Heaven Has FaceTime

I have prided myself on meeting most of the difficulties life has thrown in my path and tried to move on despite them. A catastrophic stroke at age 39 on Christmas morning 1985 resulted in left- sided paralysis. Yet it never kept me from resuming my career as a speech language pathologist, ending an unhappy marriage, or raising two intelligent, successful daughters, Robyn and Kris, on my own.

Despite the gravity of my physical disability, I have not always considered it to be my only problem. I also admit to being technically challenged. When FaceTime arrived on the scene, my anxiety level shot up even more having one more thing to master on my iPhone.

My dream of finding a friend to help with my technical disability came true when I met Pat a few months after moving to Florida from New Jersey in 1990. I had just sold our house following a bitter and lengthy divorce a few years before, and the girls and I moved to Miami to be near my family. Starting over in my early forties as a single mother with a severe disability would be one more thing to overcome.

Pat and I connected when her youngest daughter, Cheryl, wanted to spend the day at our house with Kris. They met in their same third grade class and we lived only blocks from each other. Pat joined Cheryl on her first visit, and we talked for hours, bonding over our mutual interests.

“I belong to Sierra Club, have you heard of it?” she asked. I didn’t feel I knew her well enough to confide that over the last five years surviving my illness and horrific divorce consumed every day of my life.

“Hey, next weekend there’s a bicycle trip to the Everglades I’m guessing you can’t bike, but afterwards there’s a small get-together at a member’s house. Why don’t you come?”

The following Sunday I followed her directions to the house. A familiar pungent smell drifted from a few people huddled around the back.

I felt uncomfortable walking into a room of physically fit strangers who probably ran a half mile before their first cup of coffee. My exaggerated limp barely passed as walking and my paralyzed left arm hung lifeless at my side. But Pat immediately put me at ease as she greeted me.

“Hi Mimi, glad you could come.” It was then I knew I’d met someone special. That day cemented our friendship, and we shared many weekends together, with or without our daughters. A private person, my friend kept her true emotions locked inside with few fluctuations from her positive outlook and cheerfulness. Unlike me whose emotions spilled over like a burst pipe. Over the years, she was my go-to person to help me with many technical tasks. It all came easy to her.   

When Pat lost her position working in a Miami laboratory, she took off to North Carolina to follow a new job offer. Devastated when she left, it felt like a part of me left with her. While there, she married a coworker, but the marriage soon ended in divorce, and she couldn’t wait to return to Miami.

A few months later she called, “I got the job I wanted, l’ll be down soon.”
“That’s the best news ever, I can’t wait to have you back in my life,” I said.
Within our group of friends, Pat had somehow dodged the perils of aging and declining

health, while the rest of us suffered from a variety of permanent disabilities or illnesses. She filled her weekends with snorkeling, canoeing and biking, none of which I was able to participate in. She and friends even went diving with the sperm whales. I always considered her one of the strongest women I knew, despite weighing only 110 pounds and standing full height at about five foot three. The men she dated were usually younger than she, as those her age had a tough time keeping up with her energy. Several years after her return to Miami, she stunned me again.

“I’ve decided to apply to nursing school,” she said.

“Are you kidding? What about your job or retirement or both?” I could barely contain my shock. She had decided to change careers when everyone else was heading toward or already retired.

When nursing didn’t work out, she volunteered at a shelter for women and children in downtown Miami and soon became the IT person in charge of all their computers.

Forever in awe of her ability to learn anything new, our respect for each other kept our friendship intact despite our dissimilar lifestyles and physical abilities.

“You’re my hero,” she would tell me. “You don’t let your stroke stop you from doing anything. You never give up.”

Although our personalities couldn’t have been more different, we enjoyed and shared beliefs in many of the same things, as the environment, politics, and love for the Miami Heat, the city’s world- famous basketball team with star shooter LeBron James.      

We cheered together the night Obama became president and rooted for LeBron’s baskets in every Heat game.

During this period, Cheryl and Lisa, her oldest, married and both moved to South Carolina to work for the same company. Soon after Lisa became pregnant, Pat called with more unexpected news.

“I want to be near my daughters and share in the lives of my future grandchildren,” she said. I knew this time she would not return, and my sense of loss hit me harder than before.

Friends like Pat only came along once in a lifetime, if you were lucky. I knew also there would never be another go- to person to take her place, someone I could count on to help with the technology that disrupted my life. We gave her a going away party, but unlike with my other friends who had moved away, I had a difficult time accepting her latest departure. Soon after her move, she left two or three voicemails to call her. Busy with my own schedule, I did not reply right away. When the phone rang and caller ID displayed her name, guilt crept in about not responding sooner.

“Hi what’s going on? sorry I haven’t called you back, seems like there’s never enough time.” My excuse sounded lame, even to me.

“I have something to tell you, Mimi.” Her voice didn’t have the usual upbeat, positive energy I’d grown used to rely on.

“Is everything ok, Pat? Lisa, the baby?”  My breathing quickened, and my stomach had that queasy feeling when you suspected your world was about to change.

“Lisa’s fine and so is the baby. It’s me. I have just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.” Her voice remained composed and steady as usual, with no hint of panic or urgency.

I knew I had to stay calm for her. I could show concern, but not expose the terror that flooded over me. It felt like my heart forgot how to beat. I didn’t trust myself to talk and willed myself not to cry. If she could be strong, so could I.

“What happened? How did they find it, Pat?” I tried to keep my voice even without revealing the scream, fighting to get out.

