Episode 29: Background Music While Sabine Leaves this World

NOTE:  All persons' names other than Sabine's have been changed to maintain their privacy.


Before you start "watching" this episode['s text cross the screen, delivering visual messages--hopefully], you must turn on your audio and listen to this version of Amy Winehouse's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"  NOT the one that is on most of the compilations; this one is in the soundtrack of The Diary of Bridget Jones, a totally arbitrary fact, since I heard it as the lead song on the European press of Lioness:  Hidden Treasures, while the U.S. press of that album has a different version I like much less.  This one is simpler, not so produced, which fit perfectly into the gentle but good vibe mood we wanted while listening to it over the holidays last year, while we sat vigil by Sabine's bedside.

Here's the correct version:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ludxpkyrab0.

Only by playing that version of Amy's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" as you "view" this episode might an ache rise in your chest similar to the one now in mine as I think about my last days with my dearest friend, mentor, and treasure--Sabine.  I've written about her before, so you may want to catch up on the story by going to earlier posts--Click on "Sabine" in my labels on the right-hand lower side of my first screen to access those.

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.