The Art of Saying Goodbye - Ellyn Bache [114]
Not that she’s letting down her guard. Not a chance.
She crunches through the snow until she is too winded to think. Then comes a time when she is aware, for one of the few times in her life, that what she is experiencing is not happiness, exactly, but joy.
Odd, how in the afterglow of someone else’s life, your own looks so much brighter.
Back on the street, the adults have emerged now and are pelting each other with snowballs. Paisley would be sorry to miss this.
Are they thinking about her?
Iona hopes so.
What is the measure of a person’s life? How will they remember her? As the pretty mother of two who once drank too much? As the vivacious hostess who gave the best parties in the neighborhood? Who flirted and played tennis and listened to golden oldies?
Well, all of those things. But above all, Iona thinks they will remember her on one perfect fall afternoon, when she sat in a wheelchair, too weak to walk, perched atop the ruined foundation of her life, yet with her arms outstretched to the blue enormity of sky.
“Look at this!” they will remember her saying. “Just look!”
A+
AUTHOR
INSIGHTS,
EXTRAS, &
MORE. . .
FROM
ELLYN
BACHE
AND
Dear Reader
Dear Reader,
Let me start by thanking you for picking up The Art of Saying Goodbye. It’s a book close to my heart because it began with something that really happened many years ago in the suburban neighborhood where I lived.
A woman in her midforties—the beautiful one with the beautiful children, the one who was always nice to everyone, the one whom all of us loved, admired, and even envied a little—was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We, her neighbors who knew her well or knew her only casually, went through an astonishing range of emotions. Her one close friend was devastated. The rest of us were saddened, sorry, sometimes even disbelieving, because she’d always been such an upbeat, vibrant woman who’d played such a cheerful role in our lives. The seriousness of the situation didn’t truly dawn on us until a beautiful fall afternoon, when the trees were in full color, and her husband took her on a leaf tour, guiding her through the neighborhood in a wheelchair. Although she greeted everyone with her usual good-natured jokes, she was frighteningly thin and jaundiced, and clearly too weak to walk.
It was a dreadful moment. Like her, most of us were mothers raising children. It struck us then that she wasn’t going to be able to watch hers grow up. And because each of us wanted above all to be around for our children, we were all secretly relieved that, if someone had to be sick, it was her and not us. This was an emotion we couldn’t help but were deeply ashamed of.
All of us felt too guilty to confess our thoughts to our neighbors. The white ribbons we tied around the trees in our yards seemed a paltry gesture of support—so did the awkward visits we paid and the casseroles we brought, which she grew too sick to eat. We offered to take her children to their after-school activities, but our friend’s mother had come to help and the family wanted to be self-sufficient. We felt helpless and terribly, terribly sad. As she grew sicker, we grieved for her. Already, we missed her. Our hearts ached for her daughters, who didn’t fully understand what was going on, and for her husband, who did. What else could we do? Even the prayer meeting we had did nothing to stay her illness, though it offered the rest of us an hour of shared serenity none of us had expected.
Our friend handled her decline with a grace that amazed and humbled us, and forced us to appreciate the preciousness of our own healthy lives. In the stark glare of our shared mortality, we shed hurtful old habits and fears. We acknowledged what was really important to us. By the time she died, each of us had gone through a transformation that seemed like a gift she’d given us, the legacy she’d left behind.
I decided to write about this time in my life after I realized how many other people I knew who had gone through a similar experience. The four main characters I invented have