Friday, Jul 4, 2008
It was the last Easter my friend Sue was ever going to have. So we celebrated with a ski trip.
Apr 11, 2003 | Last year, a few days after Easter, I asked my friend Sue Schuler to meet me in Park City, Utah. I was going there to give some lectures, and had scammed a ski week out of the deal. Sam had invited his friend Tony along, and I invited Sue. She was a great companion, younger than me, but already wise, cheeky, gentle, blond, jaundiced, emaciated, full of life, and dying of cancer.
She had always loved to ski, and was a graceful daredevil on the slopes. I only started skiing six years ago, and tend to have balance and steering issues. I fall fairly often, and can't get up, but enjoy the part between the spills, humiliations and abject despair -- sort of like real life.
No one, including Sue, was sure she'd even be able to ski, or if she would make the trip at all. Except for me. No one could know that she would die one month after my invitation. At any rate, I thought that if she saw those Wasatch Mountains, she'd want to try, at least. I invited her because otherwise I was never going to see her again -- she had cancer of the everything by then -- and because she was distraught on Easter when I called to say hello. I felt she ought to have one last great Easter before she died. I felt that that would make up for a great deal. Easter is so profound -- Christmas was an afterthought in the early church, the birth not observed for a couple of hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, "martyred plants rising up from their shrouds." Easter says that love is more powerful than death; bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, or airport security lines.
And so she said yes, she'd me meet in Park City.
I'd met her the previous Easter, over the phone, through her sister, an old friend of mine. Her sister was a kind of matchmaker, who recognized kindred souls in me and Sue, believers who loved to laugh. Her sister had known me when I walked my friend Pammy through her last year of life. Call me crazy, but I did not immediately want to be friends with another dying blond babe just then. But I felt God's hand in this, Her fingers on the great Rolodex, flipping through names until She could find a good match for Sue: a funny believer.
Spring of 2001 was so early that the wildflowers weren't in bloom yet; the bulbs hadn't opened, and during the worst of it, right before she called me for the first time, Sue had been told that her liver and lungs had developed tumors. She was in a deep depression. On top of bad test results, various people at her church kept saying that she should be happy because she was going home to be with Jesus, and Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I like that in a girl.
Also, the evangelicals had suggested that her nieces wouldn't get into heaven, since they were Jews, as was one of her sisters. So I said what I believe to be true -- that there was not once chance in a million that the nieces wouldn't go to Heaven, and if I was wrong, who would even want to go? I promised that if there was any problem, we'd refuse to go. We'd organize.
"God," she said, "what kind of shitty heaven would that be, anyway?"
"A Velveeta heaven," I said. "A Mallomar heaven."
That was the beginning of our friendship, which unfolded over a year and some change, a rich condensed broth of affection and loyalty, because there was no time to lose. She came to my house the following week, after a number of intimate phone calls about dying, and God, and how deeply we can heal ourselves, even if we go ahead and die. She was brilliant, and she cried a lot, and she was hilarious. I couldn't believe how beautiful she was when we met six days later: I hadn't expected that earthly, dark irreverence to belong to such a beauty. She started coming to my church soon after, and we talked on the phone every week. I had one thing to offer, which is that I would just listen. I did not try to convince her that she could mount one more offensive against the metastases. I could hear her, hear the fear, and also, her spirit. Sue had called on New Year's Day of 2002 in tears, to say she knew she was dying. She was defiant: "I have what everyone wants," she said. "But no one would be willing to pay."
"What do you have?"
"The two most important things. I got forced into loving myself. And I'm not afraid of dying anymore."
She got sicker and sicker. It was so unfair -- I know that fair is where the pony rides are, but there are a few tiny questions I'd like to ask God when we finally meet. That someone so lovely and smart and fabulous was going to die, and that horrible people I will not name were going to live forever -- it broke your heart. At the same time, she had so much joy. She loved her family, her friends, and eating. She ate like a horse. I have never known a woman who could put it away like Sue. Her body was stick thin, and the skin on one leg was completely replaced by 22 skin grafts that left it looking reptilian, from her knees, up past her hip, the result of flesh-eating disease she had contracted at a hospital after one of her countless cancer surgeries.
(This business of having been issued a body is deeply confusing, another thing I'd like to bring up with God. They're so messy, and disappointing. Every time I see the bumper sticker that says, "We think we're humans having spiritual experiences, but we're really spirits, having human experiences," I think A) it's true, and B) I want to bash in that car's bumper.)
So we met one last time on the Thursday after Easter of 2002 in Park City, to celebrate privately. We shared a king-size bed in the condominium. Sam and his friend Tony took the other room, reducing it to Pompei within an hour. Once we told them we were celebrating Easter week that night, they shook us down for sushi money, and headed out for the wild street life of Park City.
The thing about Easter is that Jesus comes back from the dead both resurrected and broken, with the wounds from the nails still visible. People needed to see that it really did happen, the brutality, the death. He came back with a body -- not like Casper, or Topper, he didn't come back as the vague idea of spirit returning. No, it was physical, a wounded body. You could touch Him, and He could eat -- which, I suppose, is a start
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