Sharon

Sharon had never looked better: tall, slim, stylishly dressed, vibrantly alive and smiling.  In the photo of the seven women Sharon’s presence immediately stood out.  Even though I had spent very little actual time with her I felt like she was a close friend.  Several years ago Sharon and her husband John had twice generously let my family and my sister Mary’s family stay in their beautiful new home over two different Christmas vacations. We had come to Seattle for the holidays at the same time Sharon’s family had vacationed in Europe.  She had stocked the refrigerator and the pantry with all the food we could possibly need plus made sure there were extra candles for all the holiday holders decorating the house as she didn’t want us to run out of anything especially at Christmas.  She also made sure the outdoor jacuzzi was working.    

I had heard others tell similar stories about Sharon.  How she’d send hubby John off in his jeep to rescue someone caught stranded by a flood.  How someone who called her up to see how she was doing would end up talking for hours about themselves because Sharon really wanted to know how they were doing.  How a teen-ager having a hard day would go over to Sharon’s house to hang out.  How she didn’t just send a treat to her own daughter during test week--she sent one to every student in the school.  Sharon had a knack for making all of us feel special.

When I saw the photo of Sharon, I smiled albeit a little bitter-sweetly.  Sharon had finally succeeded in losing weight, but it was only in order to meet the requirements for a bilateral lung transplant which she needed after twelve years of battling the debilitating, often fatal, effects of taking the diet drug Phen-Fen.

The previous Saturday Sharon and her husband John had sent out 150 invitations to both newly-made and long-term friends to join them on May 22^nd to celebrate their 25^th wedding anniversary.  They were renewing their wedding vows or re-upping as Sharon’s family called it.  It seems they wanted everybody who had ever been a part of their twenty-five years of marriage to be there.  The big day was already being prepared for: the caterer had the menu well in hand, the house was being repainted and a blue sapphire ring for Sharon had been designed and made.

I was in Seattle on a spur-of-the-moment trip back home to look at a house that was up for sale.  Since it was so close to Easter, I decided to stay on and come back to London on Easter Monday.  That meant I would also be there to celebrate my niece Caitlin’s 20^th birthday on March 29^th.   All my family plus Sharon’s daughter, Kimmy, would be there.  That afternoon Kimmy called to say she couldn’t make it because her mom wasn’t feeling well and she wanted to stay home with her.  The previous day Sharon had been to the clinic for a lung x-ray.  Although it looked like she might have pneumonia, she still felt well enough after the visit to go with John to put an offer down on a house on Lake Sammamish.  Since she could no longer be more than fifteen to thirty minutes away from the hospital in case lungs became available, this house on the lake would be their summer place until she could travel again.  So we had Caitlin’s birthday dinner that night with just the family and no Kimmy.

When I opened my email the next morning, I was shocked to find a short email from my sister Lynne saying Sharon had died the previous evening right around the time we were having dinner in the dining room.  Even though we knew she was on the transplant list, couldn’t travel and didn’t always feel well, we didn’t see her as near death.  She was intensely alive, planning her re-upping, buying a house, discussing details with her older daughter Jen about moving back to Seattle after she finished graduate school in May.  In our minds being on the transplant list meant she was on the cusp of a whole new healthy life.  We were prepared for this new life not for her death.

The funeral was Easter Monday or the day of my planned departure from Seattle but, of course, now I postponed it.  That morning I walked into Lynne’s kitchen and much to my surprise heard that she had been asked by Sharon’s sister Carol to read the eulogy that she had written but didn’t think she could stand up and give without breaking down.  Apparently Carol doesn’t know that my sister is the biggest crier of all time bar none.  She is the last person in the world to ask to read a eulogy at a funeral.  However, of course, Lynne said yes. She practiced several times and we all gave her tips on how not to cry, how to maintain her composure.  We all lied saying we knew she could do it.  And happily, for Sharon and her family, Lynne did do it, too--beautifully, calmly, clearly.

 

After Lynne Sharon’s two daughters each gave a eulogy.  Standing together at the pedestal, dressed in black with red ribbons in their hair which matched the thousands of red roses decorating the church, they held hands as first one, then the other spoke.
 

