I will always love you, girl

Last week I traveled home to see my oldest friend.

She has been on hospice at home since the last day in March. Soon after she stopped eating. I’m amazed that she is still alive.

At  times she was so lucid...like when the town official asked over Zoom if she consented to marry her fiance and she clearly nodded consent. (I actually was the wedding officiant, honored to keep my promise of making sure she died a married woman.) At other times she seemed to be reliving moments in her life, saying the names people she or we had known.

I’ve known Missy for 47 years. We were across the street neighbors. As kids we got into a rock fight and made up the very next day. As teens we would do sleepovers at her aunt’s house at the beach and try to get invited to parties we were much too young to go to.

As adults we both married and divorced, never had kids, but loved our dogs as if they were our offspring.

Missy is only two years older than me; if she makes it to mid June she will turn 53. I doubt she will. She has cancer throughout her body. It began on her tongue in June of 2018. I remember her being scared of them cutting her tongue out. I wonder now if she’d have that same fear, and would have chosen the chemo/radiation option versus the surgical removal of her tongue in order to possibly live.

The cancer spread to her lungs but was supposedly surgically removed and she was pronounced cancer free in the fall of 2020. Yet she complained constantly of pain. She was in and out of the hospital for falling episodes but no one did a CT scan until mid March. That’s when she said to me the words I never thought I’d hear. “I’m dying.”

How do you say goodbye to your oldest friend?  To my sister in spirit? How do you want her to fight and yet long for her suffering to end at the same time?

I think about certain places that will always remind me of her. Songs, like “Fantasy”  or “We Don’t Need no Education” that  we blasted for hours on end. I think about how she always smiled and laughed even when she was diagnosed with this ugliness.

I never want to die this way. This is not the first time I have seen this fight and I have to say it’s an ugly fight. I watched my dear friend Holly die of pancreatic cancer at home surrounded by her family. It was a long slow death. And it sucked, much like this does.

I think the most beautiful part about both of these moments are the loving people of hospice who attend to both the dying and loved ones in the most beautiful way. A kind word, a quiet smile, a time apart from the dying to shower or be alone but not feel guilty.

I don’t think any of us understand death, why some die young and some live into old age. Why some go in an instant or some take so long it borders on suffering. I don’t think that there is any comfort truly for those of us who have lost loved ones. Even the promise of eternity doesn’t help the pain we feel in these moments.

I am grateful that I was able to say goodbye. I am blessed to have had a hello in the first place! And as long as I am alive I have beautiful memories that continue to fill me and a beautiful angel who I know will look down on me still smiling.