because you were my friend

The nurse moved quietly around us, unhooking the IVs and unplugging monitors. With the bed pushed into the middle of the room in front of the window, I laid beside him and watched the rain drops roll down the glass, waiting for the morning to dawn.

I was curled into his side, my arm draped over the chest of my old friend as I traced circles on the back of his hand. My head rested in the crook of his neck and I listened to the ragged and uneven breaths pushing his chest up and down.

I sang his favorite song – my out-of-tune voice carrying the familiar melody barely above a whisper – as I laid by his side. I could only repeat the song over and over. All other words had escaped me.

Mr. Kelly was dying.

I tucked my body closer to him as he slept – he had been unconscious for nearly four days – and because I couldn’t think of what to say, my thoughts wandered to our afternoons together instead.

I picked up a yellow leaf that blew across the top of my shoe and held it in my hand extending in front of me. The last of the delicate maidenhair leaves were falling softly from the branches with each whisp of breeze. The leaves coated the ground like yellow snow that swirled around our feet with each step as we walked along the sidewalk.

The sun was setting, casting a warm, gold light across our faces.

“This is my favorite season,” Mr. Kelly said with a confident nod. “In my heaven, it will always be autumn.”

“Mr. Kelly, have you ever wished you could live forever?” He didn’t laugh at my sudden question, as I expected he would. He simply stared ahead of us, watching the leaves drop to the ground.

“No.” he answered simply and offered no explanation. I pressed him, I wanted to know why. Why would a man who led such a joyful life, who had so much wisdom and so much to give back to the world, not want to keep living.

“Only the scared want that. Only the scared need that. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all. I, my dear, have lived. I don’t need forever.”

“I’ll leave you now,” the nurse interrupted my thoughts. “You can take all the time you need to say your goodbyes.”

My goodbyes.

I could only nod in the nurse’s direction as she shut the door behind her with an audible ‘click’ that echoed around the now-silent room.

“I like lilies,” he had told me, “no daises or roses or heaven forbid you bring those God awful carnations. Lilies, chrysanthemums, daffodils, tulips. Those are all beautiful.”

I bit my lip to stop the quivering. “I’m scared of endings,” I told him. “I’m scared of goodbyes, of last looks, of final moments.” And before I could choke out the last words I was sobbing into his pillow.

“Today isn’t goodbye,” he said and laughed softly into the afternoon air, “There will be an ending one day, but it will not be today.” I knew this, but something about seeing him in bed reminded me that what I’d grown to depend on would one day depend on me to let go.

“Can you promise me it will be a happy goodbye?” I asked him.

“There are no happy endings,” Mr. Kelly said and wiped the tears that dripped off my chin. “There are no real endings ever, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just a part of the one story that binds us both in this world and in the next.”

“No carnations,” a rough voice tore through my thoughts and my body shook with the strangled sob that escaped my throat. “No tears my dear girl. No tears and no carnations.”

They were the first words Mr. Kelly had spoken since his heart attack four days earlier.

“I can’t say goodbye,” I whispered and tears rolled down my cheeks, soaking the shoulder of Mr. Kelly’s hospital gown.

“Then don’t say it,” Mr. Kelly rasped out. He sighed then and slowly brought his hand up and placed it on my chest over my heart. “I will always be here my beautiful girl. You think of me when you get lost and I will help you find yourself again.”

“Now, Blair, who do you want to be?”

It was my turn to stare down our path into the crisp morning. I watched as people hurried past, on their way to their daily responsibilities and I tried to picture my life without any responsibilities. I tried to picture a time when I didn’t have to do anything, but I wanted to do it all.

I turned back to Mr. Kelly who was smiling at me. “I want to be a wanderer,” I told him and laughed at my own answer. “I want to be important to someone, to be remembered. I want to be brave and I want to be smart and I want to be loved. And I want to be passionate and spontaneous.” He was laughing with me by the end of my list.

“I believe you will be all of those things,” he said, “maybe you are already those things.”

I’m scared, I told him. Scared that he is wrong that I am none of these things. That I am only cautious and that people will only think I’m aimless in my wandering.

