Family Finds Us, Even When There is No Blood to Make the Connection

The last time I saw her to talk to her, it was Christmas Eve and I was in a hurry to get on the road because I knew that tunnel traffic could stretch my 45 minute trip to my brother’s house into far more than an hour. I was delivering my end of our long standing holiday exchange–homemade sugar cookies with buttercream frosting for a jug of whiskey from the package store. It was my first Christmas without my sister and my husband, but I’d spent the holiday season following a mantra that had been delivered to me by some unknown force: Create the conditions for joy and it will return to you. Linda had brought the whiskey to my annual Christmas party a couple of weeks earlier (she thought I might need it!) where she left a message on my Christmas chalkboard that read, “Thanks for having me. I love all of ya.”

My divorce meant that my mother-in-law, who was also Linda’s best friend, would be moving 600 miles away and she’d likely never see her again once she was gone. Linda asked me to come in to see some of the gifts she’d received. I asked if it would be okay if I came the next day so that I could get through the tunnel. She hugged me, told me that she liked my gray flannel hat with the red flower on the side and wished me a Merry Christmas. As I turned to walk away, she said, “I know what you’re going through. I know sometimes it feels like you’re gonna die, but you won’t. You’re gonna be okay.” Both of us were facing big endings and life changes.

My mother-in-law, though she could be mind bogglingly argumentative, had been Linda’s lifeline for close to seven years. She’d been struggling with COPD for most of a decade and she and my mother-in-law had a great system worked out.  Linda would drive to the stores where she had a bill to be paid, and my mother-in-law would run in and pay it. My mother-in-law would walk over to the house whenever Linda’s grandson was dropped off for babysitting and stay. This allowed Linda to have time with her grandson while a more able bodied person was there to help out. My mother-in-law would make dinner and the two of them would sit and watch TV while they ate. This also meant that I had lots of  mother-in-law free time in my house.

When my mother-in-law first came to live with me and she and Linda started spending time together, I went over when Linda was alone to make sure she didn’t feel obligated to entertain my mother-in-law. She could be a lot, and I didn’t want Linda to feel burdened by her. She said, “Before she came along, I just sat in the house feeling sad and alone. Now it’s like I have new energy and I look forward to getting out of the house with her. She saved me.” On another occasion, I was having dinner with just Linda at her house. She liked to serve me shrimp and she showed me how to make my own cocktail sauce. I said to her, “I often wonder what life without Linda would be like.” And without skipping a beat she said, “Oh, it would be hell!” We both laughed heartily but we also both knew she was right. Despite the difficulties of having a relationship with my mother-in-law, Linda saw it as a new lease on life and she took the challenges with the joys. 

So, on that Christmas Eve, when she said she knew what I was going through, it wasn’t just her own divorce she was referring to but the loss she knew she was about to endure–the loss of her link to some semblance of freedom and interaction with the world. To get to her car, Linda would have to walk out onto the front porch and pause to rest. She’d then walk down the ramp and pause to catch her breath and finally she could walk the short distance to her van. Soon she would be on her own again and would have no one to witness the struggle it took her just to breathe.

I don’t know if she understood the blow that was about to come–I even wonder if something in her was already getting ready to go. On Christmas Day, I called her to see if she wanted to drive around and look at Christmas lights with the doggies and me. She explained that her family had come down with the flu and she wasn’t feeling very well. Just three days later, I was at her bedside in the hospital saying my final goodbye. She was not conscious, but I told her I wasn’t ready for her to go and I’d be right across the street for her if she decided she wanted to stay. I also told her that I did understand if she wanted to go and, like she told me, I would be okay. She’d been in and out of the hospital many times over the years and she’d always rallied. This time, though, she decided to go on ahead. With her passing, not only had my internal landscape changed where my attachments to my sister and my marriage had lived, but now my external landscape, too.

I could see into Linda’s kitchen from the window over my own kitchen sink. When I’d bought my house 15 years earlier, I’d been immediately attracted to her and would observe with curiosity her comings and goings. She smoked cigarettes and wore a blue uniform for her job as a city bus driver. She climbed ladders to work on the outside of her house and rode her bike with her dog trailing along on a leash she held. Before my mother-in-law ever came into the picture, Linda was my friend. She reminded me of my older relatives from the North who I only got to see growing up on summer visits. Linda had an above ground pool that she adored and she always invited me over. Her COPD required her to be on oxygen 24-hours a day, but that didn’t stop her. Linda got a little inflatable boat for her small oxygen canister. She passed the oxygen tube through her bedroom window and then attached it to the large oxygen tank inside. She’d then put the small canister in the little boat in the pool and put the oxygen tube from the canister in her nose and get in the pool so she could float around. One summer night she asked me to come over and sit by the pool in her new anti-gravity chairs. We laid out there looking at the night sky…talking and laughing. And then I heard thunder. I got concerned and said we’d better go in. She assured me that we had time. I said, “Linda! We’re sitting next to a giant lightning bolt target and there’s no way I’m going to be able to carry your ass down off this deck and into the house, so we’d better get started now! She finally agreed.

One fourth of July, my parents and a couple of friends came and we had a cookout at Linda’s house. We were supposed to go around the corner to watch the fireworks, but we’d all bunched up around her kitchen table while Linda taught us to play a dice game. After she taught everyone how to play, she innocently tried to lead everyone astray by giving us bad advice about what to do. She also kept saying, “Oh, Shitonya!” (break it down). In the charade of competition and cheating she called me Hussy and I called her Hoe, and it stuck. We were having so much fun laughing and shit talking that we forgot all about the fireworks and missed them completely. No one was disappointed.

Linda had a seat at every family and holiday gathering in my home. Though a one-minute walk across the street often took her ten minutes, she always came and she always brought deviled eggs that she’d made. One time she was almost out of oxygen but she didn’t want to go home. So, she had my brother and I take her oxygen tank and run across the street to her house to fill it up. Neither of us knew what the hell we were doing and I felt panicked, but she was just fine. Another time, during my house renovation, she wanted to see the upstairs but wasn’t steady enough on her feet to get up there. So, she sat on the bottom step and “walked” herself up on her bumper one step at a time. Yet another time, my whole family was playing Wii bowling and she beat everyone, including my most skilled and competitive brother, while bowling from her chair!

In the last couple of years of her life, Linda would honk her horn and wave at my house whenever she would back out of her driveway and go down the street in her white minivan. For several years a lot of my entertaining revolved around Linda and the other elders. It was as if I was making everything nice for them. But the truth is, something in me understood that this time wasn’t going to last forever, and one day I’d miss all of the chaos and the laughter of the older folks who gave my life so much richness. For, seemingly in the blink of an eye, life changed and everything went quiet. Linda died in a snowstorm that brought temperatures in the teens, kept the roads frozen and schools closed for a week. I sat alone in my house where I could not get warm and had a clear view of her house. I couldn’t help but reflect on how this storm–the way ice and snow changes the landscape–was symbolic of how radically my life had changed in just one year of unimaginable loss. And still I understood I had to conjure the courage to keep on moving and breathing, just as Linda had.

As much as I enjoy and require a good bit of quiet and stillness, I sometimes long for the joyful nonsense of a big noisy group of old folks who can’t hear and talk and laugh loudly. I will remain forever grateful that some wisdom found its way to me and helped me understand the gift of all of this. I shall always love that Hoe–my friend and my family…my Linda Lou.