Continued, Life A Love Story
Flo hears a rapping at her door and goes to let Teresa McNair in. When she opens the door, Teresa looks at her and says, “Oh, you’re tired. I’ll come back.”
“I’m not tired!” Flo says, then immediately corrects herself. “Well, I am a bit, but I still would like your company. Do I look awful? And here I put on lipstick and everything!”
“You don’t look awful,” Teresa says. “You just look a little tired.” She holds up a wicker hamper. “I did bring dinner, though. What do you say we share it, and then I’ll be on my way?”
“Have a seat at the kitchen table and I’ll get everything ready,” Flo says. “I want to hear all about your rascal cat.”
“Nothing to get ready,” Teresa says. “I’ve got it all in here. Tin picnic plates, botanical themed, if you please. Elegant flatware, plastic though it is. Drinks, too, if you don’t mind lemonade.”
“I don’t know why anybody drinks anything else!” Flo says.
They sit down and Teresa pulls out a yellow casserole dish with white polka dots on it. “Macaroni and cheese,” she says. “And I’ve got sliced tomatoes, and for dessert, some chocolate chip cookies I baked this morning.”
“My goodness! I wish I’d met you before now!”
“I’m embarrassed I never introduced myself.”
“Things get away from us,” Flo says. “Speaking of getting away, how is your cat?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Teresa says, dishing out the food. “When I got home, I couldn’t find him. He was on my back porch. I have no idea how he got out again. Nothing was left open!”
“Maybe you should name him Houdini,” Flo says.
Teresa says, “Maybe I will. Although if I have to go outside to call him, it might be embarrassing to be yelling, ‘Houdini!’ ”
Flo takes a bite of macaroni and cheese. “Oh, my goodness. This is just delicious!”
“Thank you. My mother’s recipe. She said when she first made it for my dad, he called it ‘Marryin’ Mac ’n Cheese.’ I guess it worked. They were happily together for just short of seventy years!”
She smiles at Flo, but it’s a sad smile. “I’ve never married. That’s why I got a cat. I was getting too lonely.”
Flo looks up quickly at Teresa, who smiles and shrugs. “It’s true.”
Flo has always appreciated someone who leads with honesty and openness from the get-go, someone who doesn’t wait to say things that they feel are important to say.
One of her best friends, Gretchen Hardy, was a woman she met at a party who, after they exchanged names, said, “I have to tell you, parties make me terribly nervous. I might have to disappear into the bathroom a few times to collect myself.” And Flo said that she felt nervous at parties, too, and asked would Gretchen mind if Flo joined her in the bathroom?
Gretchen said certainly not, and that was it, they were close friends for many years.
And so now, feeling free to be honest herself, Flo says, “Huh, I would not have pegged you as being lonely. You seem so friendly and outgoing.”
“I try to be. But lately the loneliness has gotten a bit more…pronounced, I guess I’d say.”
“I see. Well, I’m sorry about that. Loneliness can be awful hard to bear. After my husband died—this was years ago—I thought I’d plum lose my mind from missing him. I have to say it never went away, completely. But now that I’m…Well, I won’t have to worry about it much longer.”
“How do you mean?”
Flo puts down her fork. “I’ve been given only a few weeks to live. My doctor just told me. I hadn’t even been feeling that poorly, just losing a lot of weight, and feeling dizzy sometimes. Isn’t it funny how you can have a thing raging in your body and be so unaware?”
Teresa sits very still, staring intently at Flo. Then she asks gently, “Do you want to talk about it? I’m a death doula.”
“What’s that?”
“We help people transition from life to death. Some call us death midwives.”
“You don’t say,” Flo says, in what she hopes is a polite way, but she is thinking, Death midwife!! She looks out the kitchen window, where the clouds are pinkening with the sunset, and points to them. “Look at that,” she tells Teresa.
Teresa looks out and says, “Beautiful. You know, I had a patient once tell me that the best index he had to his mental health was whether or not he looked up at the sky every day.”
“I do have to say I wish I didn’t have to go quite yet,” Flo says. “Not just yet. But then I guess that’s what everybody says to you.”
“It depends,” Teresa says. “Sometimes people are ready, even more than ready. Other times they’re not ready at all.
One man I knew was terminal—he had been given just a couple of weeks, and he was sent to a hospice facility.
He’d been a wonderful gardener; people used to come by his house just to stare at his flowers and vegetables.
He told the staff he didn’t mind dying so much, but he was worried about who would take care of his garden.
“Well, he lay around and waited. Waited some more. Days passed, then weeks, and finally he said, ‘I have a proposition. Let me go home and garden some more and then I’ll come back.’ He moved out of hospice and back into his house.
