
we have no blood ties, even though I have two real sisters and Sue doesn't
have any.
The house is unnaturally quiet. I pad into the kitchen to start my day.
"She'll be OK, won't she?" I say to my husband, who appears, drawn by
the smell of coffee. "I can't drop everything and fly out there. Right?"
No, NOT right. When your best friend's father dies, you GO.
You see, there's a whole history behind my inaction -- a cultural tradition,
strong in my family, that says you DON'T go. I wasn't informed of my own
grandmother's death until I came home from college, weeks after her funeral. "We didn't want to upset you," my parents said at the time. At 12 my sister wasn't allowed to attend her best friend's untimely funeral; we had moved to another state, and "it was time to make new friends."
Sue's roots are deep in Nebraska and Iowa, hard pioneer territory where
people had no choice but to help each other. I think of how reliably she
has shown up for me at my best and worst moments. For my mother-in-law's memorial service; for my daughter's graduations; and then an open-ended stay the year I was seriously ill and needed her most.
"My parents taught me to say 'yes' whenever you can," she once told me.
I come from a different culture, from people whose highest virtue is to
avoid creating "a scene," and who have made a refined art form of skirting grief, or even better, denying its very existence. But darn it, this doesn't mean I have to advance the family tradition.
I call back. Noah answers.
"Tell your mom I'll be there," I say. "There's no way I'm going to miss your
grandfather's funeral."
"YES!" he says. "See you then."
