Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral

by Kris Radish

  “Annie.”

  She forms the name with her mouth but she does not say it out loud. Instead she begins a conversation that she knows is taking her someplace. She knows that already but she does not know where or how but only the why just this moment. It is because of Annie Freeman. It is because of Annie’s death. It is because of some unique and marvelous connection that she and Katherine Givins shared for years and years.

  “Katherine, how are you?”

  “You remember me?”

  “Annie talked about you all of the time. Once, I think we were just a few minutes from actually meeting each other as you were coming in from the airport in San Francisco and I was leaving,” Laura said.

  “I remember. The boys were young. Annie had a mess of friends and relatives on a very unique schedule so we could all help her that year she was so sick.”

  “So sick. Have you thought about that now?” Laura asks and then keeps on talking, already feeling certain that she may be onto something. “I have wondered if that illness all those years ago wasn’t the beginning of what happened to her when she got sick again. I have wondered if that kick started something inside of her that never left.”

  Laura always talks as if she is in charge. She is used to phone-wrestling and to talking people up and down and to making certain that she is believed and trusted even if her own hand is on fire and she’s lost in an alley. It’s her job and it’s also her inner core.

  “I think about things like that also. All of the time. It’s hard not to.”

  “Are you okay?” Laura asks Katherine. “Can I do something?”

  Katherine cannot help but laugh and the laugh startles Laura back into a standing position.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Well, you can do something but you might not believe what I am about to ask you to do.”

  The conversation turns a corner into lightness as Katherine reads the letter from Annie. Before the end of the first page Laura is also laughing. She wants to tell Katherine she is laughing because she has already imagined this moment or one so similar that one thought, one sentence, one echo on the phone could be mistaken for another.

  “Stop,” she finally tells Katherine. “Isn’t this just like Annie? We should have seen this coming. It made sense that she didn’t want to have a formal funeral. She hated that shit. I imagine she wanted the boys to spread her ashes around the backyard of that house she loved so damn much. But this? This is classic. It’s perfect. It’s . . .”

  Laura stops. She has already spread out the traveling funeral in her mind. She’s already formed pieces of the trip that stretch like banners into the lives of the other women, the people they meet, their conversations after midnight, the way they fall into each other without hesitation, the way some of them don’t like each other at first or wrestle for attention, the way they manage to finally fit the curves of their personalities into each other so the puzzle is complete, the way they will change. She feels the emotional water of the traveling funeral washing over her and she knows, she thinks she knows, why Annie wanted them to do this. But she stops herself. She doesn’t want to know everything and she has that power also. She can let it ride.

  “Hey . . .” Katherine says, a little puzzled by Laura’s silence.

  “I’m okay. Just thinking about what this is going to be like.”

  There is another pause and Laura thinks that there are so many things that she doesn’t know for sure. She doesn’t know when she will see her daughter again. She doesn’t know if she can save every woman at the shelter. She doesn’t know how she can afford to take a short leave of unpaid absence, because she and her husband live on such a tight budget that one unplanned trip, one traveling funeral, one real funeral, and the whole budget is shot to hell. But she also doesn’t know how she could not go. It is an impossible possibility, but possibility to Laura is everything.

  “Let me finish reading first,” Katherine says. “Then we’ll discuss the rest of the details.”

  Laura listens and then, right after Katherine begins speaking again, she remembers the spiral notebook that Annie kept with her the last time they saw each other. It was not so long ago, just four weeks before Annie died, weeks ago—just weeks ago when she saw her last.

  The notebook never left Annie’s hands. She placed it on her lap the few times she managed to sit outside on the deck, set her fingers on top of it, resting her palms on the metal spiral edges when it rested on her chest while she lay in bed, moved it under her elbow when she managed just once or twice to shift to her side, pushed it under her pillow each and every time she fell asleep.

  “What is it?” Laura had asked Annie. “Are you working on something?”

  Annie looked at Laura as if she were trying to see right through her. She moved her hand so two fingers rested on the side of her leg.

  “I’m always working on something, you know that. Right now I’m trying to figure out a way to forge a gentle exit but I’m having a hell of a time, sweetheart. This wasn’t part of the plan. Not at all.”

  “Can I do something?”

  “If I could laugh I would,” Annie had said, smiling just a little. “You’ve already done enough and when the time comes you will know if there is one more thing that you can do. You’ll know. Just having you here now for this time is good. It’s good, sweetheart.”

  Laura had looked hard at Annie then. She saw how her dark eyes were rimmed with even darker circles. She reached over and brushed Annie’s brown hair, laced with occasional loops of silver, away from her weary eyes. She noticed how the lines across the top of Annie’s mouth and under her eyes and descending from her lower lip had suddenly grown longer, wider, deeper. She saw how the arms and hands and fingers and legs and every inch of her beloved Annie had melted away so that her bones had become dominant features.

