The Friend Who Came and Went (part two)

Here's how the story ends.

My dear friend Shelley (on the left) and me

(If you missed part one, here’s the link to it.)

To say that we became best friends would be an understatement. It was more like the first flush of young love. We shared daily –and nightly – phone calls, and made plans to see each other two, three, four times a week. It was never enough; we always wanted more.

One blustery cold winter night, we walked out of a restaurant where we had lingered long after the other patrons had left, and in the almost-empty parking lot, we noticed that Shelley’s car was running, a white plume of exhaust curling up into the frigid air. She had been so excited to see me when we arrived for our dinner that she had jumped out of her car without turning off the ignition.

Alan was astonished at our rapid and intense bonding. “You love your friend more than you love me,” he’d say, only half kidding, as he saw me dressing carefully one night to meet Shelley for a movie. “Of course I don’t,” I reassured him. “I just love her…differently.” And when, well past midnight, I’d tiptoe in the door and gently kiss his sleeping face he’d mutter, “What time is it?” with a tone that I can only describe as loving exasperation.

How could I explain to him that finding someone who knew just what I was feeling, at my bravest moments and at my most terrified, was a source of comfort that nothing else, not even his love, could provide? It was as if I had been running and running – whether toward or away from something I couldn’t even tell – until suddenly with Shelley, I could catch my breath.

One day, seemingly out of nowhere, Shelley came down with a fever. But it stubbornly hung on. At first, she ignored it, thinking it must be a virus. But then, trying to unscrew a stubborn jar, she broke her wrist. A few weeks later, her ankle snapped when she stepped off the curb the wrong way. A run of bad luck?  Osteoporosis?  Maybe. But what about the fever that wouldn’t go away?

All of this happened in the midst of a separation from her husband. “Maybe it’s all the stress that’s running you down?” I asked her late one night when we sat on the terrace of my summer home on Fire Island, calmed by the sound of the distant waves. 

Shelley’s daughter, Arielle, and my two sons that summer on Fire Island

Although Shelley was feeling ill, she had come with her daughter to visit me. We looked forward all year to this visit – a ritual we had enjoyed each of the five summers since we’d met.  The stars were startlingly bright that night, and I remember looking up, finding one, and making a silent wish. Please, oh please, let my friend be healthy.

And then, with a shudder, the unbidden thought: What if?

In the following weeks, I found myself turning into one of those people I had shied away from after my diagnosis, urging optimism, bravery, and cheer. “You’ll be fine,” I insisted when Shelley confessed to her fear that the cancer might be returning. “It’s been ten years! I know you are a survivor,” I said.

And then, late one night, the phone call came. As clearly as I remember my first child’s first words, I remember Shelley’s: “The cancer. It’s back.” The next morning I packed my things, leaving my husband and children behind at the beach, and came home to help my friend.

This brought me face to face with the “what-ifs” I fought so desperately against. But if I had to choose between her comfort and mine, it was no contest. 

I held her hand as the doctor extracted spinal fluid with a needle large enough for an elephant; I flew to North Carolina for her bone marrow transplant and sat in the waiting room watching bald-headed wraithlike women float noiselessly down the corridors; I sat vigil months later at the hospital where my best friend lay attached to a myriad of tubes after she had begged the doctors to try anything, everything, to make her well. I shielded my tears from her by turning my head to look out the window, but when I could no longer keep them inside, I ran to the bathroom, shut myself in a stall, and collapsed in fierce sobs.

It poured furiously the day of Shelley’s funeral. As my family and I left the cemetery in Paramus and drove north toward Connecticut on I-95, the rain slowed to a timid drizzle, and an astonishing rainbow – like melted gemstones of jades, rubies, amethysts, corals, and sapphires– stretched like taffy across the sky, in an elegant arched row.

Will I ever stop missing the friend who came and went? I cannot imagine it. I keep in touch with Shelley’s daughter, an elementary school music teacher, who is now 37 and a busy mother of two children, aged five and three. We all attended her wedding 10 years ago, stung once again by the absence of her mother and my dear friend. 

Love, I believe, is stronger than fate. 

The bond that Shelley and I forged all those years ago lives on, into the next generation.

END

This essay was previously published in the anthology, A Cup of Comfort for Breast Cancer Survivors (Adams Media), edited by Colleen Sell.