Sad Goodbye

I lost a good friend to cancer not long ago. Her name was Barbara Kopet Williams. We’d been close friends for 54 years. And yet when I attended her memorial service, I didn’t shed a tear. At this age, most of us have become numb to the deaths of those around us. And at this age, many of us find it difficult to cry. Perhaps we no longer have any easy tears left.

But Barbara’s sickness and death taught me some lessons. One, I don’t think most doctors care much about sick and dying older people. Two, dying people don’t have much time to nurture friendships and that reality is part of the bigger loss. I don’t know if the lessons I learned will come in handy to anyone else facing a close friend’s death. But there they are.

One day, during Barbara’s last year, she told me on the phone she thought God was punishing her for being smug.

“Smug about what?” I asked.

“Well, because both my parents had lived to be almost 100, I’d always assumed I would, too. And it had never occurred to me I would ever have cancer.”

I told her I didn’t think God could be that petty, and she said that really she didn’t, either.

When she was told of her bladder cancer, she moved to Portland to be near two physicians who had been highly recommended. And also to be near her daughter, Julie. She thought she’d need her. She was right, and as it turned out Julie gave a year of her life for her mother.

At the end, Barbara told Julie all the awful things that had happened in the last year were worth it, because she and Julie had 12 months of closeness and caring. They even laughed during those months. Laughed and cried in that enviable way of lucky mothers and daughters.

During that time, I never saw Barbara, but I called her twice a week and wrote to her almost that often.

Barbara was unbelievably brave, although she denied this. I kept asking myself if I could be that brave. I’m not sure yet of the answer.

She told me two or three times that she’d like to go to sleep and never wake up. I never believed she really meant this, although she may have thought she did at the time. I’d seen my mother fighting so hard to win over cancer, although her future was far from bright. I learned then that the instinct for self-survival is undeniably strong.

Barbara was desperately ill the whole 12 months. She had aggressive chemotherapy that was sometimes given to her for eight long, uninterrupted hours. Each day was a battle, each day found her sicker and noticeably weaker. Then radiation. Finally, the oncologist told her the cancer was gone. But her body — attacked so long by bladder spasms and infections — was still far from what it used to be and needed to be.

Then she had a surgery that lasted 10 hours. She and Julie were both ambivalent about the surgery, but the surgeon said that her life would be much more comfortable and pain-free if she had it.

She lived just a few days after the surgery. On one of those days, she said to her daughter: “Well, Julie, we gambled and we lost.”

My opinion of the medical profession — rocky at best — plummeted during that time. Today, one gets the impression that doctors aren’t terribly interested in any of their patients, but especially in older people. It’s almost as if they think they’re wasting their time. After all, the patient won’t live too much longer no matter what the doctors do — or don’t do.

It’s really tough to be old, and if you can’t find a doctor who sincerely wants to help you, it’s even tougher.

In the last months of Barbara’s life, she had painful bladder spasms. I heard her on the phone having one and it sounded like a woman giving birth. When I asked her what was the cause of the spasms, she would always reply that she didn’t know.

I’d say, “Well, ask your doctors” and she’d tell me that she talked to her doctors only on days she had appointments. Apparently, calling them was not an option. After her death, I wondered if her oncologist, who had talked her into having the surgery felt any regrets. Somehow I doubted it. She was just a name on his appointment pad, which is all many of us are today — especially if we are old.

It seemed to me that any compassion was totally absent, although some of the nurses were kind. If she needed to talk to one of her doctors, she had to go through a battery of impersonal assistants. She had to wait and wait. And from time to time, when she had questions she wanted desperately to be answered, they never were.

She was close to 81, but she still craved nurturing, as we all do. I would say, though, that she received absolutely none from her doctors.

During her year’s battle with cancer, our friendship became one-sided. I hated that, but it was inevitable and I knew it. I’ve known since I was 20 and watched my mother die that seriously ill people live in a world of their own. They can’t do otherwise. It’s all they can do to simply get through each day. And their total interest in themselves has nothing to do with being self-centered or egotistical.

Yet I was still sometimes hurt by her quite obvious lack of interest in me. Two or three times she ended the conversation with: “Well, what’s new with you?”

I knew she didn’t really want to know and I would answer with just a few words. Just once, when I had written her that I had a rather bad kidney infection, she called me. I thought of it as a gift from her. It was like a balm — soothing my hurts and bringing back the Barbara I had begun to think was lost to me.

I understood the total interest Barbara had in herself. But it did hurt and I think of the last year as a bad one for me. I guess this means that both of us were selfish. Yet she had an excuse and I didn’t.

During Barbara’s memorial service, I remembered a day years ago when she and her first husband, Jerry, went to choose and pay for their cemetery plots and their coffins. I thought it a gruesome errand, but I remember she said, “It was kind of fun!”

Back then death was just a word, a fleeting thought. Far different from what it is for us today.

At her service, the beautiful song “On Eagle’s Wings” was sung. I remember it was sung at Jerry’s service, too.

I sometimes pretend that the words are true and that she is now being held “in the palm of His hands.” I don’t really believe it. Still, what can it hurt?