Rachel Simon's Blog

What do you do when you love someone deeply but have fallen totally out of sync with her – maybe to the point where this person, who you once got along with every day in every way, suddenly starts speaking coldly and harshly to you, rolling her eyes at so many activities you once enjoyed together, or even says those most painful words: “I hate you”?

And what do you do when this person is your own flesh and blood? Maybe even your teenage daughter?

As someone who does not have children of her own, I have been spared this all-too-familiar experience and all the associated pain. But as readers of my books and this blog know, my sister Beth, who has an intellectual disability, has the unusual lifestyle of riding city buses all day, every day, and in the interest of growing close to her after years of emotional distance, I rode the buses with her. I learned many lessons while sitting beside her on the bus, but one of the most important was this: If you want to recapture a closeness you once felt with a loved one, it’s extremely helpful to stop standing outside her world, casting judgment and grieving. Set aside all the criticism you have of her life and the hurt feelings you carry around. And, if she’ll give you permission, just enter her world.

This is the same conclusion that my friend, the writer Lauren Kessler, came to when her delightfully compatible and mutually respectful relationship with her twelve-year-old daughter Lizzie molted into constant conflict. The result is her latest book – which I recently read and got a great deal out of, My Teenage Werewolf: A Mother, A Daughter, A Journey Through The Thicket of Adolescence.

Lizzie had been an easygoing child who loved riding bikes, going bowling, drinking hot chocolate, and doing art projects with Lauren. Then adolescence hit. Not only did Lizzie lose most of her interest in these activities, she began reacting to Lauren with loud sighs, testiness, accusatory glares, and dramatically rejecting gestures.

Lauren was stunned and confused. Then she became frightened, since her relationship with her own mother had deteriorated when Lauren was a teenager and never recovered.

But Lauren isn’t just a loving mother. She’s also an insightful and fearless nonfiction writer. In fact, I first met her through the pages of one of her books, Dancing With Rose (retitled Finding Life In The Land of Alzheimer’s for the paperback). Lauren’s mother had recently passed away from Alzheimer’s, and in the interest of coming to terms with that never-healed relationship, Lauren took a job at an assisted living facility. In the course of learning about the last world her mother knew, Lauren also grew close to several of the residents. That book is as informative about the daily life in such a facility (and I say this as someone who’s regularly in one as part of my hospice work) as it is moving about Lauren’s personal journey.

Having learned from that book what I learned from my memoir about my sister Beth, Lauren decided that the way to gain some understanding of Lizzie was to enter her world. But this time she wouldn’t get a job. She’d just ask Lizzie if she could shadow her life. It is a credit to Lizzie’s bighearted personality, and to the endurance of their love for each other, that Lizzie said yes. And it is a sign of Lauren’s courage, and faith in her ability to see truths that might trouble her, that Lauren then accompanied Lizzie everywhere.

The mother joined the daughter in the social minefield that is junior high. She observed teen dynamics, adolescent friendships, and her daughter, as they went from class to class, walked down the hallways, attended lunch and band. As time went on, Lauren went to sleepaway camp, volunteer activities, job internships, athletic events, and even a sex ed session at school. Along the way, she acknowledged her own emotions, which sometimes veered into dismay or annoyance, other times rose to pleasant surprise and even admiration. Sometimes Lauren managed to keep her thoughts to herself, and other times, to her chagrin, she didn’t. She also re-examined why her own relationship with her mother froze in time – and re-committed herself to not repeating that unfortunate history.

Lauren chronicles this mix of anthropology, journalism, relationship deconstruction, and introspection in her book – and she does so in a way that is honest, informative, humorous, and moving. It’s also a good story, which starts with Lauren and Lizzie being totally at odds with each other, and it ends with them coming back together, now in a stronger relationship.

I was drawn to My Teenage Werewolf because of my affection for Lauren’s last book, but I’m writing about this well-written book here for two reasons. One is because I enjoyed how much I learned – on so many levels.

