PROSE OF SHARON

When I was three, my parents purchased their own place: a brick row house facing a large park where children could sled or swing. We were one of many families with toddlers, infants and pregnancies. The fathers went to work, the mothers worked the home and the kids played in the back alley and that park. It was a pretty picture.

At this start, I bonded with a little girl nine months younger, four houses away. Both of our names began with S, both of us had new siblings and problematic eyes, neither was athletic. After she fell down our basement steps getting to the play room, we always played at her house, which is probably why hers was the first phone number I could dial by heart.

My first ever friend and I were as close as sisters, so like family I called her parents “aunt” and “uncle.” My sister, the tomboy, played with her little brother. When they all moved away, her parents being the first to migrate to the suburbs, I went to her new house almost every weekend for a sleepover and knew it as intimately as my own.

I was eleven when late one Friday night my mother discovered my friend’s father had, as the crisp hospital voice explained, expired. In a matter of hours, his third heart attack had destroyed him at 36. My mother shook me out of pajamas and drove to my friend’s house where we were to spend the night. Terrified and confused, I rode protesting I had no idea what to do. “Just be there like always,” my mother coached. “People need friends at a time like this.” This was my introduction to the expiration date called death, and what I never forgot is my bewildered horror that my friend in her twin bed and I in mine lay in the dark at such a momentous time discussing lipstick colors and other stuff we’d seen in Seventeen. For years I beat up on myself for letting life go on like that when-- it seemed--it should’ve stopped dead as her father.

That was the last time we talked as girlfriends or talked for a decade. My friend went mute, ushering the word autistic into my life and herself out of it. For most of our teenaged years she spoke to no one -- which is why her anguished little brother grew up to be a psychiatrist specialized in adolescent psyches. It apparently took six years for someone in the nonstop string of therapists to get out of her that on the morning of her father’s final day, she and he had been having one of their usual stubborn arguments over her not wanting piano lessons. The to-do at the spinet made her miss the bus, so he’d driven her to school, insisting she was going to play that piano. And because she was an angry pre-teen, as she got out of the car slamming the door, she screamed: “I hate you. I hope you die!”

In college she spoke, having been convinced, although not mightily, that fateful day was coincidence, not the curse of witchcraft. She did not in fact possess the power to damn those she spoke to. But damn, she did indeed possess the power to bewitch them. That come hither stare, brought to her by near sightedness, hovered over a toothy smile that burst with nervous reluctance, and a buxom body so otherwise small and fragile, it seemed a summer breeze could topple it. The entire effect was more magnetic than the North Pole. She was a honey pot for men and a second major league lesson for me: males really do not notice what you’re wearing. Spend your money on something else.

The one she married looked a little like her father. He played the piano—good enough to have been on the concert circuit. But he was more interested in making real money real fast, so he studied medicine, taking up psychiatry because it wasn’t bloody. Perhaps she thought she could go home again, although they took off with their record collections (I owe them my devotion to Bill Evans) and a foundling pooch for the Cambridge/Watertown life. Thus I got introduced to Harvard Square, and the Moosewood Cookbook.

Then the call came to come, come quickly to the ground floor of that wood-frame, two-family house on that heavily shaded Mt. Auburn side street. (We were now officially sisters, for my widowed father had recently wed her mother and the stuff of both our childhoods had come together in their three-bedroom apartment.) I found her across the street. Apparently the marriage of two stubborn, independent intellectuals had turned into an ego whirlpool taking her down. They’d been arguing, he’d been having headaches, using drugs, using her as designated driver. She wanted out. But the day she told him turned out to be the day doctors told him he had an inoperable brain tumor that made him as good as dead.

It went according to plan, his horrifying six months in the breakdown lane and the silence of her horrifying breakdown from the sense of being a serial killer. Her father was dead, my mother was dead. Their old next door neighbor was gone. Even Bill Evans had passed pre-maturely when Steven died at 29. She didn’t drink; she didn’t go for drugs, but still it wasn’t pretty. She slept with the surgeon, supped with her boss, surrendered to psychiatrists and kept searching for solace in someone who could make death stop happening. Powerlessness is powerful that way.

Sitting in the Boston hospital watching him go and her go beserk tipped me from Manhattan to Maine. I needed the hard reality of feeling alive, fighting for life rather than life style. Moving put me closer to Watertown and my “stepsister’s” laid back preferences. Up she came on weekends for sleepovers, always with a man, always one as strong as she was silent. They turned out to be the ones who showed me how to swing an axe, make a fire, drive on ice, and adapt to LL Bean country. They were friends I needed at a time like that, so I never forget that Sharon brought me my survival skills.