Got right back out in his garden. Two years later, his granddaughter found him sitting in front of his fireplace on a winter afternoon. He had passed away peacefully there.”
“Isn’t that something,” Flo says.
Teresa leans forward slightly to ask Flo, “Do you believe in miracles?”
Flo shrugs. “I never really asked myself that question. But I guess I do. Seems like miracles abound, only usually we aren’t paying enough attention.” She gestures out the window again.
“I mean miracles like unexplained cures for illness,” Teresa says.
“I’ve heard of that,” Flo says, “only, with someone my age, seems like it might be unlikely. Not impossible! But unlikely.”
“I always think that will has so much to do with it,” Teresa says.
“Will who?” Flo asks, but she knows it’s not much of a joke. She says, “I have heard of people making up their mind that this or that was or was not going to happen. One of these new wave things, I believe it’s called—”
“New age?” Teresa says.
“That’s it. They say you manifest something. I guess the idea is that if you just believe hard enough…Well, anyway, I may be old, but I am not too old to get me some daisies from the backyard to put on this table!”
Teresa smiles. “I’ll help you pick some.”
Flo goes to her cupboard for a certain dark blue vase, her daisy vase. “Wait till you see how perfect they look in here,” she says.
After they gather daisies in the fading light, Flo puts them on the table and they eat the delicious cookies Teresa has brought—the old Mrs. Fields recipe, Teresa tells Flo. Then Teresa looks at her watch and says, “I’d best get back to Flash. That’s what I decided to name him.”
Teresa washes up her yellow casserole dish in the sink, dries it off, and then tells Flo, “I have a tradition where if I bring someone dinner, I gift them with the dish it came in. May I leave this for you?”
“Oh, my. Well, I do love the color yellow and I love polka dots, too. But are you sure you want to part with it? It’s just as cheerful as can be. A kind of Kewpie doll of a dish, do you know what a Kewpie doll is?”
“I do. I’m older than I look.”
“How old is that?”
“Fifty-one.”
Teresa heads for the door, and Flo says, “Hold on. I believe I ought to give you a dish. I’m doing a little cleaning house. You know.”
“I’ll take a dish if you want,” Teresa says. “But I think this might be the time when you tell yourself you are ready for your own miracle.” She comes over to Flo and says quietly, “Close your eyes and think hard that you want your body to heal. Take it seriously.” She takes Flo’s hands into hers.
Flo closes her eyes. Then she pops them open. “Whooeee, I just felt something. A big rush of a feeling running straight up.”
Teresa touches Flo’s shoulder. “I’d love to visit you again.”
“I hope you will. Any time.”
Flo stands on the porch to watch the last of the colors leach from the sky.
She has heard of people in California who gather together to watch the sunset like they’d watch a show.
And they clap afterward! She wishes she’d have done that.
That is something she should have done regularly.
She thinks about how when you watch a sunset, the sun slips away so fast. Only at the end, though.
You watch thinking it will last forever, but then the sun all of a sudden flattens, becomes a pinpoint of hard shining light with those holy rays, and then: gone.
Of course, nighttime has its charms. The hooty owls and the frogs singing and how a voice can carry.
And if you’re lucky the sky fills up with stars like to take your breath away no matter how old you are or how many times you’ve seen them.
The stars can set you to wondering outside yourself, is the thing.
They can make your mind big. No need to miss the sun if the stars come out right after.
Flo sits in the rocker and closes her eyes.
She remembers when she was a girl and liked to sit out on a blanket in her backyard and watch the sunset most every night.
She wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her chin on them and held still and watched.
She always did say it was a full-out education, just watching.
She’s told people that’s what she got her doctorate in, taking note of Homo sapiens and environs.
One thing she loved about Terrence was how he never made fun of her lack of education, and so she learned.
Just about anybody would learn if you gave them a running start of I like you how you are already.
After Flo washes up and gets into bed, she thinks about whether a mind might really be able to cure a body.
She had felt that jolty feeling, and she had never felt anything like that in her life.
But how much faith could someone have in something like that?
She is ninety-two. Her doctor is not a dope.
She turns onto her side and closes her eyes, even though it’s awfully early to go to sleep. Flo thinks one of the pleasures of living alone is that you can nap or go to bed whenever you feel like it. But when you wake up alone, doesn’t the ticking of the clock sound so loud.
She lies still, thinking of the dinner she had with Teresa, and the way Teresa had brought everything in her hamper, even plastic cutlery.
Flo should have suggested they use some of her fancy silver, which she ought to have used more often.
This reminds her of something, and so she gets out of bed and goes downstairs to add a little more to her letter.