“Not all who wander are aimless,” Mr. Kelly says, “and if I am sure of anything, I’m sure you are brave.”

“I love you,” I choked out and hugged myself into Mr. Kelly’s body.

“Love is the only thing worth it,” he whispered and brought the hand resting on my chest up to stroke my hair.

I don’t know how long I laid next to Mr. Kelly after his chest had ceased its rise and fall. I stroked my fingers over the back of his hand as I told him of my hopes and my dreams, of all of the things I wished for myself in this life. I recounted times we’d spent together – places we’d seen and stories he’d told me.

Only when the nurse came to take him from the room, did I peel myself from the bed and away from him.

“I noticed here on the chart that you aren’t family?” the nurse said, tearing my focus from the now cold hand I still clutched in my own. “How did you know him?”

I smiled at her over my shoulder and looked back to the old man lying in the hospital bed.

I knocked on the front door and stood back on the porch waiting. A few moments later a small, wrinkled man moved slowly to the door and cracked it open.

“Hi,” I said in greeting. “My sister sent me over with this stuff for you,” I said, gesturing to my sister’s house next door, “she said you’ve been sick?”

He looked at me skeptically, not moving to open the door any further. I tried again.

“I’ve got soup and cookies,” I taunted, shooting him my most charming smile.

He opened the door a little further then.

“Is that so? Well come on in then, I can’t hardly turn away soup and cookies.”

I stepped in the doorway with a grin and let the man lead me down the hallway to the kitchen.

“So your sister said I’ve been sick, huh?” he asked me and I simply nodded at him while setting his care package on the counter. “She’s a sneaky little secret-keeper, that one.”

I must have given him a puzzled look because he continued quickly with a smirk on his face.

“I’ve not been sick. My wife left me.”

My face must have shifted from puzzled to shocked because he a laugh boomed out of him – deeper and richer than before.

“I know, I know, who leaves an 88 year old man just because I wouldn’t cut her toenails?” he said and shook his head at his own statement. “It wasn’t like I refused her because I didn’t love her – I just really do hate feet.”

I opened my mouth and then shut it again quickly, completely at a loss of what to say in response. “Her loss?” I said hesitantly and gave him a sheepish smile.

The man only waved off my comments and changed the subject.

“Never mind all that,” he said. “Would you like to stay and have lunch with me?”

“I, uh, shoot. Well, I’d like to,” I stammered out, suddenly reluctant to leave this man’s company, “but I’ve got to be home soon. Maybe another day?”

“Another day then,” he smiled and walked me back to the door. “I’ll look forward to it.”

“I’m Blair, by the way,” I said and stuck out my hand.

“Arthur Kelly,” he said accepting my gesture with a wink.

“Well it’s a pleasure to meet you Mr. Kelly,” I said and turned to leave.

I was down the porch steps and half way across the yard when he called out to me.

“I think you’ll do just fine,” he yelled across the yard, stopping me in my tracks.

“Huh?” I asked, looking over my shoulder at the man who had made his way out onto the porch.

“I said ‘you’ll do.’”

“I’ll do as what?” I asked, turning to face him. A bright smile spread across his face.

“As a friend.”

A polite cough brought me back to the hospital room and I looked back at the nurse who was staring at me expectantly, waiting for my answer.

“He, uh … ” I started, pausing to swallow the lump that was building in my throat at the memory. “He was my friend.”

********

Mr. Kelly died on a rainy Friday morning.

He had spent a week in the hospital after suffering two back-to-back heart attacks within two days of each other. He only regained consciousness for a minute or two during his entire stay at the hospital.

At 95, I think he’d agree with me that he lived a full life – one full of happiness, success and love. Mr. Kelly wasn’t afraid of death, or of leaving anything – even loved ones – behind. He knew it was inevitable, and he also knew it was his time.

I couldn’t possibly fit everything Mr. Kelly taught me into one blog post. I couldn’t fit it into one blog, or even the entire world wide web. There’s simply too much.

But most important of all, Mr. Kelly taught me to live for the next adventure – one would always be waiting, he was sure of that.