Jennifer, 23-years-old, tall, confident, her mother’s wedding ring hanging from a long chain around her neck, spoke first.  “I always asked my mom for advice on everything, absolutely everything,” she said, “small things and big things.  Now that she is gone I’m  trying to remember what advice she gave me all those times so I can hold on to it and use it in the years ahead.”  Jen soon realized the advice was always pretty much the same no matter what the situation was—just do whatever was the most loving thing to do.  “It was always about love, compassion, doing the kindest thing,” Jen said. “So from now on that is what I’m going to do just like my mother advised.”  

I sat there in the pew wondering what my kids would say about me if I had died and they were giving my eulogy.  Had I given them any words of wisdom to hold on to as Sharon had given her daughters?

The funeral was followed by a small beautiful graveside service.   Afterwards we headed back to the family’s home where John had invited all those who had been invited to the wedding renewal to come by.  The house painting was done, the caterer had put up a tent and laid a spread, and Kimmy wore the blue sapphire ring around her neck.  The thousands of red roses now decorated the house and lawn.

John is a tall, lean, good-looking man.  He is also a quiet man—the counterbalance for ebullient Sharon.  At one point he invited anyone in the group who wished to share stories about her to come forward, but first he wanted to say something himself.  “Twelve years ago,” he said, “when the doctor sat down with the two of us and told us Sharon had a year–and-a-half to live, her first response was, ‘Well, that doesn’t work for me.  I have two daughters who need me when they hit puberty.  John won’t be able to handle that.’”  This set the pattern, John said, for how they lived after her diagnosis: set a goal, reach it, set another goal.  For twelve years they just kept setting and reaching more goals.  They also decided that since their time together might at any time be interrupted by “God taking a hand” they needed to make the most of it.  They decided right then and there to become better parents to Jen and Kimmy, to intentionally open up more to each other, and to love each other and others more.  “These last twelve years were the best years of our marriage,” he said.   For a man of few words he had said a lot.


I am back in London now.  Just yesterday on the phone Lynne told me that all those red roses are still beautifully decorating the house and lawn.

I don’t go to church much anymore.  In fact, this might be the first year I didn’t even go on Easter which sort of makes me sad.  But I didn’t exactly miss out on Easter either.  On Easter Monday as I sat there in the church listening to Sharon’s eulogies, I knew for sure I was within touching distance of the Resurrection: Sharon’s love and spirit were everywhere.

It may be that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Wendell Berry
Collected Poems

Cinque Terre

                                              

The path is about a foot wide and makes just the slightest dent into the side of the steep hill.  Its surface is extremely uneven and full of holes.  Stones, pebbles, pine needles and leaves stick up through the reddish-brown dirt.  I don’t dare take my eyes off the ground as I firmly plant my trekking poles before taking each descending step.  I’m sure this path is meant for goats not humans.  I’m also sure if my backpack was one inch wider it would be enough to bounce me off this hill and into the sea five-hundred meters below.  I wonder if any of my kids climbed up or down here when they were visiting Cinque Terre.  If they did, I’m sure glad I didn’t know about it at the time. 

This is Day Three of our three-day or rather three-season hiking trip in Italy.  A travel brochure could have truthfully stated:

“Day One: winter.  Hike in pelting snow with a wind chill factor cold enough to make ice chips in your water bottles and freeze solid your Swiss knife.

Day Two: late fall.  Be dazzled by large snowflakes falling gently on olive, lemon and orange trees.  Enjoy the absence of strong head winds.

Day Three: spring.  Break out your sun block and sunglasses.  Indulge in gelato al limone. 

But the gelato is still to come.  In my head I can see the gelatoria by the harbor with its sixteen flavors of ice cream.  I debate between ordering my usual limone et fragole and trying something new like caramello o caffè.  I wonder what flavors the others will get.  But the continuous descent is too precarious to engage anyone in a discussion about anything let alone ice cream flavors.   I look down below at the women ahead of me to see if they all have trekking poles.  They do.  But I know some of us don’t.  They must be behind me higher up on the hill.  I wonder if they regret not bringing some.  Do they need poles?  My poles?  Should I, can I, offer them mine or at least one of them?  But I know immediately I can’t give my poles away.  Not even one.  I realize right then and there I will never die a martyr—at least not on this hill.  I don’t have what it takes.  My martyr illusion falls silently into the reddish-brown dirt.  No guilt, no regret. That’s just the way it is. 