“If this awful thing had to happen, you are right where you should be, with your daughters,” I said.

The doctors are starting me on an extremely aggressive chemo treatment to shrink the tumor and relocate it to a safer position where they can operate. I never asked why me because I know everyone else suffered with something, and now my turn had come.”

“I don’t understand, Pat. You were fine when you left here last month. What symptoms did you have?”     

“I had a feeling of fullness and a pain around my ribs for two months, even in Miami. At first, I thought it was from lifting boxes when I was packing. But it never went away. The girls went with me to the doctor. He did a scan and diagnosed it immediately.” 

But it was what neither one of us dared to say now that hovered between the telephone lines. We both knew that not many survived pancreatic cancer, surgery or no surgery. If I had “imagined a black cloud before knowing she was moving to another state, what now?

Would a tsunami of cancer cells flood all signs of my friend away or just disappear in the waves pounding the beach made up of 26 years of sand? Each grain stood for a different memory of the years we spent together.

With every treatment plan, Pat emailed her friends updating the details of her progress No emotions or speculation about the future colored any of the messages. Instead, she oozed optimism after her first round of chemo showed the tumor had shrunk.

When I visited Pat at her sister Lynn’s winter beach house in Naples, Florida she had withered to a mere 80 pounds and the energy she felt at the beginning had slowly ebbed away. For the first time in our friendship, I was the healthy and strong one. My disability paled to her illness. But no one ever uttered the word cancer, or that chemo might not do what we all hoped. Instead, only happy thoughts prevailed.

In January, I flew up to South Carolina for her 70^th birthday.  It was a double celebration. Cheryl was pregnant with twins.  During the first year and a half that Pat lived in South Carolina, she became a grandmother to two grandsons and a granddaughter; all precious, and all loved with the knowledge she might not be around to watch them grow up. The scans that soon followed the wonderful baby news, revealed the cancer had metastasized to the lung.

June came around and she flew down to Miami for my 70th birthday celebration held in a restaurant.

The doctors discontinued her chemo as it’s showed no improvement.  They didn’t want to put her through any more pain or discomfort.  Dreading how fragile she’d appear, my nerves bolted through my body like lightening. Instead, when she walked through the door, her hair had begun to grow back, and the gray curly fuzz appeared almost blonde against the black cocktail dress she wore. Although Pat had lost more weight, her smile remained bright and wide in every picture. I prayed my beloved friend would recover as her appearance gave me hope.

“My doctor’s starting me on an immunotherapy trial. since I’m off chemo,” she said.

We held hands and talked in the lounge of the hotel where she stayed. We both knew what would follow, but neither one of us said a word.

Her calls came more often and later in the night than before.  Previously short conversations lasted longer now.

“They have me on stronger meds now, but even that isn’t bringing much relief,” she admitted during one of our late-night conversations.

I marveled at her continued struggle to stay alive and wondered with all the suffering, it even made sense.

 ***

She called the first week of December. “My doctors are discontinuing the Immunotherapy trial. It’s just not working.” She never acknowledged the end was near, although we both knew.

It was the first time I heard discouragement in her voice, but still no hint of real defeat.

There were 20 seconds left on the clock, and I guessed she hoped for a basket in overtime to make the game last a little longer.

“I’ll fly up to see you Pat. You can come to my hotel, as your townhouse is inaccessible with stairs and no railings.”  

She spoke often of her favorite room on the top floor. “It’s flooded with light and the sun permeates the room. I just love it there.” she said.

I phoned one night but there was no answer and tried back the following night. Still, no one picked up.

I spoke into the receiver. “My dear, brave, friend, so sorry you don’t feel strong enough to answer your phone. I’ll try Cheryl tomorrow.” The next day Cheryl returned my call.

“I stayed over at Mom’s last night as she wasn’t feeling well and won’t be able to leave  

“I stayed over at Mom’s last night as she wasn’t feeling well and won’t be able to leave the house again. We set up a hospital bed in the sunroom.  Maybe you can call again tomorrow, and hopefully you can both talk then.”

When I tried to reach her the next day, her sister Lynn answered.

“Pat has been sleeping all day and evening. I know she would love to FaceTime with you, but she’s too out of it now. Why don’t we try again at nine in the morning? Maybe she’ll be more awake then.”

I slept next to my cell phone all night and set my alarm for nine so as not to miss her call. When the morning hours passed into the afternoon, I prayed Pat’s suffering had at last, ended. Hours Iater, Lynn called.

“Hi Mimi, Pat passed away in the middle of the night. I’m so sorry you didn’t get to FaceTime with her. I know how much she wanted to speak to and see you one last time.”

For the first time, I didn’t have to hold any emotions back as I had with Pat.

Our tears melded over the phone for a lost sister and a close friend. But what Lynn said next, remains in my heart and memory forever.

“Before she died, Pat asked me clear as anything, what is Mimi doing sitting in the corner?”

“My God, Lynn, that’s incredible,” My body went numb as I tried to absorb her final vision. She had reached down from Heaven telling me not to worry. Pat knew I was there fighting in her corner when her hourglass of life ran out, transporting her to the other side.

“It’s better than any FaceTime I could have hoped for, Lynn. Pat felt my support, even when we physically could no longer be together.”

In her greatest technological feat, Pat envisioned me before her. My go-to friend had executed our FaceTime minutes before her death and already in Heaven. I hope when my time comes, she will be sitting in my corner.

***

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