Episode 23: A Sabine Christmas

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.

Episode 5: Featured Guest: Sabine

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.

Sabine and Me, General's Beach, Albania, on the Adriatic, 1/2012