Of course, I had already noticed her. Who wouldn't have? She moved through the hallways unlike anyone else, tall, elegant, "lovely in her bones," always dressed in a way that we Americans don't, putting together textures and colors and styles we never would and pulling the ensemble off with panache. With her blond hair and bright blue eyes, along with the mellifluous accent, I assumed she was Swedish. In fact, I'd learn she is German, but her voice carried none of the harsh sounds I'd always associated with that language. Hers was High German, in which "No" is "Nay," not "Nein.," though her friends came from Southern as well as Northern Germany and all over the world, and she would settle, at the end, not far from Stuttgart.
One day shortly after I began working at the law firm, I stepped into the ladies' room, where she was just leaving. She reached out a hand and, with a friendly smile, said, "Hello! I'm Sabine! Welcome!" (She tells me we first met in the coffee room--isn't memory fascinating? This is how I remember it.)
I'm sure I mumbled my name in reply, but no one at that point in my twenty-eight years had ever approached me with quite so much confidence and warmth. Perhaps it's because I grew up in America, and Prince George's County to boot, or perhaps it's because I just hadn't been around many confident, sophisticated people, but I truly couldn't remember anyone introducing themselves to me in that manner. Besides, my shyness had been pathological since a young age.
Sabine's warm introduction was a revelation. What a sensible, good-natured approach!
Here I was, Queen of Shyness and Social Anxiety, seeing perhaps for the first time how easy it is to open oneself to others, to demonstrate one's affability, and to instantly make friends. As I said, a revelation.
I never dreamed, however, we'd become lifelong friends or that I'd travel to distant lands to be with her. Yet despite Sabine's worldliness and glamour, she exuded approachability, warmth, and an unending and generous interest in others around her. She organized lunches and evenings out for the staff in our corner of the firm, made sure birthdays were celebrated, and always had a smile and a kind word for everyone.
One day, she brought me a bouquet of flowers she'd bought from one of the many stands on the DC streets. No woman had ever given me flowers before; at first, I was just slightly taken aback--not that I thought she was "hitting" on me, but, again, it was just something I'd never experienced. \And the amazing thing about it was that it was for no occasion whatsoever! The simple, spring arrangement on my desk in the fishbowl where I worked (each secretary's "office" sat behind a plexiglass screen lining the firm's mint-green hallways) cheered me each day it lasted. Giving flowers to my women friends became a regular habit of mine as well.
And that is just a minor example of her role in my life. In the four years I worked at the law firm, she and I would spend a lot of time together, sometimes with others and sometimes just the two of us--and often with our friend John, who was a secretary in our corner and who had just left his wife after realizing he was gay. We made a little group of the disenfranchised, but we were all good friends and capable, smart people, and we developed a lifelong bond.
Sabine confided that she dearly wanted a child. She'd married a U.S. soldier who'd been stationed in Germany. They exuded sophistication, beauty, "yuppee" life in the prosperous 80's. Unfortunately, her husband wasn't interested in being a father. Still, she'd become pregnant a couple of times, and she'd lost both pregnancies. Her husband hadn't offered solace, and my heart ached for her. My two boys were small and rather adorable (and, yes, difficult, too) at the time, and I couldn't imagine not being able to be a mother.
And I knew Sabine would make the most wonderful mother. She was, at times, like a mother to me, especially after my mom died shortly the year before Sabine moved back to Europe upon the breakup of her marriage. But she was only ten years older than I, and I thought of her more as a sister.
Sabine listened to my pain over my parents' death unlike any of my other friends. I knew instinctivey that she truly cared, that she felt my pain along with me. She invited me out then, trying to help me recover from that crushing loss. She told me how lovely "and a little shy" Mom had come across to her on my mom's one visit to the lawfirm--how right she'd been, my mother's uneasiness in the glamorous place a surprise to me, who'd always seen her as the classiest, loveliest woman in a room--though if only Sabine and my mom occupied a room, I'd be hard pressed to say which one exuded those qualities most. Suffice it to say it would be a tie, with Sabine edging out Mom on the ability to stride forth and make friends.
Sabine bought tickets for us at the Kennedy Center, where we'd sit in the front row of the balcony and watch the ballerinas and male dancers perform gorgeously below us. I don't know much stronger succor than art like that, the sheer bodily beauty of those men and women expressing, with the music, what cannot be said in words. She'd take me to dinner in trendy neighborhoods such as Adams Morgan and tell me she watched men's eyes follow me while I walked to the ladies' room--she insisted I was beautiful, though I could not truly believe it. She was, in fact, my champion.
The night Sabine told me she had decided to leave her husband and move back to Europe was a devastating one for me. Here I thought we'd just get together for another fun night, John and Sabine and I--my little coterie of fellowship in a confusing world--at twenty-eight, I still felt as if I were a child, a "less than"--where few people shared my worldview. Despite being the mother of two beautiful little boys, I still felt like a child, or perhaps only felt the inadequacy I'd felt as a child, the powerlessness, when navigating sophisticated restaurants and cultural events.
