On Friendship, Part IV: All Good Things

Some people are perfectly content to live their entire lives in little city apartments without a blade of grass in sight or a tree to shade that grass.  I'm not one of them.  Neither was Laura.  After living in dorms, on-campus apartments, and cramped one-bedrooms for the better part of 20 years, we both longed for space and a front porch and maybe a garage.  Not too much to ask, but on state pay scale?  Definitely.  So we decided to get a house together after I had been back in Tahlequah for a year, teaching at Locust Grove.  By great good luck, I heard that a couple of instructors in my department at Northeastern, where I still taught as adjunct, were flipping a house.  They wanted to sell it, but as a favor, they agreed to consider a one-year lease with option to buy.  We went to look the house over on a sultry summer evening in 1999.  We got out of the car and stood at the curb, looking up at the neat red brick and black siding ranch house perched on a little rise, shaded by huge trees, both front and back.  I knew already we would have to have it.  I looked over at Laura, her eyes wide and sparkling, smiling as she gazed up the hill and said without fear or irony, "I'm going to die in this house." 

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Co-habitating with another grown, very independent woman can be a dangerous enterprise, especially when that woman is your best friend.  I still wonder how we had the nerve to jump into that situation, knowing that most girls who come to college as best friends and are roommates end up hating the other.  But we proved to be a rare and excellently matched team. 

With three bedrooms, one and a half baths, an average living room, and a kitchen big enough for only a small round table, quarters were tight, but we made it work.  We each had our own bedroom, and the third became what we called the Nintendo room---yes, for my Super-Nintendo she had given me for Christmas the year before.  Really, it was an office/library/craft area/guest room, but mostly we really did use it for Nintendo marathons on Friday evenings.  And glory! our own washer and dryer and a dishwasher promised hours of leisure formerly wasted on drudgery and chores.  We could paint, plant, decorate and revel in it all.  If there was a period of adjustment to sharing space, I don't remember it, except for the fact that Laura thought she needed to get up 30 minutes earlier in the mornings to drive halfway across Tahlequah to get to work.  I needed to be getting into the shower at that time to get to Locust.  It took about a week of her showing up to the office at 7:15 (and my teasing her about it) before I convinced her to set her alarm 15 minutes later so our shower schedules would work. 

 

 

In no time, we established a domestic routine that worked for us.  There were chores and problems I didn't mind dealing with---car mechanics, grocery shopping, bill paying---that had always annoyed or intimidated her.  Bless her, she loved to dust, clean, and organize, all foreign concepts to me.  I have only a black thumb, but she loved to grow flowers, and we now had a front porch and a back deck for her to go to town on.  When it came time for her to purchase a new car, she took me to do the talking; when social occasions called for it, she did it.  We broke everything down as simply and fairly as possible.  For example, the one-car garage was traded every Sunday evening: one week I'd park at the curb while she had the garage; the next we'd reverse.  Instead of our friendship being tested, it just grew deeper as we each thought of the other first and tried always to be self-sacrificing instead of self-promoting.  It's the closest thing I can imagine to being married....with the exception that we were nicer to each other than most married couples I know.

 

 

And that was what everyone seemed to believe of us, too, even the people closest to us; they began to assume we were a couple, or even a single unit, two-become-one.  Even now, it feels as though people still wait for that announcement from me, but they'll have to wait forever, because it just was not true.  There was no romance at all to this love and respect; it was as pure and clear as God could ever make it.  Oh, we used to talk about how everything would be so much easier if we were gay, because we were perfectly suited to one another and happy with our little home and life---but we just couldn't wish it true.  We loved men, even if we loved each other more than any man we ever dated.

