I'm coming to this topic raw, unpolished. Uncertain of what I want to say or even how to begin to say it. I imagine I will massage this episode innumerable times in the future, and I'm not sure I'll get very far with this very first attempt.
I want to write about it, to connect with the persons and places and emotions I connected with then, but the task is daunting on so many levels, the most daunting being the pain I feel when I think of her, lying there in the hospice bed, sleeping most of the time, thankfully--she wasn't in a lot of pain most days, but exceptions certainly came, and even if medication kept the physical pain at bay the psychic pain was palpable to us all.
We tried to do what she'd wanted.
Sabine knew she was dying, and she and I had shared emails in which we talked about what we'd want in our last days. I'd visited her a year ago in Albania, and I was dumbfounded that she had lived another year after her surgeon told her they'd decided her cancer was inoperable--in other words, it had won. The only way to defy Sabine's determination to live was to be relentless and brutal, and her cancer was both--though for the longest time she'd say she had cancer, but cancer didn't have her.
She not only lived that one year after that dire prognosis; she packed her home of three years in Tirana, moved to a village in her native Germany with her daughter Zoe (all names other than Sabine have been changed to protect the privacy of those persons), and purchased a home in that village just a short walk from the family she'd chosen--and who'd agreed--to take care of Zoe after Sabine died. In fact, they decided to adopt her so she'd be a full member of their loving family.
It was to this home in a German town similar to my own little town in the mountains I traveled in mid-December, and I'd spend the next month with Sabine in the last weeks of her life. In that month, I'd meet her German friends and family, folks I've heard about over the years through the unusual friendship Sabine and I shared.
We'd sent each other cassette tapes, you see, for some ten years between 1990 and 2000 or so. We'd met in a law firm in Washington, DC, in the early 80's, and Sabine, our mutual friend John, and I managed to stay good friends even after our diaspora--Sabine back to Europe, choosing to settle in Brussels to perfect her French, John back to North Dakota to take care of his dying mother and enroll in nursing school--he'd already nursed twelve good friends through their days dying of AIDS, helping them physically, financially, morally, making sure they didn't die alone and that everything was taken care of to the extent it could be.
And I moved to my little Appalachian town, a decision that may well have shortened my life by a perhaps significant number of years--had I not left Washington, DC, my medical care might have been such that the cause of my hypertension would have been figured out and treated before it destroyed my heart and kidneys. Then again, it may not have been discovered even there since the condition had once been considered so rare it was barely touched on in med schools and, as Garth Brooks once sang in a rare country tune I like:
And moving to Appalachia has been a beautiful dance I'm so grateful I didn't miss even if the move did compromise my health to some degree.
Anyway, I do digress. The whole point was that Sabine moved to Belgium, Jack moved to Aberdeen, and I moved to Appalachia, and yet we managed to stay in touch ever since. Jack and I visited Sabine in both Lithuania and Albania; Sabine and Jack visited me in my little mountain town; Sabine and I visited Jack in Chicago, and so forth and so on.
And through all those years, the three of us traded cassette tapes back and forth. Whenever Jack participated, it was the best, but Sabine and I did it more often and more obsessively. We started out sending a 90-minute tape every now and then, and at our heyday we'd send packs of 6 or 8 180-minute tapes every few weeks in a very slow, back-and-forth conversation between friends who grew closer and closer through the years, sharing our secret dreams and deepest secrets, giving advice received usually well past the crisis in question, but valuable nevertheless, and otherwise becoming closer than friends or lovers or family normally do, at least in these far-too-fast times. Not unlike the letter writers of former days, but with the added benefit of hearing each other's voices.
And so now I want to write about Sabine, and I want to evince the exquisiteness of my last days with Sabine, but that is impossible to do without also conjuring back the pain. Joy and sorrow, the joy and the sorrow, the beautiful joy, the terrible sorrow. The joy so profound, but with it the pain even more so.
