Facing Death The Loss Of A Dear Friend Can Be Difficult, Especially For A Soon-To-Be 80-Year-Old Who’s Not Ready To Die

I was having lunch with Shirley Michaelsen. We were both getting close to that big 80. We’d known each other since we were 16 and we’d always laughed a lot. We were still laughing. It was a long lunch and a good part of it was spent discussing our determination to live a lot longer.

We figured we were both fairly smart and fairly gutsy, too. All we had to do, we said, was use our minds and take care of our bodies and just like that we’d live 10 more years, at least.

We spent a little time discussing, for some reason, whether we planned to be cremated or buried. Cremation won, hands down. Then we laughed to think of ourselves young inside, don’t forget talking about such things.

We hugged goodbye out in the parking lot. The next day I called Shirley and she had a terrible cold. I learned later that a neighbor had taken her that same night to the hospital. She had pneumonia. Shirley died exactly one week later.

Any death of someone close to you is a shock. But to have a friend your age die one who had just made a sort of pact with you to live many more years is much more than a shock. It was like a dark and ominous black cloud suddenly covering me. That cloud hasn’t yet completely gone away.

What will happen to me now, I wondered? What will happen the next time I get a cold? Will pneumonia, instead of being an old person’s friend as is often said be my enemy? My mortal enemy. I wondered if everything simply depends on the toss of the dice, as it were.

Of course, I grieved for Shirley, for she really was something special. If I told her I had a sleepless night, she’d say sympathetically, in that voice like no one else’s, “Oh, Honey.” And I felt better. And I knew she cared.

But and this is a kind of confession when I heard she’d died, I had the swift thought: Thank God it wasn’t I who died. I’m not proud of that thought, but neither am I ashamed of it. I believe it was a very human reaction. Each of us is self-centered simply because we are actually and physically centered in ourselves. Nowhere is this more apparent than when self-survival enters the picture.

It’s very difficult to think of oneself as being nothing, physically speaking. It seems impossible that this body one’s own lifelong companion will be gone. Either slowly in the earth, intact in a vault or quickly in flames. The thought of any of these can be nothing but shattering. Best to shut one’s eyes and pretend it never happened. However, when friends one’s own age die, it’s a sobering time of realizing it WILL happen. And possibly, quite soon.

Shirley was one of a circle of six of us, all more or less the same age. All friends since our teens. Each summer we’ve blithely planned, and held, reunions. Shirley is gone, one is terribly ill, one is more and more confused. All this in a year. The three of us will do our best to have a reunion this year. But now, after Shirley’s death, I have two constant, nagging questions. Will all three of us be at this next reunion? If not, and I am the absent one, will it be because I have died?

Part of me is gone now. A young part. For although we clearly saw each other’s wrinkles and brown spots and awkward movements, we always saw, too, the exuberant young and hopeful girls we once were.

That is the way we’ve thought about each other. And no one else sees us that way.

Shirley’s home was filled with beautiful things. Now they sit in her empty condo, no one to see or appreciate them. I’ve envied her in that elegant home. And now that I finally have the house I’ve always wanted, I may not have the years to enjoy it that Shirley had. I’ve even had the childish thought that it wouldn’t be “fair’ if I didn’t. I, who certainly know by now that nothing in life is fair.

In every book of quotations can be found copious words about how we should live each day to the fullest, for there may not be another. Well, it’s a lot easier to write that than it is to live it, is all I can say.

I’ve tried to do it a few times, but root canals and bills and icy roads have quickly put an end to that philosophy!

I have one wish that burns inside me. I want to be on the water. On the ocean. I’ve put it on hold for a long time. Always knowing there will be time to do it tomorrow. Will there? And if there is time, will one of the circle be alive to go with me? And will we both be healthy enough to even do it?

For 57 years, I’ve made my own Christmas cards. Usually I start making them early. I have the plans and the material for this year’s Christmas cards and I had intended to begin making them. Maybe I’d be an optimistic fool to do it. After all, there is the possibility I won’t be alive in December to sign them.

Young people have been impressively kind to me about Shirley’s death. I doubt that, at their ages, I would have been as kind. But they simply can’t understand how it feels at my age to have my whole life crumble around me. It wasn’t simply a matter of crying or any other kind of conventional mourning. With Shirley’s death, two things happened to me. My body became somehow less balanced and I felt acutely and suddenly alone.

Older persons have their youthful selves buried deep within them, but young people are nothing but young. It’s not inconceivable that young people, hearing of an old person’s death, thinks to themselves “big deal.”

Having been young once, I can understand that. But they couldn’t possibly comprehend the kind of emptiness I now have. And perhaps always will.

Well, I’ve had some long days to think about my future and this is what I’ve decided. To hell with practicality, realism and pessimism. I’m going to think positive. I’m going to buy quite a few small evergreens, a young Curly Willow tree, a bright, frivolous, possibly-too-young summer dress. And I’m going to buy that expensive microfiber winter jacket at Nordstrom that I’ve been drooling over. I’ll rationalize that it is really a sensible buy.

After all, I’ll tell myself, I’ll be wearing it this coming winter and the next and the next and the next.

So what if life is determined by the toss of the dice? If there ARE odds, I’m going to do my damndest to beat them. After all, I’m positive that if I had died first, this is just what Shirley would have done.

MEMO: Jane Lavagetto is a Spokane free-lance writer; she frequently writes articles in The Spokesman-Review on issues facing older people.