by Kris Radish
“I’m tired,” she tells Annie. “Tired of losing ground, of losing control, of losing so many people that I love. I fought this sale because of that, losing control, which is ridiculous because in the end selling you the land will give me something back. I’m so sorry.”
Annie does not want Rebecca to be sorry. She does not want her to take back her words or her actions or how she feels inside of her wounded heart. She puts her hand on the side of Rebecca’s face and Rebecca does not try to take her hand away.
“It’s going to be okay, you know that now, don’t you?”
“I know there will be something else but I also know that it will be okay, it has to be okay, you are right.”
That first night turned into a second day and the beer turned into wine and the wine turned into breakfast after a night on the couch from the beer and wine and a conversation that launched a friendship and gathered strength as the walls of Annie’s house went up and then the damn slanted roof came into view and a garage that was scaled back so that Rebecca could look out of her kitchen window and still see the top of her favorite hill.
Strength as the daughter and sons came and went, as one job became a struggle and the other job a delight. Strength as the grass took hold and the trees grew and as one romance soured and another erupted like a well-tended fire and then burnt out at the mere hint of a strong breeze.
Strength finally to the end. Through that day when Annie slowly crossed the yard and cried in Rebecca’s arms and beyond that, those months beyond when it seemed as if Rebecca had moved in and without knowing it passed a notebook into the hands of her dying friend so that she could design a traveling funeral.
Annie Freeman’s fabulous traveling funeral.
10
* * *
John Richardson started tapping his fingers on the dining room table a good forty-five minutes before Marie Kondronsky was due to tap her own fingers against the back door window every night.
It was not a game to him, this tapping. It was a way to try and push his mind away from the pain in those last few minutes before his medication arrived. Marie was John Richardson’s medication for many, many reasons—the least of all being the morphine. Mostly it was just the knowledge that she would come. It was knowing that she would ask how his day went and the night before the day and that she always touched his arm, sometimes his face, and sometimes she sat for a while because he was her last stop and she was always exhausted. Sometimes, just after the medication began climbing its way through his exhausted veins and toward the place where the pain lingered like lions waiting for dinner, she sat with her fingers on the veins below his wrist pretending to take his pulse. He knew she just wanted to touch him, to be sure. He knew this for certain.
John Richardson, terminal lung cancer patient just off of the Benton Way highway turn, would be John Richardson, terminal cancer patient at the Fenton Valley Care Center if it were not for Marie and her extraordinary talents as nurse and friend to the dying.
“Marie,” he said just before she turned to leave that first week. “What would happen if you couldn’t come?”
“John,” she said, making believe she was going to slap his hands for talking naughty, “I’ll always come. You know I love you. When I left last summer didn’t I send the nicest woman to fill in?”
John liked the other woman but she wasn’t Marie. He needed Marie. He did.
“I won’t leave you, John. I’ll be here. It’s okay.”
Marie always made certain he had her cell phone number taped to the edge of the counter. She made sure his wife knew to call and she made sure that as he got worse, nothing, not even her precious family time, would interrupt those last days, the last week, the last anything.
It was what she did, who she was. Marie the hospice nurse. The director of the entire valley program and the woman who had held the dying hearts and hands of more men and women and way too many babies and boys and girls during the past seventeen years.
And the phone was always ringing.
Three teenagers still at home. One in college. A husband with a construction business. Marie always on call and the phone never stopping.
It rings almost on cue after dinner, three hours past John’s goodnight, “I’m going to sleep now” call, dishes are done, everyone is reading or doing homework, and Marie finally curls into the chair by her bedroom window. It’s her place, her only place, and she has the chair turned so that she can look out from the second-story window into the hands of the trees. She sees the long limbs of the trees as an extension of the earth and all things that grow and flourish and she likes to see them reaching, moving, growing every single day. And this time, these few minutes every night, is when she puts her world back together.
During this time, her children would call for her only if the house were on fire. Her husband would wet his pants rather than come in to use their bathroom and disturb her during her alone time. Her sisters hold back from picking up the phone until morning or later in the night. Some friends forget and call, but her second-oldest daughter often catches the call before the first ring has finished and takes a message.
Only someone who didn’t know about these sacred seconds would bend the unwritten rules and call asking for Marie at this time. Only someone who didn’t know that these moments were the ones Marie needed to keep the tears and gashes in her own soul from washing her out to sea. Only someone who didn’t know would dare to interrupt the time when Marie fanned back through all of them. George, Mitchell, baby Jessie, Cynthia, the Hernandez brothers, Tom and Brad Zimcheck, Grandpa Harley. All the faces of the men and women and boys and girls and aunts and uncles and mothers and fathers Marie has helped to ease from one world to the next.