I'd pretty much given those up after a privileged childhood--not rich, but privileged, childhood--and married a guy who was himself beautiful but also the first in his family on both sides to graduate from high school--and if I hadn't helped him with his English class in his senior year may well not have done that! My first baby had been born when I'd just turned twenty, and from that point forward I'd mostly stayed at home or, when money was too tight, ventured out as a secretary, but my husband and I couldn't afford the nice restaurants Dad took us to on Sundays to give my mom a break, and we didn't travel in circles that would have upped my confidence.
Sabine told me recently that she often thought of herself as a mom to me after my parents died, and when I first wrote one of the sentences above I realized I'd written "this confusing adult world" as if I actually were a child--but I was 24 when I met Sabine--all grown up! ha--but my entire adult world had been spent going to muscle car shows and watching soap operas with new babies at home at that point, so in many ways a child, indeed, I was still. Sabine, my mentor, would help guide me into a world she knew well I could assimilate--
and now she was leaving! Not just leaving, but moving 3,000 miles away across an entire OCEAN. And I didn't even have a passport! And how could I leave my children at home to ever see her again! I couldn't afford to fly, and certainly not to fly all three of us.
But her marriage had been a disappointment, and she needed to be an ocean away while she and her husband figured it all out. She wanted to learn French, but she was a little nervous about trying to do that in France itself--and getting a job and living in France isn't so easy for "aliens"--so she settled in Brussels. Just like that, gone.
John, meanwhile, had moved to South Dakota because his mother had terminal cancer. After caring for twelve men who had succumbed to AIDS in the late 1980s in Washington, DC, where we'd all met, he realized he was rather good at dealing with persons at the end of their lives, as well as their families and friends, if they had any, which some of those men did not. While caring for his mother in the last year of her life, he enrolled at the college nearby and began nursing classes with the goal of becoming a hospice nurse and caring for AIDS patients, which he would later do, though he cared for persons dying of all kinds of diseases, not just the scourge that had killed so many of his friends.
Sabine had secured a job as a manager of a law firm in Brussels, but it wasn't long before she began working contractually for the European Union. Though she did not have the academic credentials of most upper-level managers, her intelligence--both intellectual and social--could not help but be recognized, and she was promoted to jobs of increasing responsibility.
John, Sabine, and I began corresponding by way of cassette tapes. Ten years of exchanging these regularly, almost obsessively, ensued for Sabine and me, and occasionally John. Through these increasingly intimate exchanges, I learned all about Sabine's parents, who still lived in the small German village where she'd been raised, still renting the house beside the cemetery, her father having retired as the schoolmaster for the small school she'd attended. Her greatest joy was going home and being with her father--she described the comfort and quiet energy she felt in his presence; she adored him. Sabine talked about trips back home, her father's prominence in the village for his contributions to its historical record and the education of its children. Of course, I shared my own story as well.
Sabine and I dealt with the usual issues adult children have with their parents--her relationship with her mother was more complicated than hers and her father's, though she dearly loved her mother and would lie beside her when the woman later left this life--and siblings.She listened to and commented on, much to my edification, my problems as a mother and issues my kids were going through; we talked about work and the people at work. Sabine keenly loves people and finds them endlessly fascinating. Just having her counsel gave me strength I probably would never have realized without her--or least not for a very long time. It was she who encouraged me to also take a bold step and move away from the city where I'd lived my whole life and pursue my dream of a college education deferred and living in the mountains I so loved after spending childhood summers in a West Virginia mountain resort.
Sabine approached everything with common sense and empathy. She was a woman whose personal strength made her seem capable of handling every difficulty that came her way with her confident, decisive manner. And yet she could be so refreshingly uncertain, if only on those tapes, a medium that allowed us to speak what we might not otherwise. I can still hear her saying, as she did rather frequently, "I'm such an eeeeeee-diot!"--but always with a laugh, not a whine. She could not have chosen a less apt self-rebuke--and, of course, she knew that as well, which is why it never sounded bitter. She helped me relax and begin to accept myself, in ways nothing and no one else could.
When I'd get home from work to find a packet of cassette tapes in the mailbox, I could not be happier; I had an evening with a dear friend ahead of me. The tapes were like diaries; they lacked the structure of conversation, and instead were long soliloquies on the challenges of our day-to-day lives, comments on books we'd read or movies or plays we'd seen, observations about humanity and politics and everything and anything else, even our sex lives, the loud orgasms of a woman living across the courtyard from Sabine, for one example I remember laughing with her about, and we began sending bunches of five or six or more tapes back and forth, 120 minutes each, so that we became more intimate, I believe, than most friends who see each other on a daily basis.
Speaking into a machine gives enough distance to let things pour out you might not say when facing a friend and his or her own reactions to your confessions. Sabine was in my head and heart every single day--she was my second inner voice.
We'd both take to playing the other's tape, stopping it and popping in our tape, then make our comment, and then go back to the other's, offering simultaneous synchronous/asynchronous advice and consolation and understanding. It was a form of therapy I'm not sure can be topped by the "professionals." I valued Sabine's commentary on my life like no other ... her views were always sensible yet generous, no-nonsense but deeply sentimental, an oxymoron she could pull off.