About two years into widowhood, her dog died of age and as suddenly as she’d once gone silent, she was gone to the other coast, as far as she could get from anyone she cared about. A call came saying she was living in Santa Cruz and I should hurry out to visit. So I did. And then she went silent once again, more than 25 years.

Two years ago last week, I came home from Kathmandu and started a practice my teacher bestowed on me. It concludes: “That which has wandered is summoned. The broken is mended. All that has been impaired is healed.” I had been reciting this for maybe six weeks when one morning the phone rang and the caller said: “This is Sharon.”

She was sorry, she said twice, for not talking to me. She missed our friendship. She was in Santa Fe, a mountain guide, a ski patroller, an animal rescuer and regular on “fourteeners.” Thus I learned about mountain climbing in America, the height of it being 14,000 feet, and learned about PowerPoint, which she said I needed to receive her pictures from the top. The other news was: she’d beat cancer and worked as a counselor, helping others try the same.

We talked then and again about a sleepover, and I learned why there’s a popular song called, “Do You Know the Way to Santa Fe?” Because no way to get there is cheap or easy. Then about a year into our reunion, she fell on the trail of a fourteener and was taken down to a hospital where instead of a bandage and stitches, she got radiation and morphine. The doctor found a tumor on her spine. When she got home and called, I found a way to Santa Fe.

I went last May, and there in a stucco bungalow behind the excited dog, on a cane she stooped, still near sightedly squinting and smiling nervously but thinner and more fragile than you can imagine. She had a boyfriend ten years younger and discards all over town. What hit me harder was how she’d aged into looking exactly like I’d last seen her mother years ago. I was so spooked, I couldn’t remember which of them I was with, what part of my own history I was in. The trajectory of my own life was all there in that tortured face.

When she wasn’t sleeping we talked like we used to during sleepovers, agreeing on almost everything, from marvelous music to malicious family members. Independently, we'd both cut ties to most of them, for exactly the same reasons. As best she could, she showed me by car the outdoors she loved, deliberately stopping at a hidden high spot she thought I'd like: a large marble Tibetan stupa whose hilltop she, leaning on two canes, ironically reached much faster than me.

She continued to try short hikes. She said the tumor that suddenly popped up on her brain was no big deal. She drove herself to the hospital for radiation. Still I heard the undertone in that bravado. I wrote the essay In Dependence for her, summoning the courage to say she had deliberately turned herself into a flawless mountaineering machine to grind away the sense of powerlessness endowed in her by too many tragedies. She called to let me know it was thoughtful, real, and meaty. She was happy I was writing again. ‘I care about you,” she said.

This year, the day before I left for Kathmandu she assured me she was fine. It was the dog who worried her, for Keeper had cancer and needed chemotherapy, although that was easier on canines. She said both of them would go on a hike real soon to get in shape for the season. “Talk when you get back.”

In Kathmandu, I told my guru the long life practices he’d bestowed on me were evidently working. “Look!” I exclaimed in glee, “all my hair, all my teeth, no wrinkles, no scars of surgery and I’m 62. Plus broken things are mended.” Six weeks later, full of fever, bronchial mucuous and intestinal havoc, I went out in a wheelchair. The Swiss born nun Ani Tenzin Dolma, surprised to see me like that at the airport, exclaimed: “How fast we can get so low!”

Once home, I sent my stepsister an email saying I was ill and would telephone her soon. I knew she hated emails but as days passed, I went into high dudgeon at her silence. I was the sick one who deserved the slack, a friend at a time like this. Then a message appeared saying she no longer accepted email at that address. What the hell, I thought, and waited. Yesterday I solved the silence: Sharon died three days ago from an aggressive liver cancer.

“How fast we can get so low!”

The silences, the suffering, the spectacular samsara of her life from the pits to the fourteeners are not a pretty picture, not a power presentation. I hear my mother and her mother in those row houses saying: Let that be a lesson to you. So I will say it is: a primer on the stuff called life that nobody talks about, the silent suffering that merits the compassion it never gets. But then I learned all the big lessons from my sister Sharon, including how life doesn’t stop even when you think it should, at least just to tip its hat to someone who struggled so much to live it.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"

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