The other reason is that we live in a world where, when relationships grow difficult or even break apart, so few of us know what to do. We might ask friends, but they’re so often groping for an answer themselves, struggling as they are with their own questions about how to deal with their parent, sibling, child, or friend. We might turn to therapists, too, and sometimes they do offer insights, or provide the gentle guidance, to help us take some kind of step toward healing – though not necessarily toward understanding, accepting, and actively, while keeping the person in our life, repairing. And of course we live in a time of high drama, where adversarial relationships are all too often viewed as acceptable.

So I think it’s important that, whenever we encounter something that has facilitated our sense of compassion and understanding, we let others know – and perhaps all the more so when that compassion and understanding is directed toward our own flesh and blood.

So I’m sharing this book with you because it seems possible that you too might be in a struggle like this with someone you love, and need just the inspiration that this book offers. It will remind you, as it reminded me, not to fight back or reject or run away.

Run toward.

I worry that I’ll get lost, but she is at my side, guiding me, saying, “Around this corner, down this hall.” I put my trust in her, and we walk forward.

I am a hospice volunteer. Usually that means I visit terminally ill patients in their homes, which might be actual houses, though they might be Alzheimer’s facilities. When I see my patients, I ask what they would like me to do. Sometimes I sit quietly across the room while they sleep. Sometimes I engage them in conversation. Maybe we sit on their patio, window-shopping past their memories.

My role is to serve them. My goal is to love.

People ask why I do it. When they too volunteer in some capacity, I can skip the part of the answer that involves words like “giving”, “setting myself aside”, and “doing unto others”, and move directly to the chain of losses that nudged me toward this specific form of giving. But when the idea of volunteering is foreign to them, either because they have too many other commitments or find the very notion baffling (as one person said to me, “Why would I do anything for a stranger—for free?”), I get stuck in what is only a prefix to the real answer.

I suppose if I had to boil it down, I’d answer this: “Because everyone deserves to die with a caring person beside them.”

“Now,” my own guide says, pausing at the elevator, “up to the sixth floor.”

The hospice movement began in the 1960s, when a British medical social worker, Dame Cicely Saunders, started giving lectures about how she was inspired by a dying patient to think about options besides medical settings where patients could go to die. Then Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published her famous “On Death And Dying,” which brought the process of dying out of the shadows. Soon a philosophy formed that said dying patients have the right to palliative, emotional, and spiritual care, and to focus on quality of life over cure.

Most people think of hospice as being in its own building, and in some cases that’s still true, though a substantial portion of patients are served in their homes. The agency for whom I volunteer, Compassionate Care Hospice, in northern Delaware, didn’t even have a separate building for many years. But recently, St. Francis, a local hospital here in Wilmington, DE, found itself with an unoccupied floor, and an arrangement was made. And so today, led by Anne, the staff person who trained me in giving, I am visiting this in-patient unit for the first time.

The elevator doors open.

To my surprise, Anne and I step out into a space with carpets and plants, upholstered furniture and sunlight. The effect is more homey hotel than austere hospital, a place not of cure but of kindness. My confusion about our way here begins to recede, a process hastened by my meeting the receptionist, with her gentle smile.

The nurses, too, sense my disorientation. They say hello, and their looks are rich with acceptance. I can be lost, I think, as I shake their hands and learn their names, but they’ll be here with me, letting me feel whatever might feel, being understanding if I should need a helping hand.

Anne takes me through my tour.

The facility has fourteen beds, each in its own room, each decorated with patchwork quilts, living room-style chairs that open into beds for family sleepovers, old-fashioned blinds, earth tones. There is a family room where relatives can watch television, sit quietly, or talk to each other, while their parent, spouse, sibling, or child sleeps. One side of the family room has been specially set up for children, with a small table, chairs, and coloring books.

The families also have access to a full kitchen – complete with cookies and other treats brought in by the staff.

There is even what Anne calls a quiet room, which looks like a nondenominational chapel (hospice is for people of any faith, including no faith at all). “Families can come in here,” she says, “when they need to be alone, or to pray, or to cry.”

But I do not see tears today.

There is only one patient in the unit, and I see him only fleetingly, when his door happens to be open and we walk by. A gray-haired woman is with him—his wife, maybe—and she smiles at us, and waves.