“Life is good,” he used to say. “And it just gets better everyday.”

I have no doubt he’s conquering his next adventure. And he’ll be with me as I look for mine.

time heals all wounds. so we wait on time.

My two best friends are in love.

They all but exploded with it as soon as we sat down to dinner a couple of nights ago – one simply blurting out a simple, “I’m in love,” while the other blushed a deep crimson and fought back a smile when I sighed and looked at her expectantly, not having to utter the “You too?” that played on my lips.

I smiled at them both as I listened to Sarah practically hum with excitement as she talked about the future. Some might think living on opposite sides of an ocean is improbable, but watching how one of my oldest friends seemed to light up and sparkle at my simple questions about her new long-distance romance, made the Atlantic seem more like a shallow wading creek. Watching her, I couldn’t fight my own smile.

Turning to Stefanie I waited expectantly for a picture of her latest infatuation to be thrust in my face, or to hear a seemingly-predictable story about an improbable chance meeting. But instead she just sat there and beamed back at us. Sarah and I exchanged quick glances, both of us suddenly hesitant.

“Well then Stef,” I finally started and stared at her pointedly. “Are you going to share with us your newest fling?”

She furrowed her brow at me and scrunched up her nose. “Newest ‘fling?’” She spat back at me and I immediately regretted my hasty assumptions.

“That came out wrong,” I countered. “Please tell us about what has that silly grin plastered across your face.”

The grin returned but she only shrugged and I fought back my urge to let out an exasperated sigh.

“Stef,” I heard Sarah said pointedly, watching as she narrowed her eyes across the table at our friend. “You’re pissing me off. Let’s have it.”

“He’s wonderful,” she gushed suddenly, air whooshing out of her lungs. “He’s nice and he’s driven, he has like a career and a plan for the future, he’s brave and caring, says the most beautiful things. He likes to read, loves music – we have practically the same taste – he is giving and loving and just … perfect.”

Sarah and I sat stunned into silence, both of our mouths hanging open slightly and our eyebrows pushed up in surprise.

“Well he sounds wonderful,” I started. “A name? How you met?” I felt like we needed to back up about one hundred paces.

“His name is Anthony, and I read about him in a book.”

Silence.

Some one dropped a plate in the kitchen. Steam hissed up from a pot of boiling water. The bartender clanked glasses together. The televisions blared weekend football scores. A waiter read off today’s specials. A baby cried somewhere behind us. Conversation hummed around us and the three of us sat in still silence.

“A book,” Sarah finally said, her tone curving upwards slightly, lingering between a statement and a question.

“Yes,” Stef answered simply and I frowned just slightly, trying to wrap my head around what she was telling us.

“Okay so I don’t want to be the bitch here, but are you saying he isn’t … ” Sarah paused a moment before continuing. ” … Real?”

“Well I guess not in the truest sense of the word, no,” Stef started and Sarah looked at her like she had lost her mind. I watched the exchange from where I sat, still unable to make myself say anything in response – trying my best not to burst out in laughter at the absurdity of Stef’s statement or burst out in tears for fear she had lost her mind. “But he’s real to me. And not in the crazy way – don’t you pricks start in on me about therapy or anything. I mean the idea of him is real. The idea that something wonderful – someone wonderful - is waiting out there for me. It gives me hope. It lets me hope for happiness. For completion.”

Silence once again hung over the table.

“Well I guess I’ll drink to that,” Sarah finally said and the laughter that I was fighting giggled out of my lips.

“Here’s to hoping you find him,” I said and smiled at her, raising my glass. “And that he’s in flesh-and-blood form this time – I’m not sure how I feel about you dating the pages of a book.”

And snow fell in huge flakes outside the restaurant’s windows and the three of us drank to happiness – the idea of it, and the real thing.

Tonight as I’m sitting at my desk in my pajamas with my socked feet tucked up under me for warmth, I can’t help but think about what Stefanie said about the idea of happiness and her confidence that she’d find it in love. I just returned home from celebrating Christmas at my dad’s house and the familiar twisting in my chest is lingering longer than usual this time.