On top of all that, she cracked me up. Sabine has a wicked sense of humor, and a devilishly acute ability to observe and comment on the absurdities (mostly human) around her.
But after several years, her tapes became less and less animated. I knew she was depressed after a wonderful relationship she'd had with a man in Brussels came to an end. Again, the issue of children marred her happiness. She and this man enjoyed a loving, committed relationship for several years, though he was a number of years her junior. That was no surprise; Sabine is a beautiful woman, far more youthful than her years. She told me on one tape that they were not trying to avoid her getting pregnant, that they'd discussed the possibility of a child and were both eager for one. I couldn't have been happier; no two better parents could be found, if what she told me about this man was true, and to this day I have no reason to doubt that it was.
But she did not get pregnant. In time, the man opted for a family and married someone who was fertile. His wife produced a child within a year after the wedding.
Sabine did not fully recover. Though she never became bitter, she never again gave her heart to a man. She simply moved on. Sabine had another kind of love to give, and she was ready to give it.
By then, Sabine had been in Brussels some ten years, and life there had become stale. Her taped messages had gone from joyful descriptions of her life and love to expressing an overwhelming sense of darkness, cold, and loneliness in the northern, often sunless country. In her EU work, she'd been instrumental in Lithuania's bid to become a part of the Union and had become friends with many Lithuanians. True, the country was even more northerly than Brussels, and cold and dreary winters would well await her should she move there, but her interest had been piqued, and other forces may well have been at work.
She'd become friendly with many of her counterparts in that nation, and she came to love many of them, as she so easily does with people everywhere she goes. She saw the country as one that desired its freedom and a purity from colonizing forces. The USSR had governed Lithuania for years, but, after its revolution in the TV tower, the country had broken from its Soviet "masters" and declared its independence. Sabine probably saw a little of herself in the nation's break from its prison--though she loved her tiny village, she'd needed to break free of it, and the same was true of her marriage.
The country itself is beautiful, as I'd learn on my visits there--rolling hills; hardworking, farming folk; Baltic Sea; peninsulas upon which amber washes up like jewels. (Amber is pine resin that hardens in the sea--not a stone. Visiting Lithuania for the first time, I saw endless stands of amber jewelry for sale at dirt-cheap prices; when I returned, signs and menus included English, unlike before, and the amber prices had gone up.) Vilnius itself was a gorgeous woman who, because of neglect, had fallen into disrepair. Churches and buildings crumbled, but the the EU would help build them back up.
Sabine has always been a champion for the underdog. That is one of the most luminous qualities of her character. With all her privilege and sophistication (despite what she might consider humble beginnings in that village, daughter of a schoolteacher), her heart is always open to the struggle of those who have not been so blessed.
At some point after her breakup with her Brussels man, Sabine began talking about relocating to Lithuania. This fascinated me in real time, though delayed by ocean postal deliveries: a study in how persons make changes in their lives; how the idea occurred to her on a tape or two, then began to grow, and then she made it happen with inquiries that eventually led to her settling in Vilnius. The process took longer than a year, and she'd had to fight the bureaucracy that didn't allow for brilliance without a college degree (her hotel degree hadn't counted on the hiring grid), family members and friends who didn't want her to move to a country they would be unlikely to visit, though many did, and many fell in love with it just as she had, as did I.
My photos from the charming town of Nida bring back memories of fresh fish and vegetables accompanying long nights of drinking wine in the local restaurants, the pair of swans swimming near the Baltic coast, the beer gardens with colorful sweet peas climbing a fence with the sea laid out beyond, climbing the massive dune and putting our feet in the sand, the charming fishing cottages mostly converted to equally charming bed and breakfasts, like the one we rented, the magnificent breakfast the German proprietor brought us that morning, complete with an egg cup with soft-boiled egg, German meats, homemade bread, and fresh fish.
And thus it was, after several years working at the EU delegation in Vilnius, becoming friendly but not romantically involved with her male administrative counterparts and superiors from Germany and other countries, but also young men and young women working in the office with far lower salaries due to their being native Lithuanian, with whose lives, and their children's, she grew intimately involved. At one point, a friend suggested volunteering at a local orphanage, and the die was set.
Sabine had been keeping herself occupied by buying buildings in bleak Soviet condition, then beautifully renovating them and renting them out to nice profits. She'd bought a four-room sort of bed and breakfast named the Amadeus and devoted herself to making it a refuge for the business people who chose it for their business dealings in the then-economically recuperating Vilnius, and was considering buying a hotel in Klaipeda near the water--she wanted always to live by the sea and near mountains, as she would later do in Tirana, Albania. Her desire was always to make others comfortable, to give them a place of refuge. After all, she'd pursued a degree in hospitality in Wursburg, a period from which many of her still-active friends continued to be in touch, often with women's weekends in cities such as Istanbul.