And as we continue on, and I walk past the empty rooms which, someday soon, will be occupied by the kind of people who led me, as Anne is leading me now, to hospice, I remember so much more than tears.

There, flashing quickly before me in an empty room, is Angelo, the father of my best friend from fifth grade. A bank teller, jazz drummer, and man of wit and folk wisdom, he had opinions on just about everything—and an open mind if challenged. I think of him before the cancer, at his kitchen table, he in his late sixties, I in my thirties. He is holding up a carton of milk, pontificating about the appalling way most people open the spouts by pushing their fingers inside the folds of the lid. Then I remember his daughter, still my good friend, on the day of the funeral. She is saying to me, “Those people in hospice were amazing.” That is the first time I hear about hospice, and immediately I want to know more.

There, in the next room, I see my best memory of Kenny. A friend who was the bookkeeper at my food cooperative, he told me, soon after we first met, that he could eat whatever he wanted, because he was HIV-positive, and someday he’d be getting too thin. I was in my mid-twenties, he in his mid-thirties, and the closer I got to him, the more I worried. When I learned, a few years later, that he’d come down with pneumonia, I worried harder. When I learned, a few months later, that he’d caught it again, I knew. He left the food cooperative and settled into bed at home. I said, “I’ll come to see you every week,” and for the better part of the next two years, as his partner John tended to him, I did. I hadn’t yet heard about hospice, but, as I later learned, I was practicing it. When I came, John was able to take a break, and Kenny was able to have company. I sat on his bed, listening to his stories about his life, his sadness over the life he wouldn’t have, his happiness about all the love he’d come to know. We never cried. We laughed, especially when he sang along to his favorite Bette Midler video. He had a big booming laugh, and that is what I envision now: his head back, his mouth open, our hearts open wide to the world.

I see others in my memory as we proceed down the halls. The ones killed by accidents, brain hemorrhages, undiagnosed heart conditions, who went too fast to know they were going. What their families would have given for the pause before it was over, for the opportunity to hug, or listen, or assure them someone was there. For what each of their losses taught me was the luxury of hospice.

And then I imagine the patient I have been visiting for the last several months. We also do not cry. With her Alzheimer’s, I’m not even sure she knows she’s going. Sometimes she’s distressed because she’s convinced her mother—dead for decades—is expecting her, but she can’t find the door out. Sometimes she thinks the floor is a cliff and she’s going to fall off. I touch her hands and speak to her. I ask her to tell me about her mother. I suggest we look up from the floor to watch a video of Lawrence Welk. And on warm days, I offer to wheel her outside. She loves the sun, and we sit on the patio, getting warm. I ask her if she wants to sing, and she always does. That is what I see now: us sitting on the patio, singing “America The Beautiful” or “When You Wish Upon A Star.” Singing is good for the memory, I’m told. But as I know from Kenny, it’s just as good for the soul.

“Why do you do it?” people ask.

I think about this question again, as Anne and I say goodbye to the nurses.

She leads me back down the labyrinth of hospital corridors, away from this place of loss and love, where I will spend so much time in the months to come, and where many lives will change, including, in ways I cannot predict but know I will cherish, my own. And as we reach the ground floor, and step out into the light of everyday life, I realize I have a better answer than any of the ones I’ve been giving.

I do it because everyone deserves to be heard.

I do it because everyone deserves to pontificate about milk, or sing along to Bette, or sit in the sun on the patio.

And I do it because everyone deserves to reach out for another hand. Even though nobody knows exactly what lies ahead, with hands intertwined we will walk there together, side by side, for as long and as far as we can.

I stood on our front porch, waiting for the vet to arrive. It was a chilly Saturday evening in May, though the wind gusted like November, sweeping old leaves up into the air and down the street, twirling them out of my sight.

Inside the house, our cat Peach lay on the kitchen floor, where she had lain for much of the last day. My husband Hal sat beside her, stroking her fur, cooing consoling words. She was fifteen, and her long-haired, calico coat was as beautiful as ever. But her plume of a tail, once a flagpole of merriment as she bustled down the stairs to greet us hello, stretched flat on the floorboards, and her eyes, which had gazed into Hal’s so many times with a look of unconditional adoration, stared out into nowhere, unfocused.