You see, I don't really want to go back into that bright, mostly-white-except-where-punctuated-by-blood-red-poinsettias room; I don't want to see the small fire blazing cheerfully in the efficient little German woodstove. I don't want to sit at the kitchen table while Sabine sleeps in the living room, just in my line of sight, while her Lithuanian friend ministers to her in abject worship. I don't want to do this even though I'm sitting there with Sabine's dearest friends, drinking the beer and wine she'd stocked for this very occasion, nibbling cheese and cold cuts and liverwurst and bread and Berliners and other such concoctions of heaven and NOT of America, I guarantee you--
Oh, but I do want to be back there with her friends of forty years and more and her ex-husband who wrote me that separating from Sabine was the biggest mistake of his life; I do want to hear their stories, see their photographs. I do want the conversation to shift to the living room where Sabine has wakened, and hear her additions to the story being told, the funniest parts told in her driest humor, and we remember that as saintly as Sabine was throughout her life, she loved to shock; she loved to just knock your knees out from under you with the most unexpectedly hilarious (even if the humor was black, as it tended to be those days) observation or punch line. She didn't shrink from sexual or even scatological jokes--she just loved a good joke! But mostly her humor was her own, one of a kind, from a sensibility we all loved so very much.
Day-to-day life sucks a person up, away, out of the kind of air surrounding a dying friend; it's more than difficult to bring oneself back to that strange, almost underwater reality. And it's also difficult to write about it because now there's no joy in being there with Sabine and her friends and family; it's all sorrow, though even that is bittersweet and punctuated with moments of joy memories return to me.
It was a beautiful time in its way, that deathbed vigil--all because that's how Sabine made sure it was. Throughout life, Sabine had done everything in a way that made it special. She never showed up anywhere without champagne and flowers, and if kids lived in the house (as mine did back in the day), with candy and trinkets for them. But it was more than the material items she brought--it was her presence, her essence, that made any space with her in it joyful even, at times, in that last sad month.
My younger son (relatively speaking; they are both bona fide adults now) wrote me while I was in Germany--you've got to love the wired world--and told me he was thinking of me, that he knew how much I love Sabine, and he realized now that I must've been going through a very hard time back then when we'd been friends in DC--he'd known Sabine when I was in my late twenties and had heard of her in all the years since; he knew my divorce and single-momhood had originated during that time, he'd seen me through all the poor choices in men I'd made all along (until now--love you, honey), he couldn't remember my dad dying when he was only two years old, but he'd practically fallen apart himself as a six-year-old when my mom died, and now, nearly 30 years later, he wrote, "I realize now how happy Sabine made you when things must have been hard."
Talk about a shock. My little boy has really, truly grown up!
And then he mentioned the Hot Dog. The Hot Dog! A stuffed dog, very long, Dachshund-style but bigger, with brown and black spots, and long enough to stretch across the head of a twin bed, where it usually lay under Adam's head at night. Sabine had given it to him when visiting our place not long after my mom died, 'way back in the late 80's. She knew six-year-old Adam was going through a very difficult time after losing his grandma; he'd been having inconsolable tantrums at his daycare that didn't stop until I arrived and gathered him up in my arms, only confessing after many months that he was afraid I was going to die, too.
After Sabine gave him the dog and other trinkets for him and my other son that evening long ago, she and I had retired to my kitchen where we opened a bottle of white wine and a pack of cheese and crackers. Sabine confided that she'd bought the stuffed dog for herself after her real dog had died. "Gypsy was Mick's dog," she'd told me, "and I loved that dog so much. And when she died, I saw this stuffed dog that kind of looked like her, so I bought it to hold when thinking of Gypsy. I am ready to part with it now."
I doubt she would have parted with it at all, had she not realized Adam needed it more--and, indeed, that stuffed dog with the new name "Hot Dog" gave him immense comfort through the years. I'd forgotten about that, and my son's email brought tears to my eyes. Though she'd seen my kids only a few times when they were both very small, they both remembered her vividly some thirty years later--she was that special.