A life of dying, Marie calls it, and how and why she came to do it astounds her every single night just as it does this night when she places one hand on each arm of the rocking chair and feels the wood beneath her fingers. The wood is solid and real and she can feel it. She holds on to the rocker’s arms as she prays. She prays first for each person under her care who has already died and then she prays for those who are dying tonight and those who will die tomorrow or next Friday. She prays during these precious moments only for her people—“clients,” some nurses call them, but she calls them “her people.” She does not pray for her family—not her four daughters or her husband or her sisters. Those prayers are for the morning or for the drives to see her people or for every other moment of the day when she is not in her life of dying.
The phone rings and there is a scramble downstairs that Marie hears and it makes her laugh out loud just a little to think how well her family knows her and understands this space that she has to protect to keep on going, to tell herself, “Yes, I’m alive and I can do it again.”
A tap at the door startles her because it has been so long since there was an emergency at this hour. So long since someone called and needed her now, just like that, during this time, her time.
“Mom, I’m sorry,” whispers Sarah from behind the door. “She says she needs to talk to you right away.”
“That’s okay, honey,” Marie whispers back, not wanting to break the spell of her own prayer service with a loud voice. “Who is it?”
Sarah is a good girl. She is really a young woman who is only months away from handing over the reins of this very important job to her younger sister when she graduates from high school. But for now, maybe for the last time, she is the one who whispers first one name and then another from the other side of the door. Sarah is the one who will stop her mother’s beating heart with the names of two women. Sarah, who will eventually go on to become a doctor and who will be remarkable not only for her healing powers but for remembering the kindness and grace that she witnessed every single day in the actions and life and breath of her own mother, Marie Kondronsky, the hospice nurse from Sonoma County.
“Mom, she said her name is Katherine Givins and that she needed to talk with you about a funeral for Annie Freeman.”
Marie cannot move for one, two and then five seconds. The weight of Annie Freeman’s hands on her arm is still so fresh in her mind that she cannot think to speak to her daughter who is waiting to be dismissed, to know for certain that her mother is going to know what to do next.
“Mom?”
“I’m fine, sweetheart. I’ll tell you about it later. Can you hang up down there?”
“Of course.”
Of course.
Katherine Givins and Marie Kondronsky spoke on the phone often during Annie’s illness. They met twice during Katherine’s visits but they have never gotten past the graceful discussion of the medical world. They have discussed cancer and medication and efforts to comfort the dying, but they have not balanced over the edge very far to explore the potential possibilities of common denominators. Life beyond dying has danced around them even as they have embraced and cried together and then turned to get on with it.
This is the launch of something new. This is where those “How are you?”s move quickly to the heart of the call.
“How are you, Marie?”
“Fine, Katherine.”
Then Katherine Givins begins her tale of the traveling funeral while Marie rocks in her chair and imagines, in between sentences, that she is gliding across the tops of the trees and that she will never fall and nothing can stop her from floating as if that is all there is to do. Float and be in the now with the living. That is all. Just that.
“Did you know about this?” Katherine asks her. “The traveling funeral?”
Marie does not answer Katherine’s question. Instead, she tells her a story. She tells Katherine about how she falls in love with every single patient that she cares for and how her heart breaks every single time one of them dies and that they all die.
They all die.
Marie did not know. She did not know that Annie used the pen and notebook to plan her own funeral. A traveling funeral. She did not know that the pages she’d found folded over when Annie fell asleep were the directions to all the secret and wonderful spots that helped make a remarkable trail. She did not know that Annie’s writing was a simple journey back to reclaim a portion of what was once alive for those who remained, for those she loved, for those she loved beyond all the others. She did not know that while planets of grief and sorrow started swirling around the sons and friends and colleges and the young boys and girls in Memphis and Orlando and Princeton who had read about Annie’s own brush with death years and years before and who knew that she was really, finally dying again that Annie was smiling and laughing at what she was planning.
Her traveling funeral. A place beyond the yard she loved to watch and the faces she memorized with all the photos she asked Marie to help her line up against the front of the dresser. Marie did not know that she was a key player, that her placing the pen in the perfect spot and never reading the notes and holding open the covers and making certain that the medicine and the baths were just the way Annie liked them—all these things, she did not know.
“What did you think she was writing?” Katherine asked.
“I never thought about it. It was not my place to imagine or intrude. It was not my place to look over her shoulder or to dare to read even one word that she had written.”
“I understand.”
“I respect them, you see, Katherine. I know you get this because Annie talked about you, because I have met you and looked into your eyes. I know when to ask some things but mostly those who are dying . . . they have so much to think about, so much to remember, so much to imagine. There is no time for questions.”
“I see, I do see.”
Silence guides them for a few moments while Katherine imagines Annie and Marie sitting just this way, in the quiet. Marie is monitoring some bodily movement, the flow of the medicine, the way the IV drips from the machine into Annie’s thin arm, and Annie is swept away with her writing, her planning, her traveling funeral.
“I’m wondering now why you are calling about this funeral,” Marie says. “Annie would know there is no way for me to leave without weeks and weeks of preparation. She would have known this even as she was planning it.”
“You know what you meant to her. You know what you must mean to all of them.”