We didn’t want to believe her time had arrived. Yet even as we hoped the vet would say recovery was still within grasp, even though we knew she wanted to hold onto her life, we knew she would not revive.

Her decline had begun a few years ago. That’s when our cheerful chatterbox with the insistent friendliness and fill-up-a-house personality, whose dainty ballerina turnout, combined with a sashaying gait, made us call her Miss Marilyn Meow, added some new and unwelcome behaviors to her repertoire. She howled loudly, peed outside her cat box, drank water constantly, lost lots of weight, and ran about until she collapsed into the deepest of sleeps.

After many visits to Dr. Coogan, the softspoken veterinarian who, it turned out, every pet lover in our neighborhood called their own, we learned she had hyperthyroidism. Increasingly common in cats, with unknown causes, hyperthyroidism will ultimately lead to kidney failure. There is only one medication that might help, and we tried it in pills, pill pockets, liquid, and a gel we applied to her ears. But it made her sleep all the time, or throw up, or have allergic reactions. So about half a year ago, in the fall, we decided to take her off the meds, and let what would hapen happen.

The wind rushed down our street with a force I hadn’t seen since around the time we made that decision. It tipped potted plants onto their sides and spilled out the dirt. It snapped strong young branches off trees.

Hal came up beside me, and put his arm around my shoulder.

He glanced at the trees on our street, their leaves chattering in the gusts. “Such a windy day,” he said. “Somehow it seems appropriate.”

The graph of Peach’s health had been sloping down for months, but it was gradual. The bottom seemed far away.

Only two nights ago had we reached the steep drop down. We didn’t realize it at first, because she and our other cat, Zeebee, had spent the day romping and sleeping in our small backyard, and in the neighbors’ yards across our side alley. When dusk fell, Zeebee came in easily, but for awhile we couldn’t find Peach. Then we located her, perched on the edge of a neighbor’s tiny fish pond. Since her illness, she’d drunk water from this pond. That night, she wasn’t drinking.

A few hours later, at four in the morning, she woke us with a plaintive cry. We found her in the bathroom, a place where she rarely ventured, and after we brought her to bed to comfort her, she climbed out, made her way downstairs, and laid beside her water bowl. I’d heard that’s one of those bad signs, so we tried a trick we knew of giving her ice cubes and encouraging her to lick. She didn’t lick.

At sunrise, Hal called Dr. Coogan. He’s the kind of old-styled vet who’s cut from a cloth rarely made anymore: he has a gentle, caring demeanor, sees patients the day they need help, and understands that animals have the capacity to enter the souls of those who love them. He told Hal to bring Peach in, where we learned she was severely dehydrated. For a few hours he gave her fluids, then released her. But when Hal brought her home and set her carrier case on the floor, she didn’t move. We urged her out, and saw her legs were wobbling. She laid on her side on the floor. Hal sat in a chair and brought her to his lap. “This isn’t looking good,” we said.

That was Friday. Now it was Saturday. The journey through Friday night had been a march into dread. Will things somehow turn around? When should we call the doctor again? How can we go on without our mirth-making, dustball-producing, quilt-kneading Miss Peachie Pie?

We didn’t sleep, thinking instead about how, when Hal was single fifteen years ago, he found a shriveled, lonely, quivering cat in his backyard in another city. She had a collar but no tags, and somehow, for reasons we would never know, had gotten separated from her home, and taken refuge under a concrete bench outside Hal’s back door. He’d recently said goodbye to his first feline soulmate, Woody, who’d also had hyperthyroidism, and died at age twenty-three. So his house was empty and his heart was ready, and when he lured this lost, pathetic looking creature into his warm kitchen, she moved into his life as well.

She found him, and a paradise beyond any she could have ever dreamed of—shelter and food and rugs and beds and warm laundry and nightly brushie and nuzzly-cuddly-giggly-fur-addicted-nickname-minting-cat-dancing companions—became hers.