For a couple of years, she lived in one of her renovated apartments, where she befriended the Lithuanian woman who lived in an unrenovated flat beneath her--an ugly, small Soviet-style place where the woman was raising her teenage daughter. Lithuania is a fabulously difficult language, or at least it looks that way, with a smorgasbord of letters and diacritics in each word. Sabine and this woman communicated despite Sabine's limited mastery of yet another language. What the woman communicated was a life of hopelessness: she didn't understand this new, non-Soviet country, she feared losing her apartment, she couldn't control her teenaged daughter, she didn't feel well.
Before too long, the poor woman was dying of cancer. Sabine told the woman she would pay for the apartment and be sure her daughter had a comfortable life as she finished high school; she'd keep the child in her life and help her as much as she could as she became an adult. This allowed the mother, who was only in her 40's, to die in some semblance of peace, and Sabine followed through, staying in touch with the daughter after graduation as she moved to Italy, married, and had a child.
I met the teenage daughter while in Vilnius. She was 17 by then, nearly out of school, a long, thin beauty who was fascinated with Chicago. (Many Lithuanians, including the unfortunate Jorgis Rudkus in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, immigrate to Chicago.)
But in the end, Sabine's real estate schemes, and even her humanitarian ones, as much as they excited her for a few years, did not satisfy her.
And when the friend suggested they go to the orphanage in the old town where they could sit in rocking chairs and cradle the tiny, newborn infants frequently born to prostitutes or drug-addicted mothers, she readily agreed. When she first told me about this new activitity, I immediately knew what would happen. I had no doubt whatsoever.
For weeks, she described the babies she held in her arms and fed with bottles of formula. She told me their names, their characteristics, their sad stories, as far as she knew them. Sabine saw each child as a pure, beautiful spirit who had entered this realm under less-than-optimal circumstances. She loved them all unequivocally. But she also felt compassion for the mothers who had had to give up their children, as she'd had to her own, who'd never lived long enough to be born at all.
And then, of course, of course ... she fell in love with one little newborn who was so special, so immediately tied to her heart, that she could not help but talk about her in tones that told me all I needed to know. The infant was tiny and sick, but Sabine spent hours holding that little girl in her arms, reveling in the child's sweet, pure gaze. Before long, she began taking Zoe (not her real name, to protect her and her family) to her home over the weekends, eventually gaining foster home status so that the little girl could be with her every day, as long as she could keep her.
But adopting a child when one is past the age of fifty is not easy, here or in Lithuania. Though the baby had a questionable future as yet another infant in a system full of children "discarded" by addicted mothers, the system would not necessarily relinquish her to a women beyond "normal" childbearing years. So many strictures legislated by those who have no intimacy with the reality.
Fortunately, with perseverence, Sabine did gain custody of Zoe and, eventually, was able to legally adopt her.
I have no doubt this is the child she was meant to mother. Sabine's desire to move to Lithuania after her breakup, in my mind at least, had cosmic underpinnings.
Zoe is now eleven years old, flourishing as children who are valued and loved nearly always do, despite lingering problems from her dicey birth and a particular health syndrome she'd aquired.
I haven't seen the child since she'd sat in a stroller while John and Sabine and I wandered the streets of Vilnius, waiting for Zoe to sleep so we could have some dinner the night before John and I returned to the States. But I have recent photos of the girl, lying on the floor doing her homework, jumping from a rock in a park. She looks so much like Sabine with her blond hair and blue eyes, her long, lithe limbs. She is what joy is made of.
Sabine was diagnosed with cancer a year ago. She fights the disease with the same tenacity she has applied to her life story. Sabine is a woman who has always offered herself to others, me included. She quite literally opened the world to me. Though my aunt had written me for years from Turkey where she'd served as principal in a girls' school, and though my "hippie" sister backpacked through the U.S., Mexico, South America, Europe, Turkey, and Greece, Sabine is the person who made it possible for me to leave the confines of this country and this sensibility and, eventually, to reach places and truths I never could have without her.
May this cancer be destroyed. May Sabine live for years and years, sharing with John and Zoe and me and her international friends and her brothers and their families her wisdom, her beauty, her unique spirit, and her love long into the future. I have a hard time imagining anything but this, my dear friend there always ready to listen, to encourage, to believe. To inspire, as no one else has or could. To offer respite, as no one else can.
And, since this is Sabine we're talking about, to tell a dirty joke at the most unexpected moments, or to otherwise say the absolute opposite of what you'd expect in moments of great seriousness.
On the tapes we sent each other those ten years, we saw each other through job travails, romantic intrigues, family relationships and diseases ... and death, of course, those of my parents still fresh and raw in those early years, and hardly less so today, and later the declining health and death of Sabine's beloved dad .... I would learn of her mother's death years later via email, a much less satisfying medium, though Sabine would often call on holidays and birthdays and other random times.
I would also learn of her cancer this way, she too weak at the time and with too many calls to make, to telephone me.
And now Sabine is facing her own mortality, and I am facing a future without her presence--or, at least, her visible, tangible presence. I've gone through enough deaths of enough loved ones to know that they are not truly gone, and Sabine will be as present to me on the other side of the horizon as she always has been an ocean away. She will always be my second inner voice; she will always help me figure things out.
