Between Earth and the divine

“I was her nurse.”

I really didn’t need the voice on the phone to continue. I knew. She spoke about her in the past tense. Was.

After 2 1/2 weeks of struggling and waiting, hoping and crying, it was over. My friend was gone. Nearly 20 years of a life that took on many different forms and phases came to a close in early September. My hands and face went numb as I listened to the nurse tell me she had died. It was hard to breathe.

“What do I do now?” One question asking so much.

In the end, she was my friend but we started as more. Lovers and partners. Then life and sickness had its way with us and things slowly changed. More and more, I was her caregiver, her support system, her friend and companion.

As I began to tell people she was gone, one commented how wonderful it was that I was there with her at the end. I didn’t have the heart or the words to try to explain that I wasn’t there. I couldn’t be there.

Yes, I could have sat in the room with her, waiting, but I knew I wouldn’t be what she needed. I knew I would panic and ask the doctors to help her hold on, to keep her here, for me. For selfish reasons. I knew I would break the promise I’d made to her to let her go when the time came.

For so many years she had been sick in so many ways. Ironically, it was the treatment for an illness many years ago that ultimately caused the damage she couldn’t survive.

We had many discussions in the intervening years about when enough was enough, about how the cure could be worse than the disease, about living well and dying well. She was very clear. She didn’t want to linger and suffer, to be forced to continue with no purpose.

So, no, I wasn’t there. I let the calm, compassionate nurses do their job. They were kind and they were gentle and she knew no pain in the end.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had to go through her paperwork, looking for documents to complete the final bureaucratic steps of her life. Sitting on the floor, I was quickly surrounded by drifts of paper, pieces of her life before me. Photos she’d shared with me, letters she hadn’t. Bits and pieces of a person I only knew through anecdotes and stories.

I met her when she was getting sick, so I never experienced the woman who lived a vagabond life in a massive brown Chevy pickup with nothing but her dog and her wits. Never saw her after riding her motorcycle to and from Santa Fe to paint the interior of one of those million dollar houses.

I looked at pictures of her, young and strong and smiling at some long ago Pride celebration, bare chested with only two Xs of electrical tape standing between her and a citation. People and places I’d never met and never been. Letters written to her and by her, filled with passion and joy and regret.

She lived her life fully and with no hesitation. She lived out loud and faced things head on. She was such a physically small person but the empty space she leaves seems so vast. With an energy and personality so big, I cannot imagine she is just gone.

She’s somewhere, walking through the mountains with all the dogs that have gone before her, smiling with the sun on her face. She is somewhere between Earth and the divine.