And so I told the stuffed dog story in Sabine's German kitchen; her ex-husband had brought photos with Gypsy in them, including one of a layer cake decorated in white and red, with candles lit, reading, "Wunderhund." And the next photo, Gypsy's nose to a platter of cold cuts and other goodies on a coffee table, her birthday spread. All Sabine's work, of course. And Gypsy did look very much like the Hot Dog, or vice versa. I later told the story to Sabine while at her bedside, letting her know how much my boys adored her and how much her attentions to them meant to all of us.
Sabine's and my friendship began in 1984 when I was a single mom in my young 20's. My father died in 1985, my mother in 1989. And Sabine was there for me through it all, and through the divorce that occurred in the middle of all that. She was ten years older than I, sophisticated, beautiful, always cheerful, always generous of heart and gift, and she helped me through those sad years, taking me to dinner, to the ballet, to dinner, to the ballet, to dinner. Food, drink, friendship, and art--what heals us.
In fact, it was not long after my mom died that I visited Sabine in Brussels, where she'd moved after her marriage broke up. I was thirty years old then, she forty. She took me to Le Grande Place and the Turkish quarter, to Amsterdam and Paris. And not too many years later I'd visit her again, twice, in Lithuania. Lithuania! All I'd ever known about it was that Jorgis Rudkis of The Jungle came from Lithuania. I'd dressed up as Jorgis in my 8th grade English class, scruffy clothes and smudged face, and told his story in character, from his start in that bucolic country to his and his family's cruel life of exploitation in the Chicago stockyards, their dream of a better life in America shattered by the robber barons who preyed on them.
Albania I'd known nothing of, not even the famous Cheers episode when Coach teaches Sam to study for a test on Albania by singing a tuneless song about it--but now I do know Albania, thanks to Sabine, and a beautiful country it is, And, finally, Germany. I'd so wanted to see the village where she'd grown up the child of the schoolmaster, but when I suggested that to her she told me she was done with that part of her life then and had no desire to see it. And, indeed, she would live only a month longer. She was still mobile when I got there, still cooking pasta with cheese for Zoe, but not long after I got there that would change.
We'd planned to go to the Mediterranean coast in Alicante, Spain, while I was there, but she'd weakened too much by then. And how I wanted to visit Istanbul, the city where my aunt spent twenty-five years as a girls' school principal, with Sabine, as we'd talked of doing many times. Those trips would not occur, but she made it possible for me to be with her in Germany, and there is nowhere else I wanted to be at that time. She did kick me out for a week while other friends visited--I say fondly, because of course I could have stayed if I'd had no place to go--and so I also saw Basel and the Swiss Alps, a lifelong dream.
Upon my arrival in her village, she still had the energy to show me around her flat and take me to the basement, down two flights of stairs, where she kept her stores--milk in long-term storage containers, cases of red and white Riesling from orchards near by, several types of beer, and--she didn't forget the American champagne!--a case of Pepsi for me. (Yes, I am deeply ashamed to admit it, but I'm a Pepsiholic constantly trying and failing to kick the habit.) Sabine's refrigerator was filled with food, and she told me where she kept her money so I could go to the village shops and get anything I needed.
That was Sabine. Always making everyone around her comfortable--in Albania she'd left me money and an appointment at the local spa for a massage and a facial while she had to spend a few days in hospital. And always making everyone around her laugh even in the saddest moments, while we'd we'd shake our heads in wonder at the disconnect between the ultra sophistication that was Sabine and the raunchiness of her sense of humor--though that was Sabine, no disconnect at all, just always unexpected, telling jokes all the way to the end--she made life fun and a little thing like impending death wasn't about to change who she was. At some point I'll have to actually write those stories and the punch lines she gave them--nothing would characterize her better!
Except perhaps the term "champion of orphans." She was that, indeed, including this one who was a shy, insecure, just-turned 29 orphan when she took her under her wing. And in this article by her co-workers, you'll see that she adopted two girls, one whose mother lived beneath her in the flat she bought in Lithuania; Sabine befriended the woman, who soon died of cancer, her daughter still in high school, and took over the cost of the mother's flat and paid the girl's living expenses; a few later, she would also adopt an infant she'd held the baby's first day on earth while volunteering at an orphanage in Vilnius. She soon foster parented the child at home and fought successfully to adopt her at the "advanced" age of 50, giving that little girl who looked just like her the chance of a good life she'd have been denied without this remarkable woman.