And if she dies, she will be the first to greet me "on the other side" with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne, as she arrived at most social events, and her family and mine and the friends who went before will have the most joyful reunion party ever to hit heaven.
One day shortly after I began working at the law firm, I stepped into the ladies' room, where she was just leaving. She reached out a hand and, with a friendly smile, said, "Hello! I'm Sabine! Welcome!" (She tells me we first met in the coffee room--isn't memory fascinating? This is how I remember it.)
I'm sure I mumbled my name in reply, but no one at that point in my twenty-eight years had ever approached me with quite so much confidence and warmth. Perhaps it's because I grew up in America, and Prince George's County to boot, or perhaps it's because I just hadn't been around many confident, sophisticated people, but I truly couldn't remember anyone introducing themselves to me in that manner. Besides, my shyness had been pathological since a young age.
Sabine's warm introduction was a revelation. What a sensible, good-natured approach!
Here I was, Queen of Shyness and Social Anxiety, seeing perhaps for the first time how easy it is to open oneself to others, to demonstrate one's affability, and to instantly make friends. As I said, a revelation.
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| Sabine and Me, General's Beach, Albania, on the Adriatic, 1/2012 |
I never dreamed, however, we'd become lifelong friends or that I'd travel to distant lands to be with her. Yet despite Sabine's worldliness and glamour, she exuded approachability, warmth, and an unending and generous interest in others around her. She organized lunches and evenings out for the staff in our corner of the firm, made sure birthdays were celebrated, and always had a smile and a kind word for everyone.
One day, she brought me a bouquet of flowers she'd bought from one of the many stands on the DC streets. No woman had ever given me flowers before; at first, I was just slightly taken aback--not that I thought she was "hitting" on me, but, again, it was just something I'd never experienced. \And the amazing thing about it was that it was for no occasion whatsoever! The simple, spring arrangement on my desk in the fishbowl where I worked (each secretary's "office" sat behind a plexiglass screen lining the firm's mint-green hallways) cheered me each day it lasted. Giving flowers to my women friends became a regular habit of mine as well.
And that is just a minor example of her role in my life. In the four years I worked at the law firm, she and I would spend a lot of time together, sometimes with others and sometimes just the two of us--and often with our friend John, who was a secretary in our corner and who had just left his wife after realizing he was gay. We made a little group of the disenfranchised, but we were all good friends and capable, smart people, and we developed a lifelong bond.
Sabine confided that she dearly wanted a child. She'd married a U.S. soldier who'd been stationed in Germany. They exuded sophistication, beauty, "yuppee" life in the prosperous 80's. Unfortunately, her husband wasn't interested in being a father. Still, she'd become pregnant a couple of times, and she'd lost both pregnancies. Her husband hadn't offered solace, and my heart ached for her. My two boys were small and rather adorable (and, yes, difficult, too) at the time, and I couldn't imagine not being able to be a mother.
And I knew Sabine would make the most wonderful mother. She was, at times, like a mother to me, especially after my mom died shortly the year before Sabine moved back to Europe upon the breakup of her marriage. But she was only ten years older than I, and I thought of her more as a sister.
Sabine listened to my pain over my parents' death unlike any of my other friends. I knew instinctivey that she truly cared, that she felt my pain along with me. She invited me out then, trying to help me recover from that crushing loss. She told me how lovely "and a little shy" Mom had come across to her on my mom's one visit to the lawfirm--how right she'd been, my mother's uneasiness in the glamorous place a surprise to me, who'd always seen her as the classiest, loveliest woman in a room--though if only Sabine and my mom occupied a room, I'd be hard pressed to say which one exuded those qualities most. Suffice it to say it would be a tie, with Sabine edging out Mom on the ability to stride forth and make friends.
Sabine bought tickets for us at the Kennedy Center, where we'd sit in the front row of the balcony and watch the ballerinas and male dancers perform gorgeously below us. I don't know much stronger succor than art like that, the sheer bodily beauty of those men and women expressing, with the music, what cannot be said in words. She'd take me to dinner in trendy neighborhoods such as Adams Morgan and tell me she watched men's eyes follow me while I walked to the ladies' room--she insisted I was beautiful, though I could not truly believe it. She was, in fact, my champion.
The night Sabine told me she had decided to leave her husband and move back to Europe was a devastating one for me. Here I thought we'd just get together for another fun night, John and Sabine and I--my little coterie of fellowship in a confusing world--at twenty-eight, I still felt as if I were a child, a "less than"--where few people shared my worldview. Despite being the mother of two beautiful little boys, I still felt like a child, or perhaps only felt the inadequacy I'd felt as a child, the powerlessness, when navigating sophisticated restaurants and cultural events.
I'd pretty much given those up after a privileged childhood--not rich, but privileged, childhood--and married a guy who was himself beautiful but also the first in his family on both sides to graduate from high school--and if I hadn't helped him with his English class in his senior year may well not have done that! My first baby had been born when I'd just turned twenty, and from that point forward I'd mostly stayed at home or, when money was too tight, ventured out as a secretary, but my husband and I couldn't afford the nice restaurants Dad took us to on Sundays to give my mom a break, and we didn't travel in circles that would have upped my confidence.
