by Pamela Ribon
When I told Smidge that Tucker had scored her the “suicider,” as she liked to call it, I saw the relief soothe every part of her body.
“That man’s a good man,” she said.
“He is.”
“I shouldn’t have said such hateful things about him.”
“Well, you’re hateful.”
“Hmph. You’re the one who dumped him.”
“Lady, don’t make me smother you with this pillow before you get to taste your sui-cider.”
She mumbled a laugh, reached up, and wiped her mouth. Her breath was slow, rattling.
“Henry is a good man, too,” she said.
“He is.”
“Then why won’t you be with him?”
I stroked her arm, careful to be gentle. “Because he’s your man.”
She looked off toward the window. Creaks and moans escaped her body as she seemed to be searching for something. “What if he doesn’t find someone? Or what if he does and she’s an asshole?”
I knew this was what you meant, Jenny. This was the moment you were asking me to have with your mother. She was waiting to hear everything was going to be okay. She needed proof before she could leave.
So I did what you told me to do. I said, “You have to let us go, Smidge. You have to let us bumble around and make mistakes and miss you.” Then I cried. “I am really going to miss you.”
“Good,” she said. “There’d better be a planet-size hole in this world after I’m gone. That’s why I stayed alive long enough to ruin Christmas forever.” All that time I’d wanted her to fight, to stay around longer, but up until that moment I hadn’t noticed she was doing exactly that.
She was fuzzy, blurred out through my tears as I said, “I hate that you’re leaving. I hate that it’s so soon.”
“Then you’re really going to hate that it is now.”
“Now?”
“You go call in my family. I am going to say some goodbyes while you fix Mama one last drink. I’d like some apple-juice with a hell of a mixer.”
“But.”
“And I’m going to drink it alone. I don’t want anybody getting in trouble. After you hand me that glass, you leave and don’t let anybody come back here until I’m dead.”
There’s never the right last moment. Even if you get to say good-bye, even if you get to say “I love you,” even if you jump off a plane and get a tattoo and hug everyone you’ve ever met right before you drift off with a smile, it is never the right last moment. There is always more to say, somewhere to go, something to remember. Another discussion, another fight. Another day. There is always supposed to be another day.
She had her last moment with Henry, and she had her last moment with you. I don’t know what she said to either of you when she took you alone in her bedroom. It’s none of my business, and it’s not my memory to share.
My last moment with Smidge is enormous in my heart. It has expanded to fill all of the space inside of me where she is missing. I know it was her time, I know it was what she wanted, even though it sometimes seemed like it was taking forever for her to get to the end. It really seemed somehow she’d find a way to stay alive, because she always got what she wanted. Once her last day came, I couldn’t believe how fast she was gone. Just like that. Thirty-six years of that tornado of a woman on this planet and then she was gone. Forever.
It’s never the right last moment.
THIRTY-FIVE
As well as you took it at the time, as much as you surrounded yourself with the friends and family who supported you during Smidge’s final days and up until the memorial on Serenity Hilltop, the day had to come when the mourners weren’t as plentiful, when you took off your black clothes and realized your mother was never coming back. I resolved to do whatever it took to make sure you never resented or hated Smidge for leaving you so soon.
Dissolving your life into someone else’s can’t be a process. It has to just happen. That way, everyone just deals with it and makes it work.
I sold most of my things in Los Angeles and moved only the essentials into the Ogden house. I was careful with Smidge’s money, and I made sure Henry did what she wanted. You might remember he opened Henry’s House not too long after that. I helped with inventory and acquisitions, filling in where Tucker would’ve been. Supporting Henry where Smidge would’ve stood.
But always at a bit of a distance.
I stayed in the guest room for the next five years. I think you two let me stay mostly out of our mutual sadness, our loneliness. Not having someone to boss us around was difficult to get used to for a while. With Henry and me both able to focus on you, it kept us from feeling so lost.
I like to think we made the most of it. There were good times in there. We took trips, lighting memorial candles in cathedrals for your mother on more than four different continents. You let me be the shoulder to cry on for your first heartbreak. I taught you how to drive a stick shift. Every year on your mother’s birthday we made cookies from her recipe, and left some out for her like she was Santa. We even went to church that one time. Your genius brain got you into college all by yourself, but I like to take at least a little credit that you applied to more than just that one where your boyfriend was going.
And then suddenly you were all grown up and beautiful, with as many of your belongings as possible stuffed into the back of the Pickle as you headed off to Austin for college. You waved good-bye toward your father and me where we were standing on the porch. As we waved back, Henry brought an arm around me, and I realized what was happening.
It was your mother’s dream, her vision, just as she’d described it so long ago. She was right, once again. That stubborn woman always got what she wanted, even from her bossy porch swing in Heaven.
That’s when it ended for me, Jenny. My promise was over. The job fulfilled. You were raised and you were thriving. I had done everything your mother wanted, everything your father needed.