In so many ways, Sabine taught me how to live, and now she was showing me how to die: in her home, surrounded by her dearest friends, her affairs taken care of well in advance to make the transition for those who love her the easiest it could possibly be in some of the hardest moments of our lives. She wanted joy and laughter around her, and she set things up so that would happen. Of course, we had quiet times, too, times when she was obviously in pain, when we sat by her bed and traced our fingers along her skin to let her know we were there, and she was still with us, eventually smoothing out the stress lines in her forehead with our gentle fingers until she was once again sleeping soundly.
And one night we were sure she was going to leave us, and we sat around her bed and said the Lord's Prayer in English and in German. And the next day she rallied, sat up in bed, and told more jokes.
One of her favorite things in the world was to fall asleep to bedtime stories; she'd told me how she'd loved as a child to hear comforting rumble of the adults' voices while she was falling asleep. I know that feeling, too. You're dropping off, just aware of the far-off sound of grown-ups laughing and talking in the next room while playing bridge, ice rattling as they sipped their drinks, keeping the world safe. I doubt her parents played bridge, but the sounds were no doubt similar . . . .
And that, Sabine told me, was how she wanted to drift asleep for the last time--with the sound of loved ones still awake, still taking care of things, gently coaxing her to sleep in the comfortable rhythms of conversation and fellowship. I wanted to sit by her bed, hold her hand, and tell her stories every night, but I didn't get a chance to do that more than a few times because so many friends loved her so much--as in life, Sabine's time had to be parsed out to so many people she'd become dear to.
One night I did do this. She'd just had surgery to relieve pain and pressure, but she didn't bounce back from that operation as she had all the others, and we were certain she would slip away as she barely regained consciousness until (once again, surprising us) a few days later when she was fully back in her mind and fully in charge, telling her best friend Gwennie to take the bread out of the freezer so folks could have sandwiches the next day.
But that night I sat alone with her while the others slept, and I traced her brow with my fingers as I'd done with my babies while they were nursing and drifting off to sleep. I softly told her it was okay to let go, she'd fought so hard, but she'd made sure Zoe was cared for, and we didn't want her in any more pain, and her mother was waiting to take her in her arms again, just as she'd waited for her while she formed in the womb. As the Lao Tzu says, woman is the gateway to life and to death, and that tunnel we're supposed to see with the light at the end when we're dying may just be our being born again into our mother's arms. Who's to say it's not?
Fortunately, Sabine didn't listen to me. She wasn't done yet. She hadn't had a proper good-bye with Vida, and so she rallied once more until she felt strong enough to have Zoe come over from her new family's house for a last visit. The rest of us made ourselves scarce, but I did see Zoe bring Sabine a pillow from the couch--I'm sure Sabine asked her for it so that Zoe could feel she'd done something for her, and then Sabine asked Zoe to lie down with her, and Zoe crawled in beside her in the hospice bed. They'd slept together most nights of Zoe's ten years, Zoe crawling out of her own bed and slipping in beside her mom, and so they had that last chance to cuddle again, and I know whatever Sabine said to Zoe it was just the right thing to say. And after that, we knew it a matter of but a brief time until our friend would take her last breath.
I feel so blessed to have known Sabine and to have been considered a friend by such a remarkable woman, so blessed that she wanted me with her in her last days. I almost feel that life is hardly worth living without her--melodramatic, I know, but in an odd way true. She made my life something more. It's terribly diminished without her. She was my sparkle; she was my light. She still is, I know, but she's farther away now, in a new land I have yet to visit. I hope she'll show me around when my time comes. And as I've learned through the pain of losing several dear loved ones before her, my memories will remind me that time and distance, even across that great divide called death, cannot diminish love.
