B.F.F., page 19
I walked as slowly as I could, without drawing attention to myself, but when I turned the corner there she stood, tracking the elevator’s progress to the first floor.
“Hi, Anna.”
“Christie!” she said, her face lit up with a genuine smile. “You must be here to see B.J.”
Other than at a Christmas party, I hadn’t seen Anna in two years, and I hadn’t spent one-on-one time with her in almost three. My skin had long since healed, but the shock of standing three feet from her made my arm tingle. I folded my arms across my chest and held the book so it covered the scars. Shield the arm, shield the heart. We stepped into the elevator together.
The elevator rose several floors and two other visitors stepped in; we shifted to the back right corner.
“Wait,” Anna said, turning her whole body toward me. “Isn’t today your birthday?”
I nodded. It was my forty-fifth birthday, and I was surprised and touched that my birthday lived in her memory. It was exactly the kind of complicating experience that made my head swim. She was kind. She offered me kindness. Why can’t I let her in?
“Happy birthday! I hope you’re doing something celebratory tonight.”
We fell into step in the hallway, and once we made it to B.J.’s room, we sat shoulder to shoulder on the couch by the window. It was confusing to admit to myself that her presence comforted me. Her lively energy kept the conversation going. When B.J. expressed anxiety that his family trip would be canceled because of his illness, Anna reminded him that there was still plenty of summer left even if they had to reschedule. She was graceful and lighthearted. I handed B.J. the book, keeping my left forearm covered by my right.
When a nurse knocked and mentioned a test the doctor wanted to run, Anna and I stood up to take our leave. We retraced our steps and walked back through the lobby. We swirled through the revolving door and stood in the radiant, inescapable July sun on the corner of Ohio and McClurg Court. We paused and hugged, she again wished me a happy birthday, and we parted ways.
In the cab, I texted Meredith immediately. Oh my God, I just saw Anna. Spent an hour with her in B.J.’s hospital room. HOLY SHIT. I think it was okay. It’s really not about her. It’s me. I know it’s me.
Seeing Anna brought her back to her right size. My imagination had blown up Anna and her perfection until she’d become a caricature, an untouchable beauty like Mila Kunis filled with the unwavering goodness of Mother Teresa and the global popularity of Beyoncé. But none of that was real. The phantasm in my head left no room for the actual flesh-and-blood Anna. From our short visit with B.J., I understood that. This was progress.
What a wonderful birthday present, Meredith wrote.
33.
Have I made Meredith sound like a saint? A blue-eyed, uber-spiritual, tiny-boned angel with golden rings stacked on her fingers, sent to guide me? I’m afraid I have, and Meredith would hate that. I would hate that. I want to tell the truth about her, give you the whole complex picture. She wasn’t a saint before she got sick, and she didn’t become saintly when she got sick. Much like me, she could be a real pain in the ass.
Sometimes she would call me, tired from treatment, and go off about Bebe and the fudge debacle from her wedding years earlier. “Meredith, don’t you have bigger fish to fry?”
Sometimes during our coffee dates, she would pull out Tupperware filled with quinoa and slices of boiled egg from her run-down grocery store, even before she got sick and chemo threw her appetite out of whack. Maybe it was delicious, but it looked like food you’d feed an arthritic lap dog, and it pained me to see her forgoing edible food to save money or cut calories.
Sometimes she refused to ask for help even when she desperately needed someone to drive her somewhere, hold her hand, or help decode the communications from her insurance provider. She wanted to do it all herself.
Though she owned two buildings in Chicago and had a full-time job with benefits, she still struggled to spend money on herself. She had plenty of problems, but financial security wasn’t one of them. Early in her illness, she asked me to meet her at my place of worship, the Rack, to pick out a hat before her hair fell out. I found her in the accessories section holding a jaunty black leather baseball cap over her head. She smiled at herself in the mirror and turned her head in several directions, admiring her reflection.
“It’s perfect,” I said, and she nodded but put it back, mumbling that it was “too expensive.” I returned to the store the next day during my lunch hour, and improbably, the hat was gone.
When I told her I’d tried to find the hat for her, she seemed annoyed.
“I don’t need that hat!”
“I want you to have it. You looked so happy in it.”
“The one I got is fine.”
“Sure, denim bucket hats are a look. But—”
“Leather’s too hot. I don’t want it.”
“Fine, but let me say this: it’s hard to watch you be cheap at a time like this.”
“Fuck you, Christie.”
Her sharp response startled me, but I didn’t back down.
“Fuck me? What the hell. The difference was twenty bucks. I think that when you lose your hair because of chemo, you should get whatever fucking hat you want—”
“Exactly. I got the hat I wanted.”
“Okay.”
“So stop judging me.”
I apologized and our argument petered out, but it scared me, the anger that ignited between us. She was right that I’d judged her as depriving herself, but I couldn’t help it. No friend in her situation was going to deprive herself on my watch.
