Something I never want to hear again…

[originally intended to be published 2009-09-08 at 1pm]

By the time you read this it will be at least 1:00 p.m. (eastern time, USA).

I will be at a funeral for a friend of ours who died of cancer. She was diagnosed in February. She was, perhaps, more an “acquaintance” than a friend. She was someone I knew, a little. Occasionally we’d see her at a church, or at the local theater where she helped with the children’s plays. We’d see her at this or that event, or picking up a few things at the grocery store. Here or there.

I had heard second- or third-hand that she had cancer. Whenever our paths crossed I’d ask her how she was doing, and she always said she was doing well, and seemed to be. It seemed like our paths crossed fairly regularly for awhile, and so I never thought much about keeping in touch with her. After all, cancer is no longer the death sentence it once was. Or so we’ve been told.

A week ago Sunday I saw her name and thought, “I haven’t talked to her for awhile, I should call her.” That’s never really the way things had worked between us, we had always counted on life to bring us back together. Or at least I had.

Saturday morning I got the call that she had died. Almost a week had passed since I thought about calling her. If I hadn’t gotten the call, I probably would have seen her name again on Sunday and thought the same thing. Would I have done it? I wish I could say I would have, but probably not.

I went to the “calling hours” tonight. I met her sister, who lives in town but I’d never met. Hard to imagine not knowing people in a town this small, but it happens. We exchanged pleasantries. She told me her sister had been in the hospital for two weeks, but things had gotten bad pretty quickly. She seemed to be handling it pretty well. I guess she had time to see it coming.

The hardest part, by far, was talking to her daughter. I knew her about as well as I knew her mother: a sweet girl with a light laugh and a pretty face, just starting her junior year of high school. She seems to be taking everything in stride. To everyone who said “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she shrugged, looked down, and said “That’s cool.” In print it looks cold or rude. It was neither. It was just all she seemed to be able to say. It’s as close as she could get to “thank you.” I have no psychology degree, but I’d guess she’s in some stage of denial, operating on some version of auto-pilot. Waves of well-meaning adults and friends keep coming to say the same things to her. They didn’t know what to say and she didn’t know what to say.

She sat at the end of a row of the folding chairs with thick cushions, meant to comfort the grieving when preachers go too long during the eulogy. Another girl I assumed to be her best friend sat two seats away with an empty seat between them. Her aunt sat on one of the large upholstered chairs against the side wall, surrounded by the same well-meaning adults and friends saying the same things to her they had said to her niece.

Eventually I sat down in the row behind the daughter, and a few seats to the side. I had said my clichés and offered my sympathies as best I could. Others who came in threw their arms around her and hugged her, and she accepted their gestures, but as I watched her body language, I was glad I had resisted the urge. She seemed to be doing it to comfort them, despite wishing that they would just say their words and move along… not because she didn’t care or didn’t appreciate them, but that she just didn’t seem capable of accepting them.

At first it seemed strange that her friend had left an empty seat between them. Eventually I wondered if it wasn’t a subtle indication of how well her friend knew her. “I’m here, but I’m giving you the space that you need,” she said without words.

So they sat together. Her friend seemed neither anxious nor chatty. She just sat by her side; neither out of reach, nor too close at hand.

I wanted to have words of comfort for her. I wanted to ask where she would live now. I wanted to try to break down some of the walls that she has so quickly built up around herself. I wanted to do something. I’ve been told that this is an especially common (but not uniquely) male response: the urge to “fix it”… even when there’s nothing to be fixed. I found myself wondering about her father. I had never heard about him. I had never been close enough to her mother to ask, nor she close enough to me to tell the story.

So I sat there, hoping that perhaps my presence alone might offer some comfort like I imagined her friend’s presence was. It seemed unlikely, but maybe it was something—

I didn’t hear the question, or see who asked it… all I heard was the answer:

“Oh, she’s going to be buried next to my dad.”

There was the answer to the question that I had resisted asking.

“How long has he been gone?” I asked, betraying even more the lack of real knowledge or friendship between us. “I don’t know…” she began, and then corrected herself, “…I never knew him…”

Her aunt spoke up, “He died when she was 9 months old…”

She is 16. Her mother died at age 46. Which means that her mother, at around age 30, had a newborn baby and a dead husband.

Rationally, I know that there are thousands of cases like this, if not more. Single parents with even younger children, whose spouses die and leave them alone to tend to their young child. I know that it is not unique. I know there are tens of thousands, if not more, children who never know their fathers, for a myriad of reasons. I know all these things. I am educated about all these facts.

But until you’ve heard a 16 year-old say that her mom will be buried next to the father she never knew because he died when she was an infant, you can’t really understand how much you will hope to never hear that ever again.