I met Mary the way
hundreds if not thousands of people around the world met Mary. I was traveling into her city—at the time,
Beijing—and a mutual friend arranged for me—a poor foreign student—to stay with
her. Stay I did, for a week, with my
traveling companion, in the home of this vibrant perfect stranger who
truthfully I didn’t see much of because her work schedule. The most vivid memory I have of Mary’s apartment
there was the pantry. I had just been
living in Taiwan for a year, and familiar Western foods were hard come by. Because she had generous shipment privileges
being in the Foreign Service, Mary had the best-stocked pantry I had ever
seen. Particularly I remember the gusto
of tucking into Quaker Granola paired with local yogurt. Yummm…
We didn’t stay in
touch after my visit beyond a heartfelt thank you note, but one day back in
Washington, DC some years later, working in the Asia field, I spotted a
familiar looking face at some seminar.
It was Mary. Agreeing to talk
soon, we did, and in so doing discovered many mutual interests. We quickly became fast friends. That was about 30 years ago.
My friend Mary passed
away on January 8. I write this still with
a sense of how surreal it is—can she really be gone?
Her death was sudden
and too soon, but I still feel blessings around it. First of all, Mary lived what I call a
no-regrets life. She travelled all over
the world, she had friendships from her work and those travels that had lasted
for many decades, she immersed herself in things she loved to do (like reading
and collecting books), she was respected and well loved. She had an amazingly close nuclear and
extended family with whom she spent a great deal of time, including a big
Christmas reunion she had returned from the day before her first massive stroke—a
huge blessing for her family.
My getting to see her
a last time was a blessing, too. Though another friend and I had been told she
could not see, move, speak, or eat, that morning (after a visit from a therapy
dog, her sisters told me) she became a bit lucid. When we got there her bed had
been rolled out into the hospice’s garden. It was a magical 65-degree January
day, and as I shared stories about Mary’s and my friendship and escapades with
her sisters and a niece, she was definitely there. Mary was there, and she even spoke—albeit
with great difficulty-- to me, using my name.
Not having been with anyone in this condition, I had opted to bring a
couple of particularly fragrant flowers in case she still had her sense of
smell, as well as a few clementines, thinking of that delicious aroma when they’re
cracked open, even if she couldn’t eat. One of her sisters had the bright idea of
taking a slice and very gently dribbling juice onto her lip, and you could tell
Mary loved it.
I’m grateful I’m able
to remember Mary in that serene space, not at a hospital with needles and tubes
and hospital smells and noisy intercom and staff bursting in at all hours of
the day or night. It was so peaceful, that time together, as I talked and I stroked
her hair, having decided in her position what I would want was for people to
touch me. She just as peacefully passed
away a couple of nights later, with her family at her side.
This is the first time
a friend—a peer, though a bit older than I—has died, and I didn’t know what to
expect. Tears come at odd times every
day or so, as something or other touches a chord that says “my friend, Mary”:
v
Looking at a list of
museum openings in the Weekend section of The
Washington Post. Mary was always game for a museum jaunt, despite the fact
that one of her two most recent jobs was as a tour operator taking visitors
from school kids from the Midwest to business people from Germany or China around
the city’s attractions (in their native language, one of about five she spoke).
v
Flipping through a
clothing catalog, seeing a kind of shirt we both loved and had in several
colors.
v
Every time I look at
my living room bookshelves and worry about where my framed picture of Mary I’ve
had for perhaps a decade has gone, oddly vanished right around the time of her
death.
v
As I stand in Second
Story Books chatting with the bookseller who is appraising the hundreds of
books I’m selling in advance of a move, and wonder where Mary’s collection will
go.
v
Flipping through a
Healthy Back catalog when I see a blue recliner. I remember having to go to the
La-Z-Boy store and arranging for delivery of one just like it to Mary’s home
while she was in rehab at the hospital after a knee replacement surgery. I helped her when she returned home, too, and
we enjoyed many “picnics” with her sitting in the recliner recovering.
v
Thinking I’m really
overdue for a press trip for a travel article.
Mary was my partner in crime for two trips, one to an Eastern Shore
resort that was fun, but its luxury not really her kind of travel, and another
that was more her thing, staying in a small B&B and tramping around
exploring Richmond, Virginia.
v
Telling my mother
about a program I had coming up in Annapolis that was to start at 8 a.m., and that
with some of my classmates considering staying overnight the night before that.
Suddenly I was remembering the group’s opening retreat in Pennsylvania where I
did stay at a motel the previous night, courtesy of Mary, who told me she didn’t
want me driving early in the morning—also for an 8 a.m. start--after my usual
late night working and the medications I take usually at 1 in the morning. Just
a beautiful, completely generous gesture so typical of Mary. Her Facebook page shared stories of even
huger generosity, given still so openly.
v
Reading the spring
National Geographic Live! brochure and reaching the page on the All Roads Film
Project, “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” films by women directors from
international and indigenous cultures. We had gone to one of these programs
together a year or two ago, to a film about a matriarchal community still
existing in modern China. That’s the kind of cultural outing Mary and I loved
best.
v
Reading a book about
two women travelers in the 1920s and wanting to share the fun of it, thinking I’d
pass it to Mary when I finished it, that she would love it.
v
Seeing women wearing
Asian-inspired jewelry or clothing.
v
Every time I write to certain friends on Gmail,
when a suggestion courtesy of Google pops up automatically suggesting other
people I might want to send the email to-- often, Mary,
v
Seeing people with the
beautiful ruddy faces suggesting they might be from Nepal, or seeing the word “sherpa”
in a mail-order catalog describing some thick comfy outerwear. Mary spent years in Nepal in the Peace Corps
before going into the Foreign Service, and retained many friendships from that
time, including her favorite Sherpa.
v
Roaming in the library
or a bookstore. Again, despite the fact
that one of Mary’s job was as a bookseller at the now-defunct Border’s, she could always spend more time
around the books that we both loved so well.
One of our favorite mutual haunts was the Freer & Sacker gift
shop/book shop. Oh, the trouble we could
get in there!
v
Seeing a play last
night that dealt with how a group of people at the hospital together got
through the last hours of a loved one, how one in particular remembered the man.
(Perhaps it was a bit too soon for me to take in a play like that.)
Mary was always up for dim sum and we had a favorite spot the
town over from where I live in Maryland. At Chinese New Year, just a couple of weeks
after her passing, two friends who’d become friends of Mary’s through me over
the years, and their children, celebrated with the traditional dim sum, and we
saved a seat for Mary. And every late July,
those same two friends and I will celebrate the Leo Birthday gatherings the
four of us had held for years. And Mary
will be there with us.
For the first few weeks after her passing I would hop on
Facebook every night to see if there were new photos of her or anecdotes about
her shared by all the people whose lives she had touched. I still go back,
though less often, hoping for more.
I am grateful to Mary’s
sisters for having a memorial service here, though at her instruction she’ll be
buried back in Wisconsin with her family.
It allowed some of us who had been privileged to know her, as friend or
as colleague, a chance to swap warm and funny anecdotes about her, to sing some
songs she loved, to learn more about her family, to look at some adorable
pictures of her as a child and fondly remember the times of her photos as an
adult, and to honor her immense but easy generosity and her no-regrets life
which I, for one, aspire to emulate.
I love you, Mary.
“I think of memories as…bringing [her] back before me.
No, she is not reborn. And she is probably not a ghost drifting
above me, or an angel singing in heaven.
But nor is she nothing, and there is not nothing after her death.
. There are all my
recollected moments of time I spent with her.”
(Nina Sankovitch, from Tolstoy and the Purple
Chair: My Year of Magical Reading)