I want to write about it, to connect with the persons and places and emotions I connected with then, but the task is daunting on so many levels, the most daunting being the pain I feel when I think of her, lying there in the hospice bed, sleeping most of the time, thankfully--she wasn't in a lot of pain most days, but exceptions certainly came, and even if medication kept the physical pain at bay the psychic pain was palpable to us all.
We tried to do what she'd wanted.
Sabine knew she was dying, and she and I had shared emails in which we talked about what we'd want in our last days. I'd visited her a year ago in Albania, and I was dumbfounded that she had lived another year after her surgeon told her they'd decided her cancer was inoperable--in other words, it had won. The only way to defy Sabine's determination to live was to be relentless and brutal, and her cancer was both--though for the longest time she'd say she had cancer, but cancer didn't have her.
She not only lived that one year after that dire prognosis; she packed her home of three years in Tirana, moved to a village in her native Germany with her daughter Zoe (all names other than Sabine have been changed to protect the privacy of those persons), and purchased a home in that village just a short walk from the family she'd chosen--and who'd agreed--to take care of Zoe after Sabine died. In fact, they decided to adopt her so she'd be a full member of their loving family.
It was to this home in a German town similar to my own little town in the mountains I traveled in mid-December, and I'd spend the next month with Sabine in the last weeks of her life. In that month, I'd meet her German friends and family, folks I've heard about over the years through the unusual friendship Sabine and I shared.
We'd sent each other cassette tapes, you see, for some ten years between 1990 and 2000 or so. We'd met in a law firm in Washington, DC, in the early 80's, and Sabine, our mutual friend John, and I managed to stay good friends even after our diaspora--Sabine back to Europe, choosing to settle in Brussels to perfect her French, John back to North Dakota to take care of his dying mother and enroll in nursing school--he'd already nursed twelve good friends through their days dying of AIDS, helping them physically, financially, morally, making sure they didn't die alone and that everything was taken care of to the extent it could be.
And I moved to my little Appalachian town, a decision that may well have shortened my life by a perhaps significant number of years--had I not left Washington, DC, my medical care might have been such that the cause of my hypertension would have been figured out and treated before it destroyed my heart and kidneys. Then again, it may not have been discovered even there since the condition had once been considered so rare it was barely touched on in med schools and, as Garth Brooks once sang in a rare country tune I like:
And now I'm glad I didn't know
The way it all would end, the way it all would go.
Our lives are better left to chance.
I could have missed the pain,
But I'd have had to miss the dance.
And moving to Appalachia has been a beautiful dance I'm so grateful I didn't miss even if the move did compromise my health to some degree.
Anyway, I do digress. The whole point was that Sabine moved to Belgium, Jack moved to Aberdeen, and I moved to Appalachia, and yet we managed to stay in touch ever since. Jack and I visited Sabine in both Lithuania and Albania; Sabine and Jack visited me in my little mountain town; Sabine and I visited Jack in Chicago, and so forth and so on.
And through all those years, the three of us traded cassette tapes back and forth. Whenever Jack participated, it was the best, but Sabine and I did it more often and more obsessively. We started out sending a 90-minute tape every now and then, and at our heyday we'd send packs of 6 or 8 180-minute tapes every few weeks in a very slow, back-and-forth conversation between friends who grew closer and closer through the years, sharing our secret dreams and deepest secrets, giving advice received usually well past the crisis in question, but valuable nevertheless, and otherwise becoming closer than friends or lovers or family normally do, at least in these far-too-fast times. Not unlike the letter writers of former days, but with the added benefit of hearing each other's voices.
And so now I want to write about Sabine, and I want to evince the exquisiteness of my last days with Sabine, but that is impossible to do without also conjuring back the pain. Joy and sorrow, the joy and the sorrow, the beautiful joy, the terrible sorrow. The joy so profound, but with it the pain even more so.