* * *
Meredith had periodic full-body scans to see if her treatment was working. Whenever the scan days loomed, Meredith fretted, projected, and worried. Hope made her feel too vulnerable. The day before one of these scans, one she had a bad feeling about, she gifted me a pink quartz rock shaped like a heart. After the scans, her mood faltered as she imagined the worst. Fatigue and discouragement thinned her patience with herself and others. To me, her foul moods, which occasioned snarky remarks and tirades against customer service reps and blowhards at recovery meetings, made her seem more human. More like me.
Honestly, I loved it.
“I’m so fucking angry,” Meredith screamed into the phone one afternoon. My habit was to pick up her calls on the first ring—everyone else’s could go to voice mail. “I can’t take it.” I heard her fists pounding on the steering wheel.
“I’m here. Get it out. Rage on. Maybe pull over to be safe.”
She screamed and cried for a few minutes. A few deep, jagged breaths later, she explained that she’d spent hours arranging for her doctor’s office to transfer her files to a new clinician whose team had better outcomes than Meredith’s current medical team.
“I drove to the first office downtown. Paid for parking. Had to wait for twenty minutes. The nurse was rude to me, even though I called ahead. Then I had to drive across town in terrible traffic to the new office and do it all over again.” Meredith sobbed again. Deep sobs. Sobs I’d been expecting for months. I breathed and let her cry. One of my coworkers stuck his head in my office, and I waved him off. Not now.
She caught her breath and continued. “I did all that, and the second office just called. There’re records missing. I have to do it all over again tomorrow! Motherfucker!” Her voice dissolved into more sobs.
I could tell from the noises she was making that she was crying with her mouth open. Wailing. Animal sounds. I gripped the side of my desk and took deep breaths as I listened. The sound was raw and haunting. I’d never heard anything like it. I sat still and focused on my own breathing. In and out. In and out.
“I yelled, Christie. I yelled at the nurse. I was awful. I really was.”
“It’s okay. You can make amends to her. I’m sure she sees this all the time. She knows the errand you were on. She knows the stakes.”
“God, she was such a bitch.”
“Do you want me go with you tomorrow?”
I would have to move around an oral argument with a court in Indiana, but I would do it.
“No. I’ll figure something out. You have to work. I’ll feel worse making you miss work.”
“I can come.”
“I know.”
“Can I send you dinner so you can relax tonight?”
“Sushi sounds good.”
“Text me what you and Gage would like. I’ll have it delivered around six.”
We paused. I shook my head. Had I rushed us to sushi dinner when she really needed to stay with her grief and rage? I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t handle the depth of her emotion.
“Mere, it sounds really hard.” I teared up. If I had to spend two days shuttling records between oncology practices, dealing with traffic, parking, and grumpy nurses while sick, I would absolutely lose my fucking marbles—and I’d scream until my voice box burst into flames.
“This isn’t who I am. Yelling at nurses? I don’t want to go out this way. What’s happening?”
“You’re tired and frustrated, and you’re sick. It’s understandable. You deserve to get these feelings out, and it’s going to be messy. Kind of like you’re always telling me that I’m probably always going to be messy.”
“But for you, it’s living and healing that’s messy. For me, it’s dying.”
I wanted to push that thought away. You’re not dying, stop that. But how violent and disrespectful, how selfish and inaccurate. By pure grace, I kept my mouth shut.
Meredith sighed. “Maybe it’s all messy. Living, dying, all of it. Mess, mess, mess.”
“I’m here for your mess.”
“I know.”
* * *
A few days later, the new specialist recommended a regimen of treatment at the University of Chicago, one hundred blocks away from Meredith’s house.
“When does it start?” I asked. We stood together on the sidewalk after a meeting.
She shook her head. “It’s too far.”
“Too far? What do you mean?”
“Too far to drive back and forth every day. It’s disruptive. It doesn’t feel right.” She folded her hands, signaling the discussion was over.
“Meredith, this is life or death.”
“They don’t know if it’ll work.”
“What’d Gage say?”
“He said it’s up to me. It’s my body. I’m the one who has to drive there every day.”
My shoulders tensed. Why wouldn’t Gage insist she do the treatment?
“Have you made up your mind?”
“Yes. I’m staying at St. Francis.”
I pressed my lips together. This defeatist discussion about mileage and inconvenience made me want to shake Meredith’s shoulders. Her decision to continue with her treatment at a podunk regional hospital with zero cutting-edge ideas about how to keep her alive smelled like suicide. I could accept her decision to buy a cheaper hat or drive out of her way to save a few bucks on groceries, but I could not accept this. Why was she giving up? How could I call myself a friend and let her deprive herself of the best treatment possible?
“Isn’t part of the reason we live in Chicago so that we can take advantage of the amenities like the University of Chicago hospital? There are options—like you could rent a place near the hospital during your treatments—”
“Then Gage can’t get to work easily. It’s not all about me.”
“Um, yes, it is.”
Meredith cocked her head and pursed her lips. There was a line between us, and I’d stepped over it. And refused to turn back.