Sabine told me recently that she often thought of herself as a mom to me after my parents died, and when I first wrote one of the sentences above I realized I'd written "this confusing adult world" as if I actually were a child--but I was 24 when I met Sabine--all grown up! ha--but my entire adult world had been spent going to muscle car shows and watching soap operas with new babies at home at that point, so in many ways a child, indeed, I was still. Sabine, my mentor, would help guide me into a world she knew well I could assimilate--
and now she was leaving! Not just leaving, but moving 3,000 miles away across an entire OCEAN. And I didn't even have a passport! And how could I leave my children at home to ever see her again! I couldn't afford to fly, and certainly not to fly all three of us.
But her marriage had been a disappointment, and she needed to be an ocean away while she and her husband figured it all out. She wanted to learn French, but she was a little nervous about trying to do that in France itself--and getting a job and living in France isn't so easy for "aliens"--so she settled in Brussels. Just like that, gone.
John, meanwhile, had moved to South Dakota because his mother had terminal cancer. After caring for twelve men who had succumbed to AIDS in the late 1980s in Washington, DC, where we'd all met, he realized he was rather good at dealing with persons at the end of their lives, as well as their families and friends, if they had any, which some of those men did not. While caring for his mother in the last year of her life, he enrolled at the college nearby and began nursing classes with the goal of becoming a hospice nurse and caring for AIDS patients, which he would later do, though he cared for persons dying of all kinds of diseases, not just the scourge that had killed so many of his friends.
Sabine had secured a job as a manager of a law firm in Brussels, but it wasn't long before she began working contractually for the European Union. Though she did not have the academic credentials of most upper-level managers, her intelligence--both intellectual and social--could not help but be recognized, and she was promoted to jobs of increasing responsibility.
John, Sabine, and I began corresponding by way of cassette tapes. Ten years of exchanging these regularly, almost obsessively, ensued for Sabine and me, and occasionally John. Through these increasingly intimate exchanges, I learned all about Sabine's parents, who still lived in the small German village where she'd been raised, still renting the house beside the cemetery, her father having retired as the schoolmaster for the small school she'd attended. Her greatest joy was going home and being with her father--she described the comfort and quiet energy she felt in his presence; she adored him. Sabine talked about trips back home, her father's prominence in the village for his contributions to its historical record and the education of its children. Of course, I shared my own story as well.
Sabine and I dealt with the usual issues adult children have with their parents--her relationship with her mother was more complicated than hers and her father's, though she dearly loved her mother and would lie beside her when the woman later left this life--and siblings.She listened to and commented on, much to my edification, my problems as a mother and issues my kids were going through; we talked about work and the people at work. Sabine keenly loves people and finds them endlessly fascinating. Just having her counsel gave me strength I probably would never have realized without her--or least not for a very long time. It was she who encouraged me to also take a bold step and move away from the city where I'd lived my whole life and pursue my dream of a college education deferred and living in the mountains I so loved after spending childhood summers in a West Virginia mountain resort.
Sabine approached everything with common sense and empathy. She was a woman whose personal strength made her seem capable of handling every difficulty that came her way with her confident, decisive manner. And yet she could be so refreshingly uncertain, if only on those tapes, a medium that allowed us to speak what we might not otherwise. I can still hear her saying, as she did rather frequently, "I'm such an eeeeeee-diot!"--but always with a laugh, not a whine. She could not have chosen a less apt self-rebuke--and, of course, she knew that as well, which is why it never sounded bitter. She helped me relax and begin to accept myself, in ways nothing and no one else could.
When I'd get home from work to find a packet of cassette tapes in the mailbox, I could not be happier; I had an evening with a dear friend ahead of me. The tapes were like diaries; they lacked the structure of conversation, and instead were long soliloquies on the challenges of our day-to-day lives, comments on books we'd read or movies or plays we'd seen, observations about humanity and politics and everything and anything else, even our sex lives, the loud orgasms of a woman living across the courtyard from Sabine, for one example I remember laughing with her about, and we began sending bunches of five or six or more tapes back and forth, 120 minutes each, so that we became more intimate, I believe, than most friends who see each other on a daily basis.
Speaking into a machine gives enough distance to let things pour out you might not say when facing a friend and his or her own reactions to your confessions. Sabine was in my head and heart every single day--she was my second inner voice.
We'd both take to playing the other's tape, stopping it and popping in our tape, then make our comment, and then go back to the other's, offering simultaneous synchronous/asynchronous advice and consolation and understanding. It was a form of therapy I'm not sure can be topped by the "professionals." I valued Sabine's commentary on my life like no other ... her views were always sensible yet generous, no-nonsense but deeply sentimental, an oxymoron she could pull off.
On top of all that, she cracked me up. Sabine has a wicked sense of humor, and a devilishly acute ability to observe and comment on the absurdities (mostly human) around her.