You see, I don't really want to go back into that bright, mostly-white-except-where-punctuated-by-blood-red-poinsettias room; I don't want to see the small fire blazing cheerfully in the efficient little German woodstove. I don't want to sit at the kitchen table while Sabine sleeps in the living room, just in my line of sight, while her Lithuanian friend ministers to her in abject worship. I don't want to do this even though I'm sitting there with Sabine's dearest friends, drinking the beer and wine she'd stocked for this very occasion, nibbling cheese and cold cuts and liverwurst and bread and Berliners and other such concoctions of heaven and NOT of America, I guarantee you--
Oh, but I do want to be back there with her friends of forty years and more and her ex-husband who wrote me that separating from Sabine was the biggest mistake of his life; I do want to hear their stories, see their photographs. I do want the conversation to shift to the living room where Sabine has wakened, and hear her additions to the story being told, the funniest parts told in her driest humor, and we remember that as saintly as Sabine was throughout her life, she loved to shock; she loved to just knock your knees out from under you with the most unexpectedly hilarious (even if the humor was black, as it tended to be those days) observation or punch line. She didn't shrink from sexual or even scatological jokes--she just loved a good joke! But mostly her humor was her own, one of a kind, from a sensibility we all loved so very much.
Day-to-day life sucks a person up, away, out of the kind of air surrounding a dying friend; it's more than difficult to bring oneself back to that strange, almost underwater reality. And it's also difficult to write about it because now there's no joy in being there with Sabine and her friends and family; it's all sorrow, though even that is bittersweet and punctuated with moments of joy memories return to me.
It was a beautiful time in its way, that deathbed vigil--all because that's how Sabine made sure it was. Throughout life, Sabine had done everything in a way that made it special. She never showed up anywhere without champagne and flowers, and if kids lived in the house (as mine did back in the day), with candy and trinkets for them. But it was more than the material items she brought--it was her presence, her essence, that made any space with her in it joyful even, at times, in that last sad month.
My younger son (relatively speaking; they are both bona fide adults now) wrote me while I was in Germany--you've got to love the wired world--and told me he was thinking of me, that he knew how much I love Sabine, and he realized now that I must've been going through a very hard time back then when we'd been friends in DC--he'd known Sabine when I was in my late twenties and had heard of her in all the years since; he knew my divorce and single-momhood had originated during that time, he'd seen me through all the poor choices in men I'd made all along (until now--love you, honey), he couldn't remember my dad dying when he was only two years old, but he'd practically fallen apart himself as a six-year-old when my mom died, and now, nearly 30 years later, he wrote, "I realize now how happy Sabine made you when things must have been hard."
Talk about a shock. My little boy has really, truly grown up!
And then he mentioned the Hot Dog. The Hot Dog! A stuffed dog, very long, Dachshund-style but bigger, with brown and black spots, and long enough to stretch across the head of a twin bed, where it usually lay under Adam's head at night. Sabine had given it to him when visiting our place not long after my mom died, 'way back in the late 80's. She knew six-year-old Adam was going through a very difficult time after losing his grandma; he'd been having inconsolable tantrums at his daycare that didn't stop until I arrived and gathered him up in my arms, only confessing after many months that he was afraid I was going to die, too.
After Sabine gave him the dog and other trinkets for him and my other son that evening long ago, she and I had retired to my kitchen where we opened a bottle of white wine and a pack of cheese and crackers. Sabine confided that she'd bought the stuffed dog for herself after her real dog had died. "Gypsy was Mick's dog," she'd told me, "and I loved that dog so much. And when she died, I saw this stuffed dog that kind of looked like her, so I bought it to hold when thinking of Gypsy. I am ready to part with it now."
I doubt she would have parted with it at all, had she not realized Adam needed it more--and, indeed, that stuffed dog with the new name "Hot Dog" gave him immense comfort through the years. I'd forgotten about that, and my son's email brought tears to my eyes. Though she'd seen my kids only a few times when they were both very small, they both remembered her vividly some thirty years later--she was that special.