I know it’s hard for you to understand, but as much as Henry and I cared for each other, we never fell in love. We were never going to. We weren’t attracted to each other, and he deserves a woman he wants to cook for and care for, as much as he did for your mother. Henry’s love makes the sun wake up and circle the woman he desires, and that’s part of what makes him such a wonderful man. I couldn’t sit in some other woman’s place, a woman he had yet to meet. His love, as you know, is a special thing.
That’s why I immediately went to find Tucker, who at that point was living in London. If I fell in lust for that man when he was in a ball cap, I fell in love with him the second I saw him in a peacoat. He met me at the airport, once again, but this time when he held me, I asked him not to let go.
Sometimes our hearts make decisions long before our heads get into the game.
I know you felt like I left your daddy, that I abandoned your family, but you have to know that I couldn’t have. I was your family, and I still am your family.
You got so angry with me. I know you had to. I had a feeling it was coming. Both Smidge and I lost our mothers young, too, remember. We all felt abandoned and needed someone to take the blame.
In a last act of love toward your mother, I stood in the way of your hate, and let you blame me for everything instead. I let you hate me as if my name was lung cancer.
I don’t know if Henry ever tried to get you back to my side. We both knew you had waited a very long time to start to grieve, and I can assume he didn’t want anything to get in your way, either.
We will do anything to get away from our own pain. We will change our lives, rip people out, swallow a bottle of life-ending pills. When we hurt more than we can bear, when our lives get that dark, it’s shocking what we will do to protect ourselves.
I never blamed you for hating me. And I never stopped loving you for all these years. I hope you found peace. I know peace is basically the opposite of your mother, but at least it would be something.
THIRTY-SIX
We’ve come to the part where I n
eed to get to the point of all this. If you have, indeed, read this whole thing. If you kept yourself from lighting that match.
Henry called me today, for the first time in years, to let me know what’s happening. To tell me about your good news. All your good news.
Jennifer Cooperton, a young, beautiful twenty-five-year-old woman, well on her way to becoming a successful oncologist, is getting married tomorrow. I have a lot of thoughts about that.
I hope this man you have found is kind, sweet, funny, and patient. I hope he wants to have babies with you. I hope he understands the importance of your tears, and will never make you feel small. I really hope he’s Southern. I hope he’s ready to grow old with you, find antique credenzas for you, and I hope he knows to leave the house when your best friend shows up with a bottle of wine.
As for that best friend, I have thoughts on her, too. If I could do only one last thing on this planet before I am sent to that place where your mother now reigns supreme, I wish you your own Smidge, your own tyrant in a tiny dress. I wish you that kind of love, because it’s harder to find than what you’ve got right now with that man about to become your husband.
I’ll be thinking of you tomorrow. Please promise me one thing. If you have found your own Smidge, and if she’s by your side when you stand up there in front of all those people, make sure she knows Henry is the only one who is giving you away. Not her. Find a way to tell her she had you before you were in love and she’ll always have you, no matter what people try to put between you.
Keep that girl in your heart and protect her. Because once she’s gone, you will be thrown to the ground in awe of how that pain never lets up.
I’m getting better at knowing when the hurt is coming. Sometimes two notes of a song or a glimpse of a stranger’s face will knock the wind right out of me, sending me back to a time when she was alive and only as far away as my cell phone, my computer, your kitchen.
Sometimes the memories of Smidge hit so strongly I will lose the ability to stand. I reach for the lowest point in the room, stretch myself out on the ground, and weep. It’s like a ghost flew in and sucked out my breath. I know that’s when Smidge has found me and is demanding I acknowledge her, that the pain I might have tricked myself into thinking has dissipated or dissolved is very much here and now and it is time to deal with it again.
This is when she’s haunting me, just like she promised she would. Not when I don’t follow her wishes; but when I forget for a moment that she’s not here.
During those moments, memories of your mother flood my head in ways I cannot control, nor comprehend. A hodgepodge of our life together, superimposed sometimes. I see us on our way to our high school graduation, when we got pulled over for speeding because we were late finding her cap and gown that had somehow fallen behind the couch. She talked the police officer out of giving us a ticket by kissing his cheek and telling him that a smooch from a graduate was good luck. He then hit his lights and escorted us the rest of the way, at speeds way over anything I’d ever dared to drive.
Then the memories stack upon themselves, faster and faster. Smidge pretending she’s British and works in PR so she can get backstage at a concert of a band I can’t remember anymore. The time she was almost deported trying to smuggle Kahlúa back into the States using a fake ID. The time she got a flystrip stuck to her face and screamed until I pulled it off her. The day of my wedding, when she gave me my something borrowed, and told me she was my something blue. “Because you aren’t just mine anymore,” she said, as she held back a secret that could have destroyed me in order to keep my life perfect that day.
The freckles on her shoulder formed an extended middle finger. The pinkie toe of her right foot looked exactly like a comma. She once won a call-in radio contest by reciting all of REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” from memory. She knew all the states’ capitals, flowers, and birds. She hated pistachios. She thought Chardonnay was for quitters. She never met a joke she couldn’t tell, a punch line she couldn’t hit. In Barcelona, she stopped a pickpocket who was trying to rob a lady on a subway by hitting him on the back of the head with her own purse and then told him to go home to his mother and apologize. In Puerto Rico, she unsuccessfully tried to steal a blue cobblestone from the street in broad daylight. She celebrated my birthday by wrapping one candy bar for each year of my life. In a couple of years I will be fifty. I know she would have stuffed me with such evil glee.