  “Goddamn cancer,” she’d said to herself. “Goddamn fucking cancer.”

  Ovarian fucking cancer. Such a secret disease. This tiny pain in Annie’s stomach. First quiet, and then more and more insistent. Then one day when Laura finally pays attention Annie is by the fountain in the center of campus, doubled over with the constant pain, and she cannot move. Annie eats an apple and feels as if she has swallowed a turkey whole. Pounds dropping away as if she has been injected with Mr. Atkins personally. Blood, tiny drops the color of a Wisconsin sunset in early fall, moving from her vagina when she is not even close to her period and then days of it and then the look on the doctor’s face when she tells her all of this, when Annie G. Freeman lines up all of her symptoms and the doctor says nothing for a moment, then calls the hospital, and Annie G. Freeman does not go home that night or for many nights after that.

  There are quick calls from the hospital. The network is alerted. Katherine, Annie’s two sons, Jill, Laura, neighbors, the assistant who will cancel classes. Quick calls and the feeling that the doctor already knows something.

  The doctor with the gentle eyes and hands that glide like only a female doctor’s hands can glide. A female doctor who knows what it is like to have objects the size of a toaster oven inserted into a vagina. A doctor who knows that the soft placing of a hand on a knee or arm or even on the side of a worried face before an examination can make a woman feel safe and protected. The hands of a doctor that take their time and move slowly with the orchestrated sounds of a female voice. The assurance and that kind voice of knowing because she has been there, felt that, winced at the exact same moment when something so unnatural moves into a natural place.

  The doctor who tells you, “Yes, I will be honest.” And “No, there is no way to know for sure,” and “Maybe it will be okay,” and then, “Maybe it will not.”

  The female doctor who tells her secretary, “Please hold my calls and cancel my last three appointments.” The doctor who says this because she gives a damn. The doctor who gives a damn beyond what the HMO tells her to do and the doctor who knows it takes more than fifteen minutes to tell a woman she may have a form of cancer that will
kill her. She may have a form of cancer that has already pawed its way past her absolutely fabulous ovaries. The same ovaries that helped her generate two of the most remarkable sons on the face of the earth. The same ovaries that pelted her with cramps and made her drop to her knees in bathrooms throughout the continental United States and in five foreign countries. The same ovaries that she doubted when she was thirteen years old because half of her friends already had their periods and her menstrual cycle was just getting cranked up. The same ovaries that claimed her as “woman” and made her want so desperately to feel things she would never have felt without them—rising tides, the glance of a handsome man, the yearning to touch the tiny hairs on the head of her own baby, the salt from the tears of her best woman friend, the warm ashes from a fire that kept her warm for days and nights along the shores of Lake Superior, the scent of lust rising from inside of her own skin, the desperate need to always say yes.

  The doctor who will hold on to you as tightly as you hold on to her and who will place you without letting you go into the arms of another doctor who will do another test and then whisk you off into the arms of yet another doctor. She will not let you go because she is yours and you are hers and your malignant tumors are now a shared part of a relationship that is a mixture of grief, sadness, anger, longing, zeal, panic, hurt, wondering, more longing and something else indescribable.

  Annie’s tumors started out as cells that found her ovaries such an inviting, warm and friendly place. So friendly that they multiplied like those late winter beetles she remembered from the Midwest that collected on her window screens and then crawled into her bedroom to form puddles of soft red and black on her light blue bathrobe like moving paintings from some science-fiction movie. The tumors multiplied, and then as if the ovaries were not enough, they started looking around and then saw another warm place and jumped, one by one, to that warm spot in her abdomen and the other warm spot just below that and from there to the next spot until that day when the doctor put her hands there, at the spot where they were about to jump to next, and said very loudly so Annie could hear it, “No.”

  “No, damn it. No, you have had enough of her.”

  And then Annie knew what her doctor did—that it was the time for miracles and the trying and the wanting to live. Just simply wanting to live.

  And then the next part, which necessitated keeping a spiral notebook with her so that she could plan what happened after this. So that in the end when she knew she had so very few choices left, when she knew that her commands and wishes were buried beneath the tangled mass of the cells leaping over each other to get to the next spot, when she knew that to dare to wish for anything but for the pain to go away for just five seconds or maybe, maybe just one second—one quiet heartbeat of a second—was asking too much, then all she had left was the notebook and this plan. This idea. A reason to keep sailing to Tuesday just one more time.

  The notebook never crossed your mind again because that very day you had to call the ambulance because it was impossible for you to know what Annie needed next and which pill was supposed to cap the pain until the next pill and then when you said goodbye you knew that she would never remember and that it would not have mattered if she had remembered anyway.

  What mattered had already happened and you, her friend Laura, hold only what you remember in the palm of your hand—a friendship which had turned into a deep love and respect and admiration that carried you through years of richness with a woman who came to you once, just once, for help, and then opened her heart so wide that you slipped inside without ever knowing your feet had left the earth.

