By Judith Cohen
My dead friend’s husband flew to Arizona from his home in Los Angeles, just for the afternoon. I was there for an educators’ conference in the broiling heat, while back in Boston, the leaves were turning red and yellow. Since my chemo for breast cancer that past spring, I was nearly bald; strands of hair reappeared in curly spirals that resembled pigs’ tails.
His wife, my friend since fourth grade, had died of breast cancer shortly after my own diagnosis. I only heard her message on my answering machine after I got the news of her passing: “I’m so sorry for you,” she’d said. “But it’s a chronic disease that you can live with.” She’d been diagnosed ten years earlier and I didn’t know that her cancer had returned, not when we celebrated our birthdays in New Orleans, not when we vacationed together at Copper Canyon, Mexico.
We’d stayed close from fourth grade through puberty, experimentally touching each other’s growing breasts; then all through high school where we created a girl’s club named The Premiers. When she left college to marry her California guy who was training to become a psychiatrist, I felt betrayed. Isn’t education more important than a man? I thought.
Now our mutual grief had pulled her husband toward me. We sat across from one another at our Arizona lunch. I don’t remember what we ordered. He said he had no one to talk to, surprising since he’d always had so much to say. He spoke Mandarin; he consulted with international governments, an expert on many subjects—just ask him. Since he answered questions before you could form them, it was hard to get a word in, but he claimed that his patients did the all the talking.
My eyes filled as we spoke about my friend, his wife who was in so much pain that she begged him to shoot her. When the words stopped, we sat in silence. I didn’t say what I was thinking. Years ago, when I‘d visited and was briefly alone with him, he’d asked: “Would you go out with me if I were single?” I was stumped. They’d been married more than twenty years by then and would continue for another twenty.
I felt relieved when he left Arizona to catch his flight back home. Very few attended my conference presentation—typical for academic gatherings created to make money and pad resumes, but the hotel had a heated pool so I swam laps, grateful to feel so healthy.
For several months after our visit, he would call to ask if I was okay. It felt as if he expected me to follow his wife to the grave.
“You seem to be waiting for me to be sick,” I said after his last call.
A year later he married a much younger woman.
“You’d really like her,” he told me on the phone.
For a shrink, I thought, you’re totally clueless.
He stopped calling—my cancer hasn’t returned, so far.