 

 

Our time together in our home was full of quiet but comfortable routines like Friday night naps before going to B & J's restaurant for dinner, about the same time as the Narcotics Anonymous group (the smokers' meeting) would show up after their meeting and take a bunch of tables in the middle of the room.  We'd smoke along with them and eavesdrop on their jokes and life stories.  Sunday nights always found us watching an HBO series:  Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under.  Most workday evenings from early spring through late fall, we would meet up on the deck for a run-down of our day while we had a couple of cigarettes, before deciding on what we would do for dinner.  Sometimes I didn't know what I really thought about a situation until we had one of those seemingly incidental talks.  As soon as I purchased the house in 2000, we got a pair of cats.  Laura loved and missed having a pet, and we chose cats because they could stay in and not pick up a gazillion ticks and fleas---things which I just cannot deal with.  Fitz (for F. Scott Fitzgerald) and Figaro (think Pinocchio, not the opera) were technically mine and hers, respectively, but they learned quickly that she would let them lounge on her lap for long stretches of time. Those same brother and sister tuxedo cats are lying at my feet as I write.

When I picture her now, it's most often in this home, where we became our own little family, the only family of my own I can ever imagine having.  It was everything home and family should be about:  comfort, acceptance, respect, laughter, and a few tears to water the soil.  It's where we were when her dad succumbed to a stroke and died a day later; it was her turn to go off the rails for a while then, making me realize that we would probably be sharing a home for the rest of our lives, and I began to worry what would happen to her if I died first.  Here is where I came home to after the evening I found my little grandma dead in her home and went into shock.  It's where we were living when I nearly died from gall bladder surgery gone awry, and her voice was the one that called me back after crashing, saying sharply, "Cathy Jean Welker, you open your eyes right this minute!"  And it was here that she came home to on a Friday night in July 2002, having been to the doctor, who told her she had to quit smoking before he would give her the massive hormone doses needed to control her cycles.  Monday afternoon, the doctor called her back at work and asked her to return to his office immediately; it was home, not work, that she stumbled back into shortly afterward, face and lips blanched white, and told me that she had endometrial cancer.

The very next day, she was sent to see the gynecological oncologist in Tulsa.  As I drove out of Tahlequah, I noticed her shaking in the passenger seat.  I held out my hand to her; she took it wordlessly, and I did not let go until I parked the car at the office on Yale.  One week later, she lay in St. John's after a complete hysterectomy and expansive search of her abdominal cavity.  The uterine wall was "involved," meaning that there was no guarantee they had gotten it all.  Radiation would be necessary, but chemo was not a given---not until we found on New Year's Eve that it had spread to her lungs and her bones.

The things that she experienced can't be serialized here; this blog is about her, about friendship, not cancer.  But even in her 10 months of dying, Laura was the epitome of selflessness, just incapable of thinking of herself first.  She was terrified that she was going to cost me my job if I missed too much school to take her to appointments.  She worried about my getting my grading and prep work done at home if she was a distraction.  Though she said little about it, I know she dreaded leaving her sister, who was not strong mentally or physically, to fend for herself in Iowa.  Even after she finally fell and was partially paralyzed, and she was given only a week or two to live, the only thing she asked me to do for her was never to separate the cats, because they had always been together.  She could have asked me for anything, anything---how I wish she had asked me for some ritual or memory to pore over!---and I would have made it happen.  Instead, she made the sacrifice (I will always believe it to be true) of hanging on until after school was out to collapse into that last crisis, the paralysis and eventual coma, so that she would not distract me from work.  No, she never asked anything, but left me with countless gifts, quite literally; I could never enumerate them here.

I see her shining brown eyes and her ever-so-slightly crooked smile, from sucking on her finger when she was little.

I smell her Oscar de la Renta and Beautiful perfumes.

I hear that lilting South Dakota accent, calling me "Ceej" before bursting into raucous laughter, and I hear Christmas music in July.

I taste her chicken and dumplings, the Roni's calazone she loved, virtual rivers of unsweetened tea.

I feel that fine brown hair that I French-braided for her so many times, until she learned to do it herself.

I think of her and I think:  Bette Midler, biscuits and gravy, Wahoo, Johnny Mathis.  I think tacky lamps and business dress and ballerina flats with bows.  I think Ben and JD, Chris and Alex and Emily.  I think slow driving and clocks set hours ahead of real time.  I think Kraft Mac and Cheese and Chef Boyardee box pizza.  I think happy dance, Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, Lawrence Welk.  I think Lane Bryant, verbal dyslexia, and "St. Francis of a Sissy."  I think love-friend-home.  I think love/trust/faith.

I think lovelovelove.