My God, Tom, she wrote in my yearbook, what the HELL are we
going to do with our lives now? That was always one of my favorite entries. On rare occasions when I'd look back at it, when I'd visit my parents' house in Lancaster, it always brought a smile.
My friend Jane died yesterday. (No, that’s not meant to be an answer to her
question.) We’d only lately been in
touch, like a lot of people in the Class of 85, who used Facebook to
reconnect. I once swore I’d never go
back to a reunion, but largely thanks to Mark Zuckerberg, I did. Jane and I were in many classes together,
and she was always good fun. We didn’t
hang out together after school, but she was someone capable of making you
laugh, even when the joke came at her expense (which I confess happened more
than a few times courtesy of yours truly).
I had a chance to talk with her quite a bit at the reunion,
and at the after-party at the bar near the convention center where the reunion
had been held. As the two of us wandered to the back of the pub, where the outside garden was, she looked around and then at me and said, oh wait, this is for the young crowd over here! While twenty-five years
had passed since graduation, we fell into conversations about what the hell
we’d been doing with our lives so easily, smiling and laughing, enjoying life
and one another’s company. Seeing her again was one of my fondest memories of that reunion.
A few weeks after the reunion, I had lunch with another
classmate of mine, and we both shared one observation: the gals looked great, and the guys much less
so, ourselves included! I’m forty pounds
heavier than I was, and while I have my head by choice every summer, more than
a few of us don’t have to waste their time combing. Yes, the women probably spent more time
getting ready to be seen – stereotype that that is – but Jane struck me as
Belle of the Ball totally without effort, just by showing up and being a
presence. Jane was a very tall person,
as the pic above shows, and at the reunion, she seemed to own the joint, the
years of global travel and success wearing so well on her dress and her face. In the pic below, that's Jane in the back, arms upraised in joy, triumph, or just for the fuck of it.)
A year or so later, when my family were contemplating a trip to London, we
posted a few concerns about being there so soon after the riots. Jane generously offered us her place in
Amsterdam to use, and while we decided to go to London anyway (which was not a
problem at all, safety-wise), I never forgot that kindness and hoped one day to
avail myself of it.
Last summer, I happened to post that I would be in town, bringing my kids to visit my parents, and asked if anyone was up for a meet. Jane happened to see the post as she was traveling by train to her parents, and we messaged back and forth and set up a breakfast date, right in downtown, at a place whose name is also its location, On Orange. We did some more catching up, and that’s when she told me she had skin cancer, stage four. She’d come to Sloan Kettering to consider her treatment options and was discussing the matter with her parents. It wasn’t public knowledge on FB, and I appreciated that she confided in me. (It may have been coincidence that she saw my post, but karma’s a funny thing.) I’m pretty sure I bought, and I’d buy her a dozen more breakfasts in town if she would only still be alive. Eventually she let the word out, and posted pictures of her recent visits, having undergone her chemo treatments. She never talked much about her battle, and I don’t even know where she got her treatments, whether in Europe or the States. (She was a global citizen, living in Holland and Tanzania among other places.) The last time we spoke directly was at that breakfast. (I was recently in town visiting, and I parked near the place, and thought of Jane, hoping she was okay, not knowing that she was leaving us soon.)
This is the point where the writer says something pompously
profound about life, but I don’t have much.
I’m grieving for my friend, who returned to my consciousness for such a
short time after twenty-five years of being a nice memory in a yearbook, long
enough to remind me how much fun a person she was, long enough to make me write
about my grief, long enough to make me decide to post a blog, something I’ve
not done since about November. (Looks like one of the last things I wrote was after Lou
Reed died.) Maybe she’ll be just a push
to get me return to writing more than assignments and letters of
recommendation. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll reflect on what the hell I have
been doing with my life, though having been in and out of therapy for so long,
some days it seems like that’s all I ever do. All I know is, I’m grateful our
paths crossed once more before she had somewhere else to go, and right now it just hurts that she's gone.
(A note on the Roethke: technically, an elegy is a poem, not
a prose piece, honoring the dead. And
Roethke’s poem about “my student, thrown by a horse,” is certainly richer than
what you’ve just read, more concentrated an expression of grief from a
speaker who is in an awkward emotional role, “neither father nor lover,” yet
still pained at the loss of a very young life.
The title of the poem, which I regularly teach, came to me before I even
contemplated Roethke’s language and mood. I suppose I connect to the speaker,
in the sense that my affection for Jane was at a distance, even more a distance
than the speaker has with his student.
But Roethke manages to make his elegy about Jane as much as it is for
her. I’m too connected to my own sadness to pull that off, preferring to let
the pictures show you my friend. But
it’s a good excuse to send you off to read a great poem by a great writer, who
also left the world too soon.)
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