But after several years, her tapes became less and less animated. I knew she was depressed after a wonderful relationship she'd had with a man in Brussels came to an end. Again, the issue of children marred her happiness. She and this man enjoyed a loving, committed relationship for several years, though he was a number of years her junior. That was no surprise; Sabine is a beautiful woman, far more youthful than her years. She told me on one tape that they were not trying to avoid her getting pregnant, that they'd discussed the possibility of a child and were both eager for one. I couldn't have been happier; no two better parents could be found, if what she told me about this man was true, and to this day I have no reason to doubt that it was.
But she did not get pregnant. In time, the man opted for a family and married someone who was fertile. His wife produced a child within a year after the wedding.
Sabine did not fully recover. Though she never became bitter, she never again gave her heart to a man. She simply moved on. Sabine had another kind of love to give, and she was ready to give it.
By then, Sabine had been in Brussels some ten years, and life there had become stale. Her taped messages had gone from joyful descriptions of her life and love to expressing an overwhelming sense of darkness, cold, and loneliness in the northern, often sunless country. In her EU work, she'd been instrumental in Lithuania's bid to become a part of the Union and had become friends with many Lithuanians. True, the country was even more northerly than Brussels, and cold and dreary winters would well await her should she move there, but her interest had been piqued, and other forces may well have been at work.
She'd become friendly with many of her counterparts in that nation, and she came to love many of them, as she so easily does with people everywhere she goes. She saw the country as one that desired its freedom and a purity from colonizing forces. The USSR had governed Lithuania for years, but, after its revolution in the TV tower, the country had broken from its Soviet "masters" and declared its independence. Sabine probably saw a little of herself in the nation's break from its prison--though she loved her tiny village, she'd needed to break free of it, and the same was true of her marriage.
The country itself is beautiful, as I'd learn on my visits there--rolling hills; hardworking, farming folk; Baltic Sea; peninsulas upon which amber washes up like jewels. (Amber is pine resin that hardens in the sea--not a stone. Visiting Lithuania for the first time, I saw endless stands of amber jewelry for sale at dirt-cheap prices; when I returned, signs and menus included English, unlike before, and the amber prices had gone up.) Vilnius itself was a gorgeous woman who, because of neglect, had fallen into disrepair. Churches and buildings crumbled, but the the EU would help build them back up.
Sabine has always been a champion for the underdog. That is one of the most luminous qualities of her character. With all her privilege and sophistication (despite what she might consider humble beginnings in that village, daughter of a schoolteacher), her heart is always open to the struggle of those who have not been so blessed.
At some point after her breakup with her Brussels man, Sabine began talking about relocating to Lithuania. This fascinated me in real time, though delayed by ocean postal deliveries: a study in how persons make changes in their lives; how the idea occurred to her on a tape or two, then began to grow, and then she made it happen with inquiries that eventually led to her settling in Vilnius. The process took longer than a year, and she'd had to fight the bureaucracy that didn't allow for brilliance without a college degree (her hotel degree hadn't counted on the hiring grid), family members and friends who didn't want her to move to a country they would be unlikely to visit, though many did, and many fell in love with it just as she had, as did I.
My photos from the charming town of Nida bring back memories of fresh fish and vegetables accompanying long nights of drinking wine in the local restaurants, the pair of swans swimming near the Baltic coast, the beer gardens with colorful sweet peas climbing a fence with the sea laid out beyond, climbing the massive dune and putting our feet in the sand, the charming fishing cottages mostly converted to equally charming bed and breakfasts, like the one we rented, the magnificent breakfast the German proprietor brought us that morning, complete with an egg cup with soft-boiled egg, German meats, homemade bread, and fresh fish.
And thus it was, after several years working at the EU delegation in Vilnius, becoming friendly but not romantically involved with her male administrative counterparts and superiors from Germany and other countries, but also young men and young women working in the office with far lower salaries due to their being native Lithuanian, with whose lives, and their children's, she grew intimately involved. At one point, a friend suggested volunteering at a local orphanage, and the die was set.
Sabine had been keeping herself occupied by buying buildings in bleak Soviet condition, then beautifully renovating them and renting them out to nice profits. She'd bought a four-room sort of bed and breakfast named the Amadeus and devoted herself to making it a refuge for the business people who chose it for their business dealings in the then-economically recuperating Vilnius, and was considering buying a hotel in Klaipeda near the water--she wanted always to live by the sea and near mountains, as she would later do in Tirana, Albania. Her desire was always to make others comfortable, to give them a place of refuge. After all, she'd pursued a degree in hospitality in Wursburg, a period from which many of her still-active friends continued to be in touch, often with women's weekends in cities such as Istanbul.
For a couple of years, she lived in one of her renovated apartments, where she befriended the Lithuanian woman who lived in an unrenovated flat beneath her--an ugly, small Soviet-style place where the woman was raising her teenage daughter. Lithuania is a fabulously difficult language, or at least it looks that way, with a smorgasbord of letters and diacritics in each word. Sabine and this woman communicated despite Sabine's limited mastery of yet another language. What the woman communicated was a life of hopelessness: she didn't understand this new, non-Soviet country, she feared losing her apartment, she couldn't control her teenaged daughter, she didn't feel well.