There were intrusions in her paradise. Moves to a few new residences, with all the accompanying changes in routines. The arrival of a black and white stray, Zeebee, who Hal insisted we take in a few years ago.

But mostly Peach had a gloriously happy existence. And she repaid us by winning over the hearts of everyone—friend, neighbor, even new wife—who encountered her. They called her “Mouthy” for her talkativeness. Everyone marveled at how she’d speak whenever you waved your arms near her, like the electronic instrument of the theramin. Neighbors discovered her boldly exploring their houses when their back doors were open. They saw her appear on their back porches whenever they were barbecuing, snatching up any morsel that fell from a fork, earning her yet another nickname, The Hamburglar.

Her eyes were smart. She knew her name. When we learned that Delaware had declared our state dessert to be the peach pie, we laughed and said, “It’s true.”

Dr. Coogan circled our block twice before he was sure he was at the right address. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t an older, white van, the kind families take for long vacations. I wasn’t expecting him to get out in shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap. For a moment I wasn’t even sure it was him, except that when he got out, he held a cardboard cat carrier and a leather medical bag—the kind I’d seen only in old television shows, when small town doctors paid house calls.

Who pays house calls anymore? Certainly not doctors. Probably not vets.

Yet when Hal called during Dr. Coogan’s office hours Saturday morning, saying Peach had shown no improvement, and in fact hadn’t been able to hold the fluids she’d received the day before, Dr. Coogan said we didn’t have to make any decisions just then. Yes, his office closed at noon on Saturday, but here was his home number. We could call whenever we needed him over the weekend. Hal asked if there was a chance Peach could come back. Dr. Coogan said it was remote. But, he added, we could wait and see. And if the time came when we felt decisive—and, he emphasized, emotionally ready—he’d come.

So Saturday we sat vigil, waiting and seeing. We began on the kitchen floor. But the morning was sunny and warm, and, aside from being in Hal’s arms, the thing Peach liked most in the world was being in our backyard.

With great care, we carried her outside and set her on the grass. She laid limp. Hal brought out his guitar and serenaded her. She sat up. We called neighbors who loved her. Susan, who’d named her “Mouthy,” came over and stroked her coat. Jen, whose yard backs onto ours and who often found Peach on her porch, said Peach felt like her cat, too. Kelly and Dave expressed sympathy over our shared fence. Hal’s parents called. My father called.

But there was a moment in the midst of all the goodbyes when hope returned. Peach’s favorite place in our yard was the Japanese maple tree, under which she would sleep for hours. And after several hours outside when the most she could do was raise her head, she somehow roused herself to stagger across the yard, jump up and over the foot-high slate border of our garden, and collapse beneath the branches of her tree. There she slept in her beloved spot, and we thought, How was that possible? Maybe she was coming back!

The winds came up then. The branches started snapping.

She crawled out from the tree but could walk no more. “I think she wants to go in,” Hal said.

We brought her to the sofa. I knew the decision had to be Hal’s—he was her true love, and she his second feline soulmate. I was her breakfast feeder and daytime playmate. But I was not the center of her universe.

Hal said, “Let’s wait until tomorrow morning.”

I waited fifteen minutes, and I said, “Why?”

He leaned over and pressed his face into her fur and mumbled their secret language, the one they’d shared since he rescued her from the concrete bench. He had waited a few hours too long when Woody died, and had watched the poor animal suffer in his last breaths. He didn’t want that to happen again. Yet it was clear Peach still loved life. And he—and I—loved her life, too.

Then he lifted his head. “I’m calling Dr. Coogan.”

Dr. Coogan came into our living room. “We’re still wondering,” I said, since I knew Hal could not. “Let me see her walk,” Dr. Coogan said, and when Hal set Peach on the floor, she just settled right where she was.

He said, “Her breathing is labored. She has no more than twenty-four to forty-eight hours left, and they won’t be easy ones. I think your decision is the right one.”

