By Kathryn McArthur
Linda lay under the covers in the middle of the afternoon with the pillows propped so that it didn’t hurt as much when she breathed. Her hair was thin, her face gaunt. She was 44 years old.
I brought out armloads of clothes from her walk-in closet and laid them on the king-size bed. We looked at each one.
“Keeper.”
“Give away.”
“Keeper.”
The piles built up around her, and each shirt or dress or skirt brought memories.
“Oh, that one. That’s the sweater I wore when I met Dean.”
I knew that ivory-colored, cable-knit sweater from the framed photograph on Dean’s desk in the corner by the windows. Linda, young and beautiful, looked straight into the camera’s eye the way a woman newly in love looks openly at her man.
“Keeper,” we said almost in unison.
We could see Dean in the backyard watering plants, puttering around in the yard and in the small greenhouse at the end of the deck. He was a freelance production manager in the film industry and had come home from one shoot with the greenhouse, a gift for Linda.
We looked at the faded blue, long-sleeved shirt that she’d worn to work in her beloved garden. It was too frayed to give away, too sentimental to toss. “Keep it,” she said, and I hung it back in the closet, although we both knew she wasn’t able to tend her garden anymore.
Her clothes bore witness to the life she had been gradually letting go of after 12 years fighting breast cancer, six of those years after the cancer metastasized to her lungs and her sternum. It’s a long time to live six years with Stage IV breast cancer.
One dress was watercolor-like in an Easter egg palette. “That’s a little cheery for a woman of 44, don’t you think?” and we laughed. I didn’t say this, but I thought she was going to say, “for a woman who’s dying.”
I brought out several T-shirts, all kept on hangers.
“I’ve worn that one forever,” she said about a pale green one and gestured for me to put it in the keeper pile. She tossed out the charcoal one with the stain and gave me a lavender one I’d always liked.
There was the black cocktail dress bought for the Academy Awards party she attended when a film Dean worked on was nominated for an Oscar; the coat a friend talked her into buying that she never wore; and the cotton shirt I had passed on to her that she now passed back to me. When I brought out a green wool cardigan with three buttons at the waist, she said, “That goes. I won’t see another winter.”
We looked at each other, and I did not say, “Oh, you don’t know that. You might.” It was our understanding that I did not try to talk her out of her dark thoughts, or dash her slivers of hope, either. I was her witness to what she really felt.
I kept the green sweater, even though it didn’t really fit me at the time. It was just so Linda. I could see her on the couch snuggling with her son when he came out in his pajamas to say goodnight. I could see her across from me at the table dividing the Chinese chicken salads I brought to her house for our lunch. I could see her on the chilly nights when we sat outside talking about our lives.
The dresses, T-shirts, and sweaters reflect the life of a woman who was a knockout whether she got dolled up or pulled on her faded garden shirt. She won’t wear the cocktail dress or the thin black pants again. She is skin and bones, and layers T-shirts, pile pullovers, and sweatpants to keep warm. I wished I could see her in a summer dress lounging on her deck by the tubs of flowering orchids, her hair flowing and her life still ahead of her, but we were past that and I just wanted her to be warm and as comfortable as possible.
Linda was right. She did not see another winter. She died one month later, 19 days before her 45th birthday.
A couple of months later Dean asked me to help him finish the job of sorting and distributing her clothes. We worked somberly, and, unlike the afternoon with Linda, there were neither tears nor laughter. Just sadness. We made the same piles – keepers, thrift store, a few for me, a few for another friend. As we emptied her rod in their big closet, we tossed the keepers in with the giveaways.
Dean and I put those giveaway things into black plastic bags and carried them outside to the trunk of my car. I drove straight to the hospice thrift store with my sad cargo and maneuvered through the narrow drive to the loading dock at the back. I rang the bell and a volunteer raised the wide door, welcoming my drop-off. I wanted to say something, to let her know that this wasn’t just another purge of out-of-fashion clothes. I wanted to say, “These are the clothes of my dear friend who died!” I wanted her to look in my eyes and see my sorrow.
I didn’t say that. Behind the loading dock door was a storeroom full of piles of clothes, boxes of books, shelves of dinner plates and coffee cups. A hospice thrift store would be full of stories of loss, a repository of objects carrying grief from their donors.
I kept the green sweater, a necklace of glass beads, three scarves, and a long, flowered skirt. The skirt reminds me of Linda lying under the covers with a knit cap on her head and telling me about wearing that skirt on a warm summer evening, the breeze touching her bare legs. We were both transported that afternoon into the memory of her life before she got cancer.
I carry both those images together – the woman near death and the woman so alive. I haven’t let go of either.