What a friendship

By MARY JANE HOLT
Contributing Writer

My friend died last week. Cindy was 55 and a half. I gotta give her that half. She fought so hard to earn it.

It has been eight days. Today is the first day I have been able to sit before this screen. Touch this keypad with any intent towards actually writing something. I could not face the reality, the finality that the keyboard too often brings into play.

Yeah, I went to the funeral. I saw the grave. I know it’s over. Final. She’s dead.

But I’ve walked around my yard all week. Smelled my flowers. Walked in the woods. Sat on the porches. Felt the wind in my hair. All the while hoping I would somehow feel her. Know that she is still near.

Didn’t happen.

The day before she died I was in my kitchen, in sort of a half turn from the counter to the sink and suddenly I thought of her, almost felt like she was in the room with me. Strongly felt it.

She died within 24 hours.

You would think I would have been ready. Prepared. Unable to be taken by surprise. Not off guard.

No such luck.

Thirteen years ago we were walking across the campus at Darton College in Albany and I scolded her for walking on the grass when the sidewalk was so convenient. She informed me that the grass would probably live longer than her.

She had just learned that the breast cancer was back after a 13 year remission. In the sternum this time. With questions about other areas.

She was in a battle to get in a program where she could receive the drug Tomaxifen that had not been approved at that time. She made the program. It helped buy her 13 more years.

That was about the time she decided to live as though she were dying for the rest of her life. We talked a lot about Jesus back then. Her lifestyle was so extraordinarily, I don’t know a word to describe how she lived, how she was. I just know I talked a lot about Jesus back then. Had to.

Our relationship became strained after a year or so. Her drinking and midnight calls got the best of me. I told her to get a life and hung up on her somewhere around 2 a.m. one morning.

Last year when we reconnected after 12 years (yeah it was just like yesterday) she told me she did. Get a life. Got Jesus, too, she said. Thanked me.

Last year, several months into our weekly, sometimes daily, even several times a day talks, she asked me why I didn’t talk about Jesus all the time anymore.

I asked what she meant.

That’s when she told me that’s all she could hear me say back in the early nineties. Jesus this. Jesus that. Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!

That’s when it all started coming back to me. “Maybe I don’t need to talk about Him all the time now, maybe we can talk about us,” I said.

And so we did. We giggled. We cried. We fantasized. We dreamed. Yeah, there is a difference.

I spent one of the most memorable birthdays of my life with her last year. She gave me a half dozen gifts, among which was a pen engraved with “Mary Jane Holt, Novelist at Heart.”

She, a teacher/professor, said she always has felt that I would someday be a “great novelist.” Don’t we love friends who believe in us like that!

I am nearing completion of my first novel. I have tried to put a bit of Cindy’s unique spunk and spirit into my main character. It was her request. Luckily, it is a work of fiction. Like Cindy said, “Folks will never believe the truth, not our truth, girl, so you gotta write fiction.”

I killed off “her” character on the first page of the book and have skipped around, writing various parts of the novel all year. About three months before she died I read the funeral scene to her She laughed so hard that she would repeatedly lose her breath. Each time she regained composure she would say “keep reading.” When I finished, she said it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

The last time I spoke to her I promised to finish the book and dedicate it to her. I think she was afraid I was just writing to appease her, or as sort of therapy to help me deal with her illness and death. Maybe she had grounds for her fear, but her belief in me will see me though. What a friendship!