 |
| LITTLE BEAR |
The day
that Mary died, I ate a cheese Danish, a square of pecan pie, an entire bag of
Lays and two vanilla cokes. Real cokes, not diet ones. She would understand
this. If that horrifies you, read no further.
In her
honor, I also watched 3 episodes of the first season of Star Trek that were
made when she and I were just nine years old, and lived almost a thousand miles
apart.
Even
with that distance, our lives were so similar that we could have been two
facing sides in a Rorschach inkblot. We were both smart, and we loved to read
more than anything else on the planet. (Except maybe to eat while we were reading, especially if
the character was chewing on something delicious we could replicate.)
Mary
and I were both the babies of our families, and our older sibs thought we were
pretty spoiled. But we talked about that and agreed they didn’t know what they
were talking about. We were just really wonderful as kids.
Were we
‘pugnacious,’ as John has stated? We didn’t think so, because that was just one
facet of our personalities. It helped us
to defend ourselves from brothers locking us in closets and later came in handy
fighting for our kids and helping the underdogs we liked to represent.
We were
also about the same age when our parents divorced; something that was really,
really hard for us. There was stigma back then when you had a broken family,
and we both felt as if we needed to defend their actions to others by denying
our own broken hearts.
Mary was my husband John's first wife, and we met in December of 2010, when she and my stepson Jack came to my house for Christmas Eve.
John and I had just started dating. I always have an open house on Christmas
Eve, and wanted to invite Jack, but not make him choose which parent he'd spend the
holiday with. That meant inviting Mary too, so I did.
Mary
and I ended up spending the entire night in my kitchen, laughing hysterically.
We shared the same sense of humor (typically the things teenage boys find
funny) and had so much in common it was almost shocking.
I guess
it’s no wonder we ended up with the same husband (thankfully not at the same
time). We did have fun with that though. When I was Mary’s guest at the
shooting range, I filled out the relationship line with “Sister Wife.” We hooted
over that, and used that phrase a lot down the road, taking great pleasure in
our nontraditional relationship.
So Mary
and I developed our own sisterhood – one independent of John, independent of
family dinners and kids. We became the closest of friends, sharing confidences,
hopes and fears. We ate cream puffs at the Big E, went on a road trip to
Pensacola (fighting only a little) and looked out for each other. It extended
our families in the most beautiful way.
We
celebrated all holidays, birthdays, and special occasions together, succeeding
in putting our own broken families together again. We folded each other’s
laundry, cooked, helped the kids and sometimes snapped at each other – just
like anyone else in a family.
We lent
each other a sympathetic ear, sometimes about her former and my present
husband. She’d say “Oh, that’s just John being John,” punctuated with an evil
grin, adding, “And I don’t have to be married to him, because you are, ha, ha!”
Can you imagine what a gift it was when I got to see them profess real love for
each other at the end?
I was
by Mary’s side at two of the most painful moments of her life – when the Dr.
told her she had leukemia, and just weeks later when she told her son that she
couldn’t go on fighting, and he’d have to let her go. My heart breaks at those
memories, yet I am so grateful that she loved and trusted me enough to have me
there at those unbelievably vulnerable times.
But
back to Star Trek, 48 years after it began, and the bag of Lays washed down
with a way-too-sweet drink. In episode 5, under the influence of a virus that
simulated drunkenness, Mr. Spock cries, and later tells Captain Kirk, “My
mother… I could never tell her I loved her. An earth woman… living on a planet where
love, emotion… was bad taste.”
During
Mary’s hospital stay, I had the honor of seeing Jack tell his mom he loved her,
too many times to count. They were beyond close. She put every single drop of
love she could into bringing him up. Not perfectly, because there is no such
thing as a perfect parent, only people without kids giving advice they
themselves couldn’t follow. Once, when someone online intimated that Mary was a
bad mother, I had to be physically restrained. They were very, very wrong.
Being
with Mary over the last seven weeks was so painful, yet not without its gifts. I
got to see that there were hundreds of people who loved her. I got to meet and
bond with her sister Karen, who I now love as my own. I watched as women who
have known and loved her for years tenderly looked out for her, and united, we
all held hands and supported her to the end. They are now my friends as well.
Mary
was the most authentic woman I have ever known, and I loved her and all that
she stood for. She was brilliant, kind, adventurous, irreverent and
intellectual. She was also a woman who laughed at fart jokes. At the end,
everything but the love just falls away.
