The Story that Numbers Cannot Tell

I keep a meticulous log of the miles I’ve run. I love the steady tick tick tick of numbers, the way each day of my calendar holds a neat row charting my progress (as of today, 272 miles run, 728 to go). Life gets derailed though, and in those times, the very absence of numerical progression hints at Something Going On.

The backstory could fill volumes, or it could be four words

Childhood friend, terminal cancer

Swift and aggressive, the disease attached itself to Jill’s lungs and brain. I witnessed her optimism and fight and visualized the cancer to be like barnacles in her battered body. I wanted to pry them off, toss them away, free her.

Jill turned 40 on February 13th this year. Her family and friends threw a massive party for her. Jill wasn’t doing well at all at the party, pain (which was hard to gauge as she never, ever complained) and fatigue so clearly etched on her face.

At one point she looked at her watch and said, "are you fucking kidding me?" I thought it was because it was only 8:15 and the party would go till 10, that she was tired. What it really was, was that she couldn't understand her watch and thought it was 3:15 am. The brain metastasis were taking such irrefutable hold, she could not find the clarity she needed to read her watch. I was kneeling down in front of her, I told her that it was 8:15, and so did the woman next to me. Jill looked so confused. She said, "Please just tell me the truth" and I looked her in the eyes, told her it was 8:15. I said it three times.

Five days later, I called Jill. I had started to call her mom, who had been my main contact as Jill’s pain had rendered her in too much pain to talk recently. But that day I called Jill, because she was there, she was alive and it was HER I needed to talk to. She’d had her scans that week, they took extra long because her pain was unbearable and she had the doctors pull her out of the machine in the middle of the process.

The results, ones she had quietly anticipated, were devastating. The doctors were out of options, no stone unturned, no drug left unexamined, unconsidered. So much chemo, radiation and surgery, her beautiful body was a battlefield. The cancer had advanced over the preceding two months even with aggressive treatment.

I went to spend the day with her. She was staying at her mom’s and we hung out the way you do when you’re in 8th grade, sort of confined to a place and a day, options minimal but really, none needed because all you need is your friend to talk to, or be quiet with.

I lay down on her bed and there was this feeling welling in me - you know it, everybody knows it. That feeling when you know you need to say something, when it is there and it is so big inside of you it and it pulses in your throat, not sure which breath it'll come out with. It's like that feeling when you’re with someone you have a crush on, and you'll admit it in a minute, or when you have a secret and you need to let it out and it's there and you almost, almost, and then BAM you say what you have to say.

We had to talk about the fact that she would die soon. That there would be life, here, going on and that she wouldn't see her older brother's babies, her younger brother's graduation, that she would leave her mother and father and friends. She told me, tears pouring down her face, voice hoarse, that she didn't want to die at home, didn't want her mom to walk into her house every single day, walk by her room and think "Jill died here." She said she wanted to die in a hospital and it broke my heart, I cried and told her what it meant to me to know her, to grow up with her, to dread my life without her.

We talked about the time she had left. She'd been thinking about places that were driving distance away to visit (the consummate adventurer, she hated that she was now forbidden to fly - doctors orders). She wanted to see the cherry blossoms in Virginia this Spring, the unspoken tension – would she be here for the Cherry Blossoms?

The brain cancer was more and more obvious. Mostly she was fine, but she was beginning to take a long time to answer questions, her balance was very off, her gorgeous handwriting became shaky, like the scrawl of a very old woman. She got a catalog one day that we looked through together and she kept turning the pages backwards instead of forward.

Time with her was just peaceful. In fact, I felt some guilt at the quiet respite that our visits were for me.

About three weeks ago, I spent the day with Jill in the hospital. She was in pain and felt awful in every way. She couldn’t move well or think or talk or remember and the cancer was filling her body so completely that it actually hurt, as if it would crimp in her body when she bumped or moved wrong.

Jill, her mom and I went to this really lovely, airy and light atrium in the lobby of the hospital that day, for a slight change of scenery. At one point, Jill adjusted her shawl and something happened, something inside of her shifted or popped and it looked like she would pass out, she was hurting so much she couldn't breath or open her eyes. She was able to come sit next to me and I put my hand on her, my fingertips stroking her neck and back so lightly, and she just sat there, to absorb the pain for a minute, wait for it to subside which, eventually, it did. She mostly slept, could speak only a few words at a time and then would drift off to sleep.

While she was sleeping, her mom and I talked about Jill's pain and I kept remembering that scene in Terms of Endearment where Shirley McClain goes batshit on the nurses because they are late in giving Deborah Winger her pain meds. Shirley did that scene justice.

That afternoon, when we walked with Joyce pushing Jill in a wheelchair, Jill would tilt her head back and look up at her mom and her mom would lean down and kiss Jill's head, like you do a baby. Her baby. Her daughter. I thought of my own ten year old girl. I thought impossible thoughts.

Late that night, I went home and kept feeling sobs try to bubble out my throat. I was reading a book to Luke for bedtime and I wanted to cry so badly it was hard to breathe. I stopped and choked it down down down. I’ve never done that, never pushed crying away with such force but I did because I felt like if I started then I wouldn't stop, ever.

I didn't want to talk about it with anyone. People would say “oh what a good friend you are” and the words turned my stomach. Nothing, nothing I could do for Jill felt like anything substantially helpful. It was hellish to watch her hurt, I felt lonely and helpless and extravagant in the ordinariness of my life.