So we brought her to the coffee table and held on. And he explained everything before he did it, and was kind and gentle. And the life left her quickly and easily, because she was already so close. And he closed her eyes, and we placed her in a box. “Now I’ll leave you to your grieving,” he said, and he left. And we cried.

The next morning was cold and the wind was still autumn-strong. Hal dug the grave in the backyard, in a spot close to Peach’s tree. We cried and cried and set the box within. Then he covered it with dirt.

We’d thought of getting a marker of some kind. But then we realized that, sitting across the yard was a very large rock, left over from several tons of stone we used, not long ago, to build a stone wall in our yard. The rock was calico-colored, we suddenly realized, and so Hal carried it to the covered grave and set it on top. “Should we say anything on it?” I asked. We both knew the answer, and as we held each other, crying, we also laughed. “State dessert,” we said, looking down. “The Peach Pie.”

The house is quiet now, and Zeebee is just beginning to search for her friend. We cannot tell her Peach is gone. But just a few moments ago we saw her sitting on the back steps, staring out to the rock.

We look too. The wind still hadn’t settled down, and we’re waiting for May to warm up again. We know we were lucky. Hal had fifteen years with one of the greatest cats of all time, and I had nine. We were given many months, even years, to adjust to her decline. We had the presence of mind to make a decision before her suffering began. She said goodbye to her friends. She spent a final afternoon under her favorite tree. She had a veterinarian who was exactly what a veterinarian should be.

But as much as we wish it would, luck doesn’t balance out loss.

We miss her so, and we always will.

I cut my engine in the church parking lot and looked around. Most of the spaces were taken, and I was glad. It was the one heartening detail I could imagine on this otherwise disheartening day.

I am not a very experienced funeral attendee. In fact, I’ve gone to fewer than a dozen funerals in my fifty years. But my impression has always been that, of the many ways we can count the measure of a life, one of the most obvious is the fullness of the church when the world is bidding us goodbye.

There are certainly exceptions, like when my step-grandfather died, and everyone he’d loved, aside from his family, had already passed away. But the woman whose funeral I’m here for was only forty-one, in the prime of her life, and until the cancer grew too debilitating, she had worked at a bank, supported a dance organization, enjoyed the company of family, spent time with her friends. I’d wondered if she’d meant as much to them as my colleagues, family, and friends meant to me, and I could see, as I got out of the car, that they had.

This was welcome news, because I had not known her. I was here because of my friendship with her father. He was an artist, and since I’d met him seven years ago, he’d been struggling to cope with the death of the youngest of his five children. Today he’d be burying the oldest.

I held up the obituary I’d printed from the newspaper. The picture at the top was the first I’d seen of her, and since she wasn’t smiling when it was taken, and the text included only a succinct resume of her life, I hadn’t gotten a sense of her personality. I am a reader of obituaries, so I know they often convey such praiseworthy traits as religious devotion, strong work ethic, or affection for golfing, but rarely does the sum of the self become apparent, and this time was no exception.

So it was meaningful to see that the lot was full. Every person I saw walking toward the church doors was another clue to the daughter I would never meet. There were the women with the lithe bodies of dancers, the woman in medical scrubs, the young couples. If only I could speak to each of them, I could come to know her better.

But I knew I would not disturb their private grieving. Everyone was young, their lives lying ahead. I remembered how I felt myself, when a college friend died when we were twenty. Just about every funeral is hard, but the funerals of the young are harder.

Especially for the parents. And especially for already-grieving parents.

When my friend called to tell me that his daughter was gone, his voice seemed dizzy with suffering. He’d lost the youngest child, a son, suddenly, in an act of violence by a stranger. I met my friend a few years later, when he read a book I wrote about my sister and, seeing in it a long struggle giving way to hope, asked if he could paint her portrait. In the months that followed, he worked from photographs, sent me sketches of his ideas, and finally invited me to meet him at an art opening. When I got there, he showed me a portrait of a handsome young man—his son, he told me—and then he explained the terrible circumstances of the boy’s death. Ever since, I stayed in touch, visiting my friend in his studio, meeting for coffee, writing letters. I met two of his remaining sons, though not his only daughter. There seemed to be no hurry. Lightning can’t strike twice, right?

