A friend died last week. I referred to her as my sister-in-law, even though she was really an in-law once removed. Her name was Annie Murphy Trout and she was married to my brother Jym’s wife’s brother. I would have to say that inside my very large family there are definitely smaller cliques that hang together. I am extremely close to my brother Jym, his wife Mary and Mary’s whole family. I’ve known them for a long time, I worked with all of them, and we’ve spent many ups and downs together.
I often don’t know how to describe my family to friends… it’s big, it’s Irish, it’s functional. So many of my acquaintances and friends have the typical ‘dysfunctional family’… or so they think. Don’t get me wrong, some people come from TRULY fucked up backgrounds and I don’t attempt to take that from them; they seem to wear it like a red badge of courage.
My family for all its petty squabbles, multiple divorces and minor dramas is remarkably solid, especially when we celebrate something joyous, or come together in grief.
Annie was diagnosed with liver cancer a little less than a year ago. Her initial treatments involved surgery at the beginning of the year. She later told me she never expected to come through the first surgery, which only happened three months after she found out she had cancer. “Every day after that surgery was a gift, and I’m truly blessed to have had it…” she said last month while I was visiting… saying goodbye. She was still looking pretty good at the beginning of September as we sat on her front porch, talking about the upcoming trip she would make to Boston the following weekend with her husband Steve and some friends. She joked about the wheelchair that was being delivered that day that she would inevitably use while there, as well as the things they may or may not do. “I’ve never been one to buy lots of clothes or do a lot of shopping,” she scoffed as the topic was brought up. “Well, you’d better get to it!” I shot back at her in a playful jibe. She looked at me a little taken aback then smiled a wry smile. In hindsight that might not have been the most ‘sensitive’ thing to say, but at that point she told me she was just so tired of being treated with kid gloves. She was still the wonderful, funny, witty, warm, (slightly) sarcastic lady I had known for the prior 8 years and we were simply being friends once more. It didn’t matter that this was the last time I would ever see her alive.
The following month was hard on the family. It’s never easy to prepare for an eventuality that can’t be avoided. Terminal illness can only be dealt with on its own terms. Luckily for Annie she had a support network of not only a big immediate family but many, many friends and acquaintances gathered from the 20 years she had spent in the U.S. and before she moved from Ireland. She went wedding gown shopping with her daughter. She traveled to Boston, which she’d never done. She went with her daughter for an ultrasound and found out the sex of her first grandchild. She spent as much time as she could in the company of loved ones but the cancer was catching up. Day by day she grew weaker and by the middle of October she finally entered hospice. When I heard of this I knew, but it’s not a thing you actively deal with… death is too final, and while you can hang on …you try.
My brother called me the following Tuesday afternoon. He never calls my cell phone. I knew there wasn’t good news. The doctors had given her anywhere from 2-24 hours to live. She’d been unconscious for a while and it didn’t look very good. There wasn’t much to say. We hung up the conversation and I thought, “Well, we knew this was coming….” Again, there isn’t much you can say, do or think when you find out news like that. Jym called back within 45 minutes to tell me she had passed. “It’s done,” was all he said… silence on the line. “Shit” was all I could muster.
The weird thing is that when you finally pass the point that you had prepared for, you still don’t quite know how to feel. I know there is a hole now. And my feelings can’t compare to how her daughters, husband and immediate family feel. She was a very special person: one who touched a lot of people, made many, many friends and definitely enjoyed life.
I didn’t attend the wake. There wasn’t a funeral per se. There was a coming together of family and friends, but I chose to stay out of the fray. In a way I chose to remember her at that last meeting we had in September. Is it selfish to want to picture her up and around, laughing and joking, being herself? -- Not sick or dying, but simply being alive? No, it isn't. And I have a feeling she would want the same thing in my shoes.
