"I didn’t plan to have anything in common with Carol. How could I, a wild rock and roll child, ever see eye to eye with this calm mother earth type? Despite the fact that her smile magically melted my irritation at the jazz and the sun, I was still not sure I liked her. "
Carol Jean ~
By Cynthia Harrison
I
wasn’t inclined to like her. I knew Joe first, because every night after work, he stopped into the bar I tended. Another bartender was interested in dating Joe, so his girlfriend was a road block. When Joe told me that he was going to marry Carol, I was, at 19, already a bitter divorcee.
“Why would you want to do a stupid thing like that?” I tactlessly asked.
“It’s the right thing for me,” he said.
I didn’t ask why, just shook my head in disgust as I stepped away to pour more bourbon for the guy at the other end of the bar.
Within a year, my cynical self vanished as I fell in love and married Mike, Joe’s friend. Joe married Carol, but I still hadn’t met her because they lived on the other side of town. I didn’t work at the bar anymore, but Mike told me they’d had a baby.
One summer night, Joe got tickets to a jazz concert in an outdoor pavilion. He invited Mike and me. I finally met Carol. They all liked jazz. I didn’t. I’d forgotten my sunglasses, too, and was totally irritated driving out to the ends of the earth with the sun in my eyes.
I didn’t plan to have anything in common with Carol. How could I, a wild rock and roll child, ever see eye to eye with this calm mother earth type? Despite the fact that her smile magically melted my irritation at the jazz and the sun, I was still not sure I liked her.
We staked out a prime spot on a grassy hill and Carol spread a pretty blanket she’d brought along. She’d also remembered snacks and drinks and offered everything to me even though I had nothing to give her in return. Her easy generosity made a little chink in my bad girl armor.
Carol had one of those loving personalities that completely accepted others no matter what their flaws. And I had plenty, many of which I modeled for her that first night.
For example, I was relating to Carol the funny story about how I’d first heard about her and what I’d said to Joe. It was funny because I, the bitter divorcee who thought marriage was stupid, had capitulated to love and remarried.
And then I added, because it had stuck in my head, “Joe said for him it was the right thing to do.”
Carol didn’t say anything, but she smiled. Nobody else said anything, either. We listened to the music. But in that silence, something tugged at my wine-numbed mind. Oh. Shit. She was pregnant when they got married. They probably got married because she was pregnant. And I’d just said something that made me sound like a total judgmental bitch, when actually, I was simply a self-absorbed idiot.
Carol didn’t hold that first meeting against me. In fact, she became my closest friend when later Mike and I moved to Joe and Carol’s side of town. By then I was expecting a baby of my own and she was pregnant with child number two. We bonded over our big bellies and delivered infants a week apart, which led to weekly Mommy & Kids lunches that lasted until the babies started school.
Carol saw me through years of stress and unhappiness: a split from and reunion with my husband, and then finally, divorce. Her love and support never wavered as I returned to the workforce, became a single mom, enrolled in an ambitious college program, married again.
In our relationship, no matter what dumb thing I did, I’d always been on the receiving end of her kindness and caring. This made me all the more determined to be there for her when she got breast cancer. The years she spent in treatment saw a renewed closeness of our friendship, which, since she’d gone back to work full time and I’d started teaching, had dwindled down to family events, like our annual summer getaway with spouses and kids, interspersed with quick lunches and hurried phone calls.
A year or so before she got her diagnosis, I felt a change in our relationship. The acceptance and love I’d taken for granted for twenty years was slower in coming. For the first time, I felt judged.
“You’ve changed,” she said. And it was true. I had. But I felt like all my changes were positive. I was forty years old, no longer a wild child who could drink all night, dance on tables, and make everyone laugh with my crazy antics.
“You’re no fun anymore,” she told me bluntly.
Our friendship seemed to be running out of steam. I wondered if, after all we’d been through together, it was coming to an end. It was, just not the way I thought.
When Carol called to tell me she had breast cancer, her fear and vulnerability were present in her voice. Gone was the judgmental person she’d lately become. The soft, sweet Carol I knew and loved for twenty years was back, and she needed me. I did everything I could to help her through her ordeal.
Because I taught college three days a week, she made her doctor appointments on days I was off so I could drive her. She fought the disease for several years with her typical courage and optimism. She never accepted that breast cancer would kill her, and neither did I. Her sheer determination to live her life normally made it seem impossible that this vibrant spirit would be extinguished.
She went through several rounds of chemo and radiation. She had complicated and painful bone marrow and blood cleaning procedures. She took a course of steroid treatments. She lost her hair, but not her spirit. She never complained about the pain. She was full of fearless optimism.
The last day I saw Carol, I took her to the hospital for tests. The steroids had robbed her of the ability to use her muscles, so I helped her dress and undress. She needed a wheelchair for walking more than a few steps. For the first time, I could see in her eyes that she knew she was dying, that there would be no more remissions.
We talked about it. She said “I really thought I’d beat this, but now I just don’t know.”
Later, I made her a bowl of cereal and washed the few dishes that were in her sink. I helped her get into a nightgown and turned down the bed for her. She needed me to move the blankets just so, they felt heavy on her feet. After I tucked her in,
she said “Will you pray with me?”
We said a few prayers, including a Hail Mary. Carol had always felt a special connection to Mary. I silently prayed that Mary would take care of my precious friend.
As I kissed her good-bye, she whispered “I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I said. “You’re a good person and you’ve been a wonderful friend to me.”
She was already falling asleep as I let myself out of the house. I drove home crying. I had been so touched by her apology. I wasn’t sure why she said it, it seemed incredible to me that she might have known how how she’d hurt me. It seemed almost impossibly saintly that in her worst time of need, she’d be thinking of me, wanting to make things right. But then again, that was typically Carol.
A few days later, she died at home with her family around her.
Carol was a person who, with rare exception, only saw the good in others. My many failures had been like nothing to her, she saw through them, saw into the goodness she knew was inside of me even when I didn’t believe in myself. And somehow, she’s passed this gift on to me. I see her as perfectly human, lovable and precious. I miss her every day, but the lessons in loving she taught me live on.
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