  “So,” Katherine says, waking Laura from her memory. “Is this all too much to do?”

  “Too much to do for Annie Freeman?”

  “Ridiculous question, but all I really know of you is how you rescued her that one horrid night and how your connection with women’s centers has never been broken. There are so many things that I don’t know. So I have to ask: Is this too much?”

  “It’s not too much for a friend, for what we all had with her, for this one last thing that she asked of us, whatever her reasons.”

  Then a quiet descends and at the same moment Laura and Katherine are imagining what Annie’s reasons might be, what might happen, who they will become or what they will know of themselves.

  And one more thing.

  “Katherine,” Laura says, her voice dipping just below her level of normal command, “when I was there, those days before she died, we talked a lot and one thing we talked about for a very long time was that she wanted me to think about buying her house and moving to California.”

  Katherine finds nothing surprising this day. A traveling funeral? Here we go. Jill sobbing on her back porch? Seems normal. Laura and her husband moving to California? Why not.

  “If you come on the funeral,” Katherine tells her, “I’ll help you end that part of your story and then we’ll all go back to Chicago and help you pack.”

  “There, that was easy,” Laura laughs. “We’ll see. I don’t and can’t see everything about that issue clearly, especially with the news you just dropped into my lap, but we’ll see about this. Annie got me thinking about it for sure and then toward the end when she was so sick we let it go.”

  “Will you need anything before we meet at the airport?” Katherine asks finally to move them on, because she is in charge of moving the flock, at least for now. “Will you need anything at all?”

  Laura wants to leave for the airport right away. She wants to run from her house wearing only what she has on and get to it. She is already seeing vistas across a New Mexico plateau and the mist rising from a stand of tall grass near a Seattle island. She is already holding the hands of her traveling funeral comrades and she wants to see it all, do it all immediately. She cannot wait. She wants to hurry. Somehow, she knows, she’ll figure out how to escape her job, her husband, the cold Chicago spring.

  “I want to write while we do this,” she says spontaneously.

  “Write?”

  “This is going to be remarkable,” Laura says. “Not just for honoring Annie, but also for what will happen to us and what we might discover. So I want to keep some kind of diary, journal, design a movie script—whatever in the hell it turns out to be.”

  “She’d love that,” Katherine almost screams. “She’d love the writing part.”

  “I have no clue but let me start now. I’ll start with this conversation and see what happens and I will move a truck with my bare hands to get to the airport.”

  “Can you do it?” Katherine asks again.

  “I can do it, baby.”

  Laura does not know how. It will seem impossible in just a few moments, in an hour and for several days and even after the funeral procession has changed direction. But she is certain, totally certain, that she will be at the airport in seven days.

  Then the conversation ends quickly because the time is moving from one zone to the next fast and two more women are waiting and Laura Westma needs to go to the bathroom, unpack her groceries, and make plans for a traveling funeral.

  One thing at a time. One thing at a time.

  7

  Laura and Annie

  Chicago, Illinois, 1987

  * * *

  Annie waited 43.8 minutes before she called. Minutes, all 43.8 of them, that were the longest she had ever spent in her entire life.

  Almost as long as the minutes when a man once tried to kill her.

  A man she remembers having seen only during a lecture on political activism she was giving at the University of Chicago during her four-month sabbatical in the fall semester. She remembers him because he paced constantly during the lecture, rising and falling in the back of the auditorium like one of those moving targets at a carnival that you get to keep if your quarter lands inside of its head or you pop out its eyes with the air gun.

  “How strange,” she remembered telling herself during that lecture and again later when she was safe, when it was over and
when one part of her life was forever changed. “Why doesn’t he sit down? He’s driving me crazy.”

  Driving her crazy.

  And then without knowing who or why or what was happening, strange objects began appearing on her car window and outside her office door where she had been given research space, where students lined up every day to see her for just a few minutes, where she spent so many hours each day she considered moving out of her campus housing unit and sleeping on the ancient office couch.

  Rubber knives. A glass of wine. Slippers. Then the notes started.

  “I could tell you about killing. I could show you.”

  “We know what you really mean.”

  “Three times and once times 100 and then the end will flatten us like nothing. You will see.”

  At first it was funny but then the phone started ringing when she was in the office at 12:30 A.M. or at 5 A.M. when it should not have been ringing. There would be a voice on the line, a man’s deep cough, a rough whisper, the sounds of something—metal maybe—and then fear rising in her throat as she began to think that maybe none of this was random. Maybe none of this was random at all.

  Annie G. Freeman was no campus kid the year she took her four-month sabbatical. She was thirty-eight years old and her two boys came with her and were plunged into the city/university life and when they were not complaining about missing their friends they were busy making new ones. They may have known something was amiss. They may have known that their mother began staying up too late, making too many quiet phone calls, had too many male friends sleep over on the couch just so someone would guard the door. They may have known she looked too tired all of the time.