Absent-mindedly I start rubbing at my chest, just over my heart and watch the fat snow flakes falling outside of my window. I’m a grown-up. I am smart and confident and understanding. I am practical and mature and accepting. But none of that keeps out the hurt. It’s been years, but every holiday spent with my father and his new family feels like the first one.

I still remember where I was sitting when I found out my parents were getting a divorce. I remember every one of my movements in the following hours as I tried to push the reality of my broken family out of my mind. I remember where I was sitting when my father told me he was getting remarried. I could take you to the exact table in the exact restaurant.

The divorce rate in the U.S. has topped 58 percent at the end of 2009. That means the majority of people know what it feels like to have their chest twist in pain, almost strangling the shallow breaths barely escaping your throat as you sit and smile and feign conversation and pretend you’re numb to it all.

It still hurts. All of these years later.

My family wasn’t just broken – I was too. My heart was their pinata. Only it didn’t seem like anyone knew they were swinging the bat. I think that has made it worse.

Stefanie has rolled through the divorce of her parents a couple of times over and while both of us pretend it doesn’t affect us – that those are our parents’ problems, not ours – we both know it isn’t true. That’s why I couldn’t help but smile at her when she announced she was in love – even if it did end up being with a book character. Because Stefanie wasn’t afraid to hope. She wasn’t afraid to seek out happiness, to accept that it was waiting for her.

She decided to loosen her grip on reality and embrace possibility.

There are times when you can choose to be realistic, and most of the time you should. There are times when you can choose to be pessimistic and think all of this will end in disaster – as it has before. But there are some times when you can choose to just be happy. Right now. Forget the past. Forget the future.

So alone tonight I once again raised my glass to the window on the other side of my desk and toasted Stefanie’s make-believe-boyfriend. And I, too, chose happiness.

“Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us. Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy. We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game.” – Will Durant

you dreammaker, you heartbreaker

Sometimes I think we are forgetful on purpose. We forget to pay a parking ticket, forget to return a favorite library book, forget to unpack a suitcase after a vacation. We forget to cut him out of all of those framed pictures, we get in the car and forget where we wanted to go until we’re already there. We forget to sit down and write about things that are hard to put into words.

Sometimes I know I forget things on purpose.

It had been weeks since I’d been to see Mr. Kelly. As I walked in his room and found him asleep in his recliner -book fipped closed over his thumb holding his page – I couldn’t think of a good enough excuse to give him as to why I’d stayed away so long. I didn’t want to tell him the truth – to speak the words outloud. So as I stood in the doorway and watched his eyelids flutter with the sporadic thoughts of sleep, I fought back the urge to curl up in his lap and beg for forgiveness. Not that I’d need to beg. Mr. Kelly was notorious for letting me off the hook.

After a few moments his eyes opened – almost sensing my presence – and he smiled at me.

“When did you get here?”

“Just now,” I said and smiled at him.

“I’ve missed you,” he said simply and waved me to his side. “Tell me everything.”

I crumpled to the ground at his feet and rambled on about all of the boring things I’d wrapped my life around in our time apart. Occasionally he’d interrupt with a laugh or a sigh or just to rumple my hair in support.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he finally said after I’d let silence sit between us for an extended moment. “And you’re wrong. You aren’t lost at all. You’re just wandering a bit.”

I bit my lip and traced the patterns in the carpet.

“That’s why I haven’t come,” I said to the rug. “I didn’t want to admit out loud that I’m afraid I have no idea what I’m doing – where I’m going.”

I looked up at him then but he only smiled.

“You will figure it out. You always figure it out.”

No advice. Only confidence in me. The swelling pain I felt in my chest tightened then as Mr. Kelly began to hum to himself. I knew he’d fallen asleep when the rhythmic strokes through my hair slowed and then stopped.

I cleaned up his apartment while he slept – putting books back in their places on the shelves and returning boxes to their cabinets in the kitchen.

“When did you get here?” Mr. Kelly’s voice called from the other room and made me jump. I froze then, both startled and then devastated.