Before too long, the poor woman was dying of cancer. Sabine told the woman she would pay for the apartment and be sure her daughter had a comfortable life as she finished high school; she'd keep the child in her life and help her as much as she could as she became an adult. This allowed the mother, who was only in her 40's, to die in some semblance of peace, and Sabine followed through, staying in touch with the daughter after graduation as she moved to Italy, married, and had a child.
I met the teenage daughter while in Vilnius. She was 17 by then, nearly out of school, a long, thin beauty who was fascinated with Chicago. (Many Lithuanians, including the unfortunate Jorgis Rudkus in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, immigrate to Chicago.)
But in the end, Sabine's real estate schemes, and even her humanitarian ones, as much as they excited her for a few years, did not satisfy her.
And when the friend suggested they go to the orphanage in the old town where they could sit in rocking chairs and cradle the tiny, newborn infants frequently born to prostitutes or drug-addicted mothers, she readily agreed. When she first told me about this new activitity, I immediately knew what would happen. I had no doubt whatsoever.
For weeks, she described the babies she held in her arms and fed with bottles of formula. She told me their names, their characteristics, their sad stories, as far as she knew them. Sabine saw each child as a pure, beautiful spirit who had entered this realm under less-than-optimal circumstances. She loved them all unequivocally. But she also felt compassion for the mothers who had had to give up their children, as she'd had to her own, who'd never lived long enough to be born at all.
And then, of course, of course ... she fell in love with one little newborn who was so special, so immediately tied to her heart, that she could not help but talk about her in tones that told me all I needed to know. The infant was tiny and sick, but Sabine spent hours holding that little girl in her arms, reveling in the child's sweet, pure gaze. Before long, she began taking Zoe (not her real name, to protect her and her family) to her home over the weekends, eventually gaining foster home status so that the little girl could be with her every day, as long as she could keep her.
But adopting a child when one is past the age of fifty is not easy, here or in Lithuania. Though the baby had a questionable future as yet another infant in a system full of children "discarded" by addicted mothers, the system would not necessarily relinquish her to a women beyond "normal" childbearing years. So many strictures legislated by those who have no intimacy with the reality.
Fortunately, with perseverence, Sabine did gain custody of Zoe and, eventually, was able to legally adopt her.
I have no doubt this is the child she was meant to mother. Sabine's desire to move to Lithuania after her breakup, in my mind at least, had cosmic underpinnings.
Zoe is now eleven years old, flourishing as children who are valued and loved nearly always do, despite lingering problems from her dicey birth and a particular health syndrome she'd aquired.
I haven't seen the child since she'd sat in a stroller while John and Sabine and I wandered the streets of Vilnius, waiting for Zoe to sleep so we could have some dinner the night before John and I returned to the States. But I have recent photos of the girl, lying on the floor doing her homework, jumping from a rock in a park. She looks so much like Sabine with her blond hair and blue eyes, her long, lithe limbs. She is what joy is made of.
Sabine was diagnosed with cancer a year ago. She fights the disease with the same tenacity she has applied to her life story. Sabine is a woman who has always offered herself to others, me included. She quite literally opened the world to me. Though my aunt had written me for years from Turkey where she'd served as principal in a girls' school, and though my "hippie" sister backpacked through the U.S., Mexico, South America, Europe, Turkey, and Greece, Sabine is the person who made it possible for me to leave the confines of this country and this sensibility and, eventually, to reach places and truths I never could have without her.
May this cancer be destroyed. May Sabine live for years and years, sharing with John and Zoe and me and her international friends and her brothers and their families her wisdom, her beauty, her unique spirit, and her love long into the future. I have a hard time imagining anything but this, my dear friend there always ready to listen, to encourage, to believe. To inspire, as no one else has or could. To offer respite, as no one else can.
And, since this is Sabine we're talking about, to tell a dirty joke at the most unexpected moments, or to otherwise say the absolute opposite of what you'd expect in moments of great seriousness.
On the tapes we sent each other those ten years, we saw each other through job travails, romantic intrigues, family relationships and diseases ... and death, of course, those of my parents still fresh and raw in those early years, and hardly less so today, and later the declining health and death of Sabine's beloved dad .... I would learn of her mother's death years later via email, a much less satisfying medium, though Sabine would often call on holidays and birthdays and other random times.
I would also learn of her cancer this way, she too weak at the time and with too many calls to make, to telephone me.
And now Sabine is facing her own mortality, and I am facing a future without her presence--or, at least, her visible, tangible presence. I've gone through enough deaths of enough loved ones to know that they are not truly gone, and Sabine will be as present to me on the other side of the horizon as she always has been an ocean away. She will always be my second inner voice; she will always help me figure things out.
And if she dies, she will be the first to greet me "on the other side" with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne, as she arrived at most social events, and her family and mine and the friends who went before will have the most joyful reunion party ever to hit heaven.
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