Ending

I started writing daily to my friend T’nette on April 13th, after I learned of her illness.  When I wrote on August 17th, her husband replied that she could no longer read emails.  I knew that day was coming, of course.  We all did.  Aviva and I had a last visit with her on August 13th, nearly two weeks ago.  She slept most of the time we were there, but she woke for a while and told us great stories about three generations of her family. For a little while, she was all there, entirely her wise and funny self.  I told her our dog had been diagnosed with Cushing’s disease and she gave me a totally lucid, detailed explanation of how the disease worked.  We sat in her beautiful house and looked out the windows on summer in her amazing garden. It is a memory I will hold for a long time.

A small group of friends and family buried T’nette today.  There will be a memorial service later.  Today, only Adrian spoke, mostly to thank the people he had invited for all they did to support him and T’nette in these last hard months.  It was a perfect late summer day, in a beautiful old cemetery in Fly Creek.  She’s buried on a hillside, with a lovely view for anyone who comes to visit.  And there is the thud of earth on the lid of the wooden coffin.  The guy running the excavator who will finish filling the grave turned out to be an old friend of Adrian and T’nette’s and was stunned to learn whose grave he had dug.

And life goes on.  One of the things T’nette did when she was already ill was to recommend that the Town of Otsego appoint Jay Supervisor when the incumbent moved away.  Her suggestion took hold, and Jay was appointed on August 14th to fill the term that expires at the end of 2025.  It’s a bit overwhelming right now, with so much to learn and a budget to pull together.  But Jay is marshaling all of his prodigious political skills and making things happen.  And I’m learning how to update the Town website.  Recommending Jay was a typical T’nette move, not a yente, but a weaver, a community builder.  When Jay and T’nette first met and he showed her his new tractor she started lecturing him about safety.  He listened politely and then explained to her that he had been a heavy equipment operator from the time he was 18 and that he taught OSHA classes and worked as a safety consultant.  Oh.  It’s a favorite memory.

I mostly wrote to T’nette about things that I thought might stir her memory.  This was my last email to her, the one Adrian read in her place.  

“Sometimes when I can’t sleep I take a mental walk around the lake in Amenia.  I picture the bank, where the Quaker Ladies grow, and the mountain laurel, where the irises are, where there’s an old stump in the water.  I picture the lake bed, covered in rust red mud and shallow here, then deep with just a little ledge of pebbles that the sunfish like to nest in.  I take mental steps and imagine looking around, in the water, on the shore, into the woods.  I try to remember as many details as I can, the contours of the land, the feel of the earth underfoot.  I find this exercise soothing and hypnotic, and I rarely get more than a few feet into the walk before I doze off.  

I walked around that lake so many times over so many years, in so many moods, with so many things on my mind.  No matter how troubled I was when I set out, by the time I came back to where I began I felt resolved and refreshed, I saw a way forward.  In the years we owned Amenia, people would drive in from time to time and ask if they could go look at the lake.  They would explain that they had been campers there when they were young