And so I told the stuffed dog story in Sabine's German kitchen; her ex-husband had brought photos with Gypsy in them, including one of a layer cake decorated in white and red, with candles lit, reading, "Wunderhund." And the next photo, Gypsy's nose to a platter of cold cuts and other goodies on a coffee table, her birthday spread. All Sabine's work, of course. And Gypsy did look very much like the Hot Dog, or vice versa. I later told the story to Sabine while at her bedside, letting her know how much my boys adored her and how much her attentions to them meant to all of us.
Sabine's and my friendship began in 1984 when I was a single mom in my young 20's. My father died in 1985, my mother in 1989. And Sabine was there for me through it all, and through the divorce that occurred in the middle of all that. She was ten years older than I, sophisticated, beautiful, always cheerful, always generous of heart and gift, and she helped me through those sad years, taking me to dinner, to the ballet, to dinner, to the ballet, to dinner. Food, drink, friendship, and art--what heals us.
In fact, it was not long after my mom died that I visited Sabine in Brussels, where she'd moved after her marriage broke up. I was thirty years old then, she forty. She took me to Le Grande Place and the Turkish quarter, to Amsterdam and Paris. And not too many years later I'd visit her again, twice, in Lithuania. Lithuania! All I'd ever known about it was that Jorgis Rudkis of The Jungle came from Lithuania. I'd dressed up as Jorgis in my 8th grade English class, scruffy clothes and smudged face, and told his story in character, from his start in that bucolic country to his and his family's cruel life of exploitation in the Chicago stockyards, their dream of a better life in America shattered by the robber barons who preyed on them.
Albania I'd known nothing of, not even the famous Cheers episode when Coach teaches Sam to study for a test on Albania by singing a tuneless song about it--but now I do know Albania, thanks to Sabine, and a beautiful country it is, And, finally, Germany. I'd so wanted to see the village where she'd grown up the child of the schoolmaster, but when I suggested that to her she told me she was done with that part of her life then and had no desire to see it. And, indeed, she would live only a month longer. She was still mobile when I got there, still cooking pasta with cheese for Zoe, but not long after I got there that would change.
We'd planned to go to the Mediterranean coast in Alicante, Spain, while I was there, but she'd weakened too much by then. And how I wanted to visit Istanbul, the city where my aunt spent twenty-five years as a girls' school principal, with Sabine, as we'd talked of doing many times. Those trips would not occur, but she made it possible for me to be with her in Germany, and there is nowhere else I wanted to be at that time. She did kick me out for a week while other friends visited--I say fondly, because of course I could have stayed if I'd had no place to go--and so I also saw Basel and the Swiss Alps, a lifelong dream.
Upon my arrival in her village, she still had the energy to show me around her flat and take me to the basement, down two flights of stairs, where she kept her stores--milk in long-term storage containers, cases of red and white Riesling from orchards near by, several types of beer, and--she didn't forget the American champagne!--a case of Pepsi for me. (Yes, I am deeply ashamed to admit it, but I'm a Pepsiholic constantly trying and failing to kick the habit.) Sabine's refrigerator was filled with food, and she told me where she kept her money so I could go to the village shops and get anything I needed.
That was Sabine. Always making everyone around her comfortable--in Albania she'd left me money and an appointment at the local spa for a massage and a facial while she had to spend a few days in hospital. And always making everyone around her laugh even in the saddest moments, while we'd we'd shake our heads in wonder at the disconnect between the ultra sophistication that was Sabine and the raunchiness of her sense of humor--though that was Sabine, no disconnect at all, just always unexpected, telling jokes all the way to the end--she made life fun and a little thing like impending death wasn't about to change who she was. At some point I'll have to actually write those stories and the punch lines she gave them--nothing would characterize her better!
Except perhaps the term "champion of orphans." She was that, indeed, including this one who was a shy, insecure, just-turned 29 orphan when she took her under her wing. And in this article by her co-workers, you'll see that she adopted two girls, one whose mother lived beneath her in the flat she bought in Lithuania; Sabine befriended the woman, who soon died of cancer, her daughter still in high school, and took over the cost of the mother's flat and paid the girl's living expenses; a few later, she would also adopt an infant she'd held the baby's first day on earth while volunteering at an orphanage in Vilnius. She soon foster parented the child at home and fought successfully to adopt her at the "advanced" age of 50, giving that little girl who looked just like her the chance of a good life she'd have been denied without this remarkable woman.