“Your friends could drive you,” I said. “We can set up one of those Google docs—” My voice rose over our heads and floated to the top of the school building behind us.
“I know you’re trying to help—”
“What about Mayo? Or MD Anderson? Or Sloan Kettering? Now might be the time—”
“I’m already under a lot of pressure—”
“I’ll call them up. We can road trip—”
“This is not what I need.”
“Minneapolis is a day trip, and I have friends in Houston who could tell us where to stay—”
“Stop. Please.”
I pressed my lips together hard. Yes, I was pushing, pressing, insisting. I knew people who’d been saved by finding the right specialist at a fancy institution. The University of Chicago cured the stage IV tongue cancer of famous Chicago chef Grant Achatz. My neighbor commuted from Chicago to MD Anderson for a liver condition, and his numbers were looking good. The solutions, I believed, were out there for the tenacious, the bold, the willing. I wanted to see that in Meredith. Where was her will to live?
But she’d shown me her no—arms crossed, head shaking, lips pressed together. She wanted to do this her way, and now it was time for me to let go.
I nodded my head but didn’t speak because of the angry tears I knew would fall. I was angry at Meredith for not insisting on the best treatment. And I hated how I felt. Impotent. Out of ideas. Ashamed. I stood there, nodding my head up and down, up and down.
She pulled her arms around her chest as if giving herself a hug. “I have to go.”
I stepped forward to hug her goodbye, but she turned and crossed the street without looking back.
As she disappeared into the rest of her weekend, I knew two things: that I fucked up this conversation and that I was right about the University of Chicago.
At my computer that afternoon, I looked up the world-famous institutions I believed could save her and jotted down some notes to text her later. Maybe there was no one else in her life saying these things to her. Her mom had passed away, and her relationship with her sisters was distant. I couldn’t give up just because she was uncomfortable leaving her neighborhood for treatment. A good enough friend would keep trying.
34.
A week went by, and Meredith and I didn’t text or call each other. We had no coffee dates on the books. The distance yawned between us. I picked up the phone to text her several times a day, but stopped. When I thought of her, my body warmed from the hostility and hurt feelings that I wasn’t ready to address. Each time I balked, I told myself, Tomorrow’s better; I’ll text her then. Or I don’t want to bother her. Every day I hoped she would text, but she didn’t.
“Can I ask you a question about cancer treatment?” I said to a woman at a water fountain on the lakefront path. I’d joined some neighbors for a run at dawn, and one of them was a physician at the University of Chicago.
“Sure.”
We started running again, south on the path behind McCormick Place. A line of ducks walked toward the water that was a deep untroubled blue on this late fall morning.
“My friend has metastasized breast cancer, and she’s getting treated at St. Francis on the North Side.” I paused to scoff at the regional hospital that hadn’t won any awards that I knew of and never appeared in the local news for saving a celebrity’s life. “I want her to go to the University of Chicago so she can have the best treatment.”
The doctor whose run I’d just hijacked listened carefully and asked a few questions, some of which I couldn’t answer, since I didn’t know the particulars of Meredith’s condition. But all that mattered was getting treatment at the best hospital in the city, right? I asked this U of C physician’s opinion because I was sure she’d confirm my theory: the best was the best, and Meredith deserved the best.
“You know,” the doctor said, her blond ponytail swishing back and forth in the shadows we cast on the trail in front of us. “There are studies that show that patients who trust their caregivers and are comfortable in their surroundings have better outcomes.”
“Better outcomes?”
She glanced at me, like I should know what she meant. “They live longer, and the quality of their lives is better.”
I swallowed hard and pinned my gaze to our shadows on the pavement.
“You think I shouldn’t push her to the U of C?” I trusted this doctor with the authoritative tone and the impressive cardio output. Before I cornered her, I’d heard her say that she’d worked two overnights during the week—she was heartier and smarter than I was. I would do what she said, but I had to make her understand who Meredith was and why she needed top-notch treatment. This doctor didn’t know Meredith or how she deprived herself out of habit—the Salvation Army, the never-realized trip to Italy, the insistence on tap water. “I can’t tell if she truly trusts the team at St. Francis or if she’s denying herself the premier treatment at the U of C because she doesn’t believe she deserves it.”
“If I had a friend with that diagnosis,” the doctor said, “I would defer to her choices. It’s hard to be on the sidelines, but you have to respect her decision. If she doesn’t want to drive a hundred blocks every day for treatment that might extend her life, then that’s a valid choice. You never know. At the U of C, she might feel like a test case or ‘just a number,’ and that experience might hasten her decline. Put it this way, do you want your friends telling you how to spend your last days?”
Last days? The doctor’s words shook the walls of my denial.
Meredith’s life was coming to an end, and I’d done this all wrong. Why did I think I knew what was best for Meredith? I was a lawyer, not a doctor. I shook my head and watched my shadow self on the pavement finally absorb the friendship lesson I’d ignored. Meredith didn’t owe me the treatment I wanted her to have. I had no idea what honoring her own life meant to her. I needed to listen, to support, to get out of the way.