Exactly one week later, I got a call from Jill’s mother. Joyce was calling to tell me that Jill had fallen, and that the decision had been made to bring her back to the hospice wing of the hospital.

I arrived at the hospital to a friend who had one foot solidly out of this world. She was tucked carefully into bed, and when I walked in, she opened her eyes, I told her Hi sweet, and put my bag down. When I looked up, her eyes were already closed.

Her brother arrived, in a cloud of big brother bluster. I read his grief, his hope, his anguish, the unabashed adoration of his baby sister. He teased her, she did not open her eyes, he tickled her feet, she did not open her eyes, but vaguely kicked at him and it was as lovely a moment of brother sister connection as any. He'd brought a small bag that his wife had packed for him to bring to Jill and asked if I wanted to help take Jill’s nail polish off (she’d had one nail stripped so the nurses could take a pulse ox level reading, it would have made Jill nuts to have one nail undone). Bill and I sat on either side of Jill, each took a hand and carefully wiped the rest of her pretty nails clean of their elegant French manicure. I wanted to go find someone to come back and re-polish them

Shortly after, the nurse came in and asked if I could help him change Jill’s Lidocaine patches. I’d helped this extraordinary nurse with the same task the week before, when Jill was slightly more lucid. We rolled Jill on her side and began the painful task of removing the large, sticky patches that covered her back, side and hip. As the nurse carefully removed the patches, a primal pain response escaped Jill, it was a moan, a cry, something that traveled from her to my very throat, something that choked and pulled at me.

I did what moms do. I lay my lips on the warmth of her head, I whispered into the pink whirls of her ear “It’s ok sweet, almost over, almost done” kissed her and murmured into the air around her “almost done almost done almost done…” hoping to deliver us both from the seemingly unending rip of the bandage.

That day, I wanted to tend to any task I could. I put Carmex on her lips and I fed her tiny ice chips, each crunch and swallow felt like a victory. I told her I had known her forever and that I would carry her always, I told her that my kids would always know her and that she could go if she was ready because we would all take care of each other. I told her more, I whispered into her ear that night, the final schoolgirl secrets for us and only us to share. I cried and my tears fell on her face and into her oxygen mask.

Jill spoke next to no words that day, but there was a moment that I will hold onto for the rest of my life. Through a blessed narcotic haze, she was somehow getting agitated, tried to sit up. I was sitting on the bed, and she looked at me. She asked me “Is this it?”

In a flash was our 32 year friendship, no lies, all honesty, there was her looking at me, saying Please, tell me the truth and I said “Yes, this is it.”

She whispered again “Is this it?”

Yes Jilly, this is it.

She relaxed into her pillow, shut her eyes, and slept.

At one point, Jill's brother, her dear friend Tricia (“Dear” does not do it justice. In fact, I think we need to build a new word to apply to the kind of love and dedication that surrounded Jill) and I were sitting on her bed, holding her and just watching her every tortured breath. We sat there for I don't know how long and it was so clear to me that we were helping her find her way through to death, that soon we would be on this side of the world and she would be on the other side and all we could offer was our presence, she was doing all the hard work. I had the thought that this would be all I would want - the love of people who wanted only to watch my breath and ease me from one world to the next.

I left late that night. Jill died ten hours later, surrounded by her mother, her father, her brother and her friends, Tricia and Robin. It was exactly what Jill wanted.

I was honored to speak at Jill's funeral. I stood up with Tricia and Robin, glad of the steadying hands they offered when my voice shook, glad to offer them each the same.

When the service ended, we, her pallbearers, walked in a gait of slow, synchronized grief to the hearse. I was aware of the cars driving by, of the sensation that I was moving through a dream. That all was sucked away when we took hold of the wooden side bars on her coffin and lifted. The weight, the heft, the knowledge that we were bearing her body to the very very end was the only thing that could stun me from the blur.

Jill’s burial was in Chicago, at an old cemetery grounded by gorgeous ornate mausoleums and headstones. We drove windy paths to the Jewish section, which immediately felt sacred and ancient. lt was cold and grey, the wind was violently relentless, though a lovely day would not have felt right. The Rabbi was this exquisite woman, whose voice, singing Hebrew at the graveside, was haunting and beautiful. We carried Jill’s casket to the grave at the cemetery.

I watched Joyce as the casket was lowered into the ground, and then watched my own young daughter as she watched the casket descend. I wondered how Joyce was restraining herself. Wondered if she wanted to jump in to get her girl, to stay with her girl, to pick her girl up, wrap her child in blankets and warm her up.

Her family began and then we all took turns shoveling earth onto the casket. We all kissed the petals of yellow roses we’d been handed and then threw those in too. Emma and Matt walked to the open grave holding hands and threw a yellow rose in to their aunty Jill.

There were days then, of sitting Shiva, days when my greatest comfort was in saying to those who gathered each day “I’ll see you tomorrow…”

I am slowly returning to regularly scheduled life. To laundry folded in warm, tidy stacks, to stocking the pantry planning the meals, the kids are returning to kickboxing classes and school put on hold while we tended to the process of death and shock and grief. Now we surrender to the inevitable tug and turn of life that insists on its own perpetual forward motion. Life was derailed, as it should be in the face of monumental, life-altering loss. It will take time to make this return, changed forever now as I am, left to swim in a void.

I’ve loved this running project, for the vision and focus it demands, for what it makes me see and demand of myself, but I’ll love it more now as I come back to it, wounded and aching, from a place of more urgent tenderness than I’ve ever known.