In so many ways, Sabine taught me how to live, and now she was showing me how to die: in her home, surrounded by her dearest friends, her affairs taken care of well in advance to make the transition for those who love her the easiest it could possibly be in some of the hardest moments of our lives. She wanted joy and laughter around her, and she set things up so that would happen. Of course, we had quiet times, too, times when she was obviously in pain, when we sat by her bed and traced our fingers along her skin to let her know we were there, and she was still with us, eventually smoothing out the stress lines in her forehead with our gentle fingers until she was once again sleeping soundly.
And one night we were sure she was going to leave us, and we sat around her bed and said the Lord's Prayer in English and in German. And the next day she rallied, sat up in bed, and told more jokes.
One of her favorite things in the world was to fall asleep to bedtime stories; she'd told me how she'd loved as a child to hear comforting rumble of the adults' voices while she was falling asleep. I know that feeling, too. You're dropping off, just aware of the far-off sound of grown-ups laughing and talking in the next room while playing bridge, ice rattling as they sipped their drinks, keeping the world safe. I doubt her parents played bridge, but the sounds were no doubt similar . . . .
And that, Sabine told me, was how she wanted to drift asleep for the last time--with the sound of loved ones still awake, still taking care of things, gently coaxing her to sleep in the comfortable rhythms of conversation and fellowship. I wanted to sit by her bed, hold her hand, and tell her stories every night, but I didn't get a chance to do that more than a few times because so many friends loved her so much--as in life, Sabine's time had to be parsed out to so many people she'd become dear to.
One night I did do this. She'd just had surgery to relieve pain and pressure, but she didn't bounce back from that operation as she had all the others, and we were certain she would slip away as she barely regained consciousness until (once again, surprising us) a few days later when she was fully back in her mind and fully in charge, telling her best friend Gwennie to take the bread out of the freezer so folks could have sandwiches the next day.
But that night I sat alone with her while the others slept, and I traced her brow with my fingers as I'd done with my babies while they were nursing and drifting off to sleep. I softly told her it was okay to let go, she'd fought so hard, but she'd made sure Zoe was cared for, and we didn't want her in any more pain, and her mother was waiting to take her in her arms again, just as she'd waited for her while she formed in the womb. As the Lao Tzu says, woman is the gateway to life and to death, and that tunnel we're supposed to see with the light at the end when we're dying may just be our being born again into our mother's arms. Who's to say it's not?
Fortunately, Sabine didn't listen to me. She wasn't done yet. She hadn't had a proper good-bye with Vida, and so she rallied once more until she felt strong enough to have Zoe come over from her new family's house for a last visit. The rest of us made ourselves scarce, but I did see Zoe bring Sabine a pillow from the couch--I'm sure Sabine asked her for it so that Zoe could feel she'd done something for her, and then Sabine asked Zoe to lie down with her, and Zoe crawled in beside her in the hospice bed. They'd slept together most nights of Zoe's ten years, Zoe crawling out of her own bed and slipping in beside her mom, and so they had that last chance to cuddle again, and I know whatever Sabine said to Zoe it was just the right thing to say. And after that, we knew it a matter of but a brief time until our friend would take her last breath.
I feel so blessed to have known Sabine and to have been considered a friend by such a remarkable woman, so blessed that she wanted me with her in her last days. I almost feel that life is hardly worth living without her--melodramatic, I know, but in an odd way true. She made my life something more. It's terribly diminished without her. She was my sparkle; she was my light. She still is, I know, but she's farther away now, in a new land I have yet to visit. I hope she'll show me around when my time comes. And as I've learned through the pain of losing several dear loved ones before her, my memories will remind me that time and distance, even across that great divide called death, cannot diminish love.
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