Marie knows. She knows as she watches a brave slice of wind bend the hands of her favorite tree into what she thinks looks like a graceful prayer, hands moving to windy music, the music of her aching heart.
“Of course. I am the last resort. I am the one last stop before they have to start all over again. I know. I do know.”
“Marie, she wants you to come on the traveling funeral but she knows you would have a hard time leaving your patients. She wrote about it. She called you the Mother Teresa of Sonoma County. The living gift to the near-dead. The heartbreak before the pills. Well, she had a list of names for you. I will send them all. But she also had this idea.”
Marie starts laughing. She sees Annie as she was the first days, when they were getting settled into people they would become. Laughing. Everything was funny. The tubes and bottles and the way she turned for the shots and how she made everything seem light, at first so easy and even at the end there was always something positive.
“What’s so funny?” Katherine wants to know, laughing just to hear Marie laugh. Then adding hastily, “Does this seem weird to be laughing when we are talking about Annie’s funeral?”
“It would seem funny not to laugh.”
Then they laugh together and Katherine catches it first. The irony of this laughing, which she is sure Annie would have predicted and wanted and hoped for during this very conversation.
“She was always full of ideas. This plan and that plan and what she wanted to do and how she never missed a chance once she got her life back.”
Marie pauses, remembering. She pauses and her mind flies back to a soft moment when Annie had laughed so hard and for such a long period of time Marie was worried that she may have crossed over some invisible physical line that would make her die sooner. Annie turned to her in the middle of the coughing and the laughing and the serious question about whether or not she would be okay and said, “This is where the term ‘die laughing’ comes from,” and then of course, yes, they both laughed some more and then that was the first and only time she ever gave Annie extra medicine, unprescribed, but she did it. She did it so Annie would not die laughing.
“So,” Marie finally asks Katherine, taking a deep breath. “How is this plan going to work?”
The details are simple. The plan is simple. Marie’s involvement in the traveling funeral is essential for its success and survival.
“I don’t know if I can go,” Marie says, standing up in her bedroom so that she can now see over the top of the tree. “She knew it would be close to impossible.”
Katherine thinks maybe she should have hopped in her car to travel to Sonoma County to tell Marie how this would work. She thinks that maybe she should have pulled an all-nighter since the red shoes arrived, should have driven to Marie’s backyard, climbed her favorite tree and talked to her through an open window.
“Well, here’s the deal. Annie knew you, above all others, might struggle with the idea because of your patients. Can you try? Can you think of a way? And if you can’t come, if you can only come for part of the funeral, Annie thought of that also. She told me to buy you a cell phone.”
The plan is simple and Katherine tells her that Annie has suggested a cell phone purchase with unlimited hours for a very long period of time so that Marie can attend the traveling funeral virtually if she cannot attend all of it in person.
“What?”
“You will call us and we will call you. She wants you to be a part of this, and this phone thing was a way for her to make it happen if you cannot leave, a way for you to help us with this funeral, for us to maybe help you and for you to keep on doing what you need to do for all those other people that you take care of every day. But it would be best if you could come along.”
; “It sounds easy so far,” Marie says, whispering again as she sits back down, putting her hands back on the arms of her chair, settling in, thinking. “Maybe I need this too. Maybe I can figure this out. Annie would like that. Annie deserves it.”
“Maybe, Marie. Maybe it will be some kind of interesting break that really isn’t a break. Don’t you get tired?”
“Are you trying to make me laugh again?”
“No. I’m serious. How do you keep doing this?”
Marie wants to tell Katherine about the day the first man died in her arms. She wants to reach her entire body through the invisible phone line that magically connects her world to Katherine’s world and rest her head in Katherine’s lap while she talks and while she cries.
Ron Smith. His name was Ron Smith. A simple name for a man who had been born in a time when men do not cry or ask for help. A time when a man who is sixty-six years old and dying of inoperable lung cancer from smoking three packs of Camels a day is brought to the hospital because his sons can’t help and his wife is also ill and no one else can handle it. There was no one else.
Marie wants to tell Katherine how everyone was afraid to touch him because he was big and swore and because they had never seen anyone from his family touch him. Marie touched him. That’s what she would say and she will say if she makes it on the virtual funeral. She will say how one day she just reached over and put her hands on his head not to see if he was feverish or to move his face for some medicine but just so she could feel his skin under her own fingertips. She wanted to touch him as Marie, the kind woman, the mother, the wife and sister, and not Marie, the hospice nurse who had to touch him because it was part of her routine, part of her job.
“He raised his hand slowly and he covered my hand,” Marie thinks she will eventually tell her traveling funeral companions. “He held my hand for a very long time and then he moved it down so that I could feel the tears running from his eyes. He cried and he cried and the entire time he cried I willed no one to come into the room and I moved my other hand to his shoulder and then I put my lips to his ear and I told him that it was going to be easy now and that he could let go. I can still feel his hair, how it bunched under my fingertips and how warm his tears felt and how something in me gave him something to trust.” But she does not say this now.