“Just now,” I whispered as I sat on the floor next to him.

“I missed you.”

Alzheimer’s is a funny thing. It creeps up on even the most prepared.

And then just like a wrecking ball, it tears through the life you’ve built, one blow at a time.

I lied to Mr. Kelly before. This was the real reason I’d stayed away. I was afraid he wouldn’t remember me. Afraid that I’d have to play along as the thread slowly unwound from his spool until one day I, too, was just another empty face in the room.

I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t brave enough to look into his blank eyes. I wasn’t ready to be a stranger.

I wasn’t ready to be forgotten.

“What if, instead of forgetting things when we get old, we were actually able to recover other people’s thoughts,” Mr. Kelly had said to me one afternoon more than a year before he started showing signs of Alzheimer’s. “Can you imagine? Wouldn’t that be just amazing?”

I thought of that afternoon as I knelt beside him and repeated all I’d told him just minutes before. We had laughed then over the impossibility of the statement and then thrown out theories of what we thought we might be able to recover.

“What if we could uncover lost thoughts of great composers?” he had said and his eyes lit up. “I’ve always wanted to be a great musician. Our wondering ended then as he had picked up his guitar and strummed a simple song.

His guitar sat untouched in the corner now, dust settling on its wooden frame.

I absentmindedly placed a record on his player as i thought about that afternoon. Familiar music filled the room and Mr. Kelly smiled, closing his eyes again. I swept away the single tear that escaped and threatened to give me away, but others choked my words in my throat as I tried to whisper goodbye.

I knew when he woke again he would have forgotten I’d ever been there.

houses are built to live in

It’s quiet in the house tonight. So quiet that I fish through a box in the tool shed out back and dig out an old AM radio and tune it to a static-filled news broadcast just to hear noise. The small house seems huge as I walk from one empty room to the  next soaking in the loneliness.

Everything here reminds me of my grandfather.

Leaning against the door frame of the living room I can see him sitting in the recliner in the corner, glasses perched on his nose, working a word search from a pile of puzzle books on the table next to him. Without looking up he yells at me for running through the house, for kicking the gravel off the driveway, for building pillow forts in the dining room. Then, a much smaller version of me crawls under his book and into his lap and kisses him on the tip of his nose. And he tells me a story.

But I flip off the light and he is gone.

In the bathroom, I open the drawer for my toothbrush out of habit but only find it empty. I retrieve it from a packed up box in the hall – one of the few left in the house – and return it there when I’m finished. Only a couch and a couple of boxes are left in the house now.

My father used to tell me that a house was just a house – four walls and nothing more – but you could build a home anywhere. I credited this belief to his years as a real estate agent and contractor, building a selling hundreds of cookie cutter houses that ll looked exactly the same and meant nothing to him. Or it could have been his childhood spent following my grandfather as he was transferred to Air Force bases around the world. A house was just a house – in Guam, France, Saudi Arabia, or the U.S. – but with his family it was always a home.

But sitting in the empty house tonight I can’t help but be filled with memories of the times I spent here. Christmases and Easters and summers that were endless, yet never long enough. I was the only one who watched my grandmother pack the memories into boxes and load them onto the moving truck. My dad, my sister, my brothers, my aunts – no one seemed affected by the home we were letting go.

It’s not just a house. It’s 37 years of memories. For me it’s an entire lifetime of memories. And tonight part of me is sad. And I miss my grandfather all over again.

He will stay in this house when we lock it’s doors for the last time in the morning. He won’t move a couple of towns away with my grandmother and her new boyfriend. Our bulging stockings lined up in rows under the Christmas tree won’t move with us either. Nor will the Easter egg hunts in the front yard, or the swing between the trees out back, or the garden where I grew my cantaloupes.

We will leave those things here. With this house. With this home.

I’m afraid part of me will stay here too. Sitting in my grandfather’s recliner. Swinging with him out back. Opening Christmas gifts, dying eggs around the kitchen table, pruning rose bushes along the fence line.

Sitting here alone in the empty house tonight, listening to the old radio. This part of me will stay here with this house.