We continue to criss cross down the hill cutting through terrace after terrace of empty  vineyards.  Every now and then I remember the reason we’re hiking here: to see the breath-taking views.  So I stop, breath, steady my feet, raise my head and look around:  the world is one immense vista of turquoise sea and sky.  For five minutes I stop thinking about gelato.

I like Day Three of hiking.  By now I’m so worn down and tired out that I let go of all the chatter in my head: the worries about first impressions, last impressions; the anxieties about what clothes to wear or what to talk about; the burden of impossible expectations or imagined failures.  I have no energy left for these things.  I have just enough energy to get myself down the hill.  By Day Three the trekking outside my head finally takes precedence over the trekking inside my head.  It’s all so much easier now.

It wasn’t that way on Day One when I fell into step as the group headed out to walk the Sentiero #1.  There are two kinds of hikers in the world: those who thrive and those who die on hills.  Guess which one I am?  Yup, no matter my good intentions, level of fitness or pure stubbornness, I find myself slowly falling back closer and closer to the end of the line as one by one my fellow hikers pass me.  Finally, it is just Mark, our sweeper and the only man in our group of twelve, and me at the end of the line.  Quite often I stop, suck in air (sometimes snow) until my heart settles and the heart attack is delayed once more.  Luckily I didn’t realize when we started out in the morning that the plan was to immediately hike straight up from sea level to thirteen-hundred meters, then cross the summit—well, not really cross, more like go up and down at least twenty hills all  three-hundred meters or higher all the way to the other end of Cinque Terre.  Late in the afternoon, long after the ice chips have formed and the knife has frozen solid,  at the site of yet another “here we go up again” I think, really and truly, “This is my Waterloo, bury me here.”  But it wasn’t and they didn’t.  All I can say is that crossing the Pyrenees in a white-out was easier, hands down, than hiking Cinque Terre’s Sentiero #1 on Day One.

It’s now 6:30 a.m. on Day Four.   I’m leaving Hotel Punta Mesco heading for the train station.  For the first time this week I am walking alone.  A part of me relishes being alone yet another part keeps looking behind to see if any of my friends are coming down the street.  On my right huge white waves surge onto the beach while on my left the terraced hills rise steeply behind the line of shorefront stores.  Grey rain clouds fill the eastern sky but bits of blue peek out between the white clouds in the west.  Oddly then the emerging dawn breaks through these bits of blue giving the impression that the sun is rising in the west.  I look down the beach to scan the coastline for the four other Cinque Terre villages.  Nestled in the folds of the hills their lights still twinkle in the predawn light.  I count them making sure I see all four. 

Standing there listening to the waves I trace the path we hiked this week: an arc runs from Monterosso, the westernmost village, up to the summit, across and down to Riomaggiore, the easternmost one.  I then trace our steep winding path connecting each village to its own sanctuary high up on the hillside and then down again into the next village.  Finally, the coastal walk between Riomaggiore and Manorola underlines and completes our three-day trek.  Not bad for a group of twelve city dwellers from the flatlands of Paris, London and New York City.  And unlike last year’s hike in Corsica, no one had to be air-lifted off the mountain with three broken bones in their foot.  But that’s last year’s story.

Looking up I couldn’t tell anyone the altitude, mileage or names of all the sanctuaries we hiked up to or a hundred other details that it seems my fellow hikers register and remember with ease.  (In fact, any such details in this piece are surely suspect.)  Instead my world is quite hazy made up of impressions, feelings and just being there.  But now looking at the steep terraced hills spotted with lemon and orange trees and cream, pink and green-colored stucco houses although I don’t know all the names or facts of this place, I do know the place itself through the soles of my feet.  I came to know it well through that narrow, not quite one foot wide, uneven path we walked for three days through winter, fall and finally spring.