Things We Do and Say At the End

In 2009, a long-time friend who had always made herself valuable, by being totally no-bullshit, received what, three years later, would be a terminal cancer diagnosis.  We had been having a long email dialog about a variety of personal subjects and, out of nowhere, she sent me a blistering, hyper-critical “never write or speak to me again” email.  I don’t have a lot of friends and I, usually, go to foolish extremes to hang on to the ones I have and, after a few days of letting that percolate, I wrote back to her.  I apologized for whatever it was that had set her off and asked for some clarification about the awful thing I had done to deserve it. 

After a bit, she wrote back and told me about the cancer diagnosis and made it clear that she did not, ever, want sympathy for her situation.  She had decided that she’d rather be friendless than to have to listen to sympathetic and sorrowful outpourings from her friends.  Like me, she didn’t have a lot of friends and even fewer family members who she was close to.   This was a tough, tough lady who had been independent since she was 16.  When she was married, she was her family’s sole income source until her husband found a younger substitute, when their son was about 5-years-old.  So, from then on I started every email with a joke about death.  As a life-long atheist, I tend to think concerns about death are funny-to-hilarious, so the jokes I picked were pretty ruthless. And we continued to communicate until her death three years later.

Our friendship began, slowly and weirdly, when I hired her to be a manufacturing engineer for a small audio company where I was the manufacturing engineering manager.  She not only hadn’t done a lot of electronics manufacturing, but she didn’t have any sort of engineering degree or even a high school diploma.  She did have a terrific track record with past employers and interviewed brilliantly and, critical to my situation at the time, she was cheap.  Early on, I discovered that she was hyper-conservative and very, very Christian; all negative flags for me, personally.  So, we began to argue about that stuff, off work and for the fun of it.  She was my first experience with a Christian conservative who never, ever, resorted to logical fallacies: Ad hominem, Ad populum, and an appeal to authority are the ones I most often experienced with conservative or religious people,  Philosophically, I often felt like I was falling on my face when I had prepared myself for the kind of irrational response I’d consistently experienced for my first 40 years of life and, instead, got a rational, fair-and-open-minded, well-considered rejoinder. I am a bit autistic (or a lot, depending on your opinion) and a stutterer, so I have always had to mentally prepare my replies in advance to keep from sounding totally mentally deficient.  When a response is completely unexpected, I have to reformulate my thoughts, rewrite my response, mentally practice forming the words, and, eventually, say something.  Arguing with her was a LOT more work than practically anyone I had ever met.  More rewarding, too.

A year or so before I left California, she had become a lead manufacturing engineer for a large medical devices company and she had arranged interviews and a pretty good offer for me with her company.  I was grateful, but had no interest in living in the southern California desert (where her employer was located), even for a six-figure salary.  After I left California, had lived in Colorado for five years working for a medical device company, and ended up in Minnesota working for another medical device company, we discovered that we were employees of the same conglomerate.  We restarted our email correspondence and I was surprised to discover that she had become a far more radical, much more angry, atheist lefty than me.  She and several other manufacturing engineers started a consulting company.  Her income bumped up against seven-figures, her lifestyle was international, and she was regularly published in the Journal of Manufacturing Engineering as an international quality expert.   

In 2007, a medical condition wrecked all of that.  Her ability to hyper-focus and work insanely long hours uninterrupted by sleep, meals, or rest turned out to be due to a Graves Disease variation that began to unravel her life.  Pre-ACA, she was dropped by her health insurance company and could only find coverage for $10,000/year with a $50,000 deductible.  Her medications cost nearly $500,000/year and she was unable to work.  The Great Recession and her medical situation cost her nearly everything, but she was able to manipulate the total disorder of the last year of the Bush II administration into freeing herself, with bankruptcy, from her expensive Riverside County, California property, her medical debt, and she ended up owning, outright, a small acreage in the desert hills of San Jacinto, California.  She turned that into a successful organic farm, where she grew heritage tomatoes, in buckets, that approached trees in size and a variety of herbal remedies that she sold at farmers’ markets and through her website.  And that lasted until her cancer took away the physical ability to maintain her farm and business. 

One of the last emails I received from her, a few weeks before she died, contained her list of “Things I have learned and learned to accept in this life”: 

•       Bad things happen to good people
•  Good things happen to just horrible, even evil people
•  No good deed goes unpunished
•  Mercy is preferable to justice
•  Keeping up with the Jones’s is a symptom of insanity
•  Degrees & diplomas are not worth the paper they are printed on, but are handy to light a fire.
•  If you are angry or bitter, you forget how to be happy
•  It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty - who the fuck cares? The point is to DRINK.
•  Humility gives clarity to a natural state of gratitude that generates real happiness.
•  Fanatics, on all extremes, are not worth listening to - they are confused and in pain.

She was about a decade younger than me and died at 51 years-old.  Now at nearly 78, after the past six years of one fucked up medical issue and lost capability after another and feeling my mortality pretty strongly, I can relate, strongly, to her urge to avoid sympathy at all costs.  Sympathy and pity are not helpful and the words are, usually, more depressing than encouraging or comforting.  Those of us who are introverted and a bit (or more) antisocial are more likely to want to die like an old cat, with “a quiet, unaccompanied acceptance of mortality amidst the recurring, cyclical, and violent destruction of human civilization” (from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.).  At its best, this life is hilarious and violently nonsensical, punctuated with brief moments of compassion, love, and loss (lots of loss, seemingly mathematically impossible with what feels like more loss than initial gains).  Someday, I hope to have a friend who sends me occasional jokes about dying when I am in that state.