I do not know how I will make it through another birthday without her. This still all makes no sense. It will never feel real. It will never be okay.
I wrote this not only to tell you the entire truth, not just to let you know how much you will always mean to me, but to tell you something important. I wanted you to know that no matter what she said, no matter what you heard, no matter where she went or whom she met, no matter what you might have thought she said and no matter what she did actually say, she absolutely loved you the mostest, and her greatest achievement in life was you.
All my love and a million Odd Hugs,
A.D.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Everything happens because of Alexis Hurley, who continues to be the calm center of all my literary storms and the champion of my what-happens-next. This story went through many capable hands from outline to manuscript to novel, and I’m thankful for Karen Kosztolnyik (a name I will always type s-l-o-w-l-y), Jennifer Heddle (who left me for Darth Vader), Emilia Pisani, Kate Dresser, and Heather Hunt for their thoughts and guidance. Thank you to Lisa Litwack and Regina Starace for the cover art. Special thanks to Anne Cherry for copyediting with an impressive balance of skill and humor that allowed for jokes in the margin (including pointing out when I was unable to count to seven).
While every cancer story is different, I wanted Smidge’s to ring true, warts and all. Thank you to Stephanie Markham, cancer survivor and the friendliest of warriors, who should teach classes on how to be good. Warm, big, happy thanks to Jennifer Saltmarsh Manullang, who got me started by swapping sad stories before helpfully guiding me through her website—where she hilariously and honestly chronicles kicking cancer’s butt (http://jmanullang.blogspot.com).
The rest of my research I did anonymously, so I wanted to thank a few people for their passion and tireless energy in the fight against cancer, and their superhero boldness to share their lives with the public. Mary Beth Williams writes of her battle with melanoma with admirable wit, grace, and bravery (http://www.maryelizabethwilliams.net/). Jennifer Windrum is fighting to gain advances in lung cancer research while letting us in on her mother’s struggle at “Where’s the Funding for Lung Cancer?” (http://www.wtflungcancer.com).
In researching assisted suicide and the Death with Dignity movement, I spent countless hours (and cried thousands of tears) watching personal accounts shared via YouTube, and pretty much blew out a tear duct over the moving documentary How to Die in Oregon (http://www.howtodieinoregon.com/). I am forever humbled by the courage people can muster when faced with their most final of decisions.
Thank you to Allison “Husalin’” Lowe-Huff and Jason “Cane Pole” Upton for their patience, insight, and encouragement (and for being so lovingly Southern).
Finally, thank you to all my Southern and/or bossy friends and family who have found a way to comment one way or another on the state of my hair, shoes, nails, love life, career, family, and then back to my hair again. You know who you are. Without your voices in my head, I’d have nothing. Well, maybe a little more self-esteem. But other than that, nothing.
PS: Bailiff Ray of the LA County Superior Court, Stanley Mosk Courthouse (Dept 34)—here’s your shout-out. I told you they weren’t going to let me serve on that jury.
GALLERY READERS GROUP GUIDE
you take it from here
PAMELA RIBON
INTRODUCTION
How far would you go to be there for a friend in need? In Pamela Ribon’s You Take It from Here, thirty-five-year-old, newly divorced Danielle Mey
ers is forced to answer this question when her best friend, Smidge Cooperton, makes a very complicated dying request that Danielle isn’t sure she can take on.
On one of Danielle and Smidge’s yearly trips together, Smidge reveals that her cancer has returned. Still feeling remorse and guilt for the way she acted the first time Smidge was diagnosed, Danielle promises to be supportive in every way possible. But Smidge’s request—for Danielle to take over her home when she dies, caring for her husband and raising her teenage daughter, Jenny, until she leaves for college—is more than Danielle ever expected. Written as a letter from Danielle to Jenny many years after Smidge’s final breaths, You Take It from Here gives voice to the journey traveled by those who loved Smidge most. It is a story of friendship, sacrifice, and ultimately, of love.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Though Smidge and Danielle appear to be complete opposites at first glance—Danielle, the more introverted, practical, and patient one, and Smidge, the loud-mouthed leader who always attracts the spotlight—which traits do they have in common? Do you think it’s their similarities or their differences that keep their friendship strong? Does their relationship remind you of any such ones in your life?
2. “It’s a lot like having a lion for a best friend—everything is really fun and exciting until the lion is unhappy”. Do you think Smidge would have agreed with Danielle’s comparison? If not, which animal do you think Smidge would think she is most like? Which animals do you think Smidge and Danielle represent?
3. “When I die, I want you to take over my life.” What was your reaction when you first learned of Smidge’s proposition to Danielle? Do you think it is fair to make this kind of request to a friend?