Many people mill about the lobby of the church. I spot one of the sons I’ve met, and go over to him. Like his brothers, who I will see over the next hour, he is composed, soft-spoken, gently in charge, and acting in unison with his brothers. He greets me, then guides me through a series of framed photographs that are propped up on a table, introducing me to his family. Most faces are from long ago, with all five children smiling. I recognize the young faces of the two sons I know. My heart thumps at the faces of the two children who are gone.

Lightning, of course, can strike many times. My friend was himself diagnosed with cancer shortly before his daughter. They underwent treatment at the same time, the three sons taking time off from their jobs to shuttle father and sister to the doctors. The father recovered. The daughter did not.

When I learned that she had died, I called my husband. The funeral was a few hours away; I’d lose a day or two of work if I went. “Should I go?” I asked him. He said, “You know the pro’s. What are the con’s?” “There aren’t any con’s,” I said, and there was my answer.

You can shake your fists at the sky and ask how such things can happen. But as I lifted my eyes from the photos, I saw another son, with his wife. They were speaking to other guests, and the wife was very pregnant. “When’s the baby due?” the guests asked. “Today,” the wife answered.

I made my way to the chapel where the viewing was being held. My friend was there, and his face brightened when he saw me. We hugged and talked about his daughter and his health, as I’d expected. But he also told me he hadn’t been able to paint for weeks. He was afraid his pain was so great, he’d never be able to reach inside himself to find art again.

I didn’t tell him, “Of course you will.” I didn’t know that. I’m an artist, too, so I’m well aware of the elusiveness of creativity. I just held his hand and listened.

I sat alone through the service, wondering if he was finding comfort in the hymns and prayers, in the thoughts of everlasting life. I hoped he was, and tried to remember what he’d once told me he felt about religion. We’d discussed it over coffee—I could even remember the booth we were sitting in — but no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to call up what he’d said about God, about faith, about what became of the soul after the last breath. He’d shared all that, yes, but at the time there seemed to be no hurry to commit his thoughts to memory.

So instead I looked around the church, and was struck, as I’d been in the parking lot, by how many people had come. And again, I thought about the measure of a life. If it can be counted by any number, then that might well be the number of people who care enough to see us off. But it might also be the number of dances danced, or times we laughed with friends. From what I could see, by any of these measures, this young woman had lived a rich life.

Maybe my friend would see this, and it would give him some comfort on this hardest of days.

Yet as the service drew to a close, and the pall bearers surrounded the casket to bear it down the aisle, I knew that comfort in this moment would do little to ease my friend’s suffering. I knew too that the number of people who were in this church meant less to him than the number of days his children had lived on this earth. I wished I could reverse everything that had happened, and give him the hundreds—the thousands—of days that hadn’t been given to them.

When the guests filed outside, and I saw him standing on the curb near the hearse, looking bewildered and fragile, I came up to him. The sun was beaming down onto us, and I gave him a huge hug. Behind him, I could see his three sons, who would, I knew, go through the rest of their lives with a bond that no one would break. Along with them was the pregnant wife, who would soon—maybe even later that same day—give birth to my friend’s first grandchild.

I closed my eyes, and as we tightened our hug, I thought about how, when the skies darken and the worries uproot everything in sight and lightning shoots down from the sky, none of us has the power to stand in the way of the bolt, catch it in our hands, and hurl it away. All we can do is stay together through the storm, holding each other’s hands, and hoping the sun will return.

How do we measure a life? I wondered this as my friend and I let go in the bright light of the April morning. Is it the number of people whose lives we’ve touched? I’d thought that, when I pulled into the lot. But now, as I looked into my friend’s face, I thought, The measure of a life cannot be counted with any numbers. We measure a life by the depth, the strength, the endurance of the love we give to others. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot of others, either. It can be the love we give to just one other, at a time when he really needs someone there.

I walked back out to the parking lot, looking at the other guests getting into their cars. Her life was short. But maybe she touched just one of these people at just the right moment. Even if her days were far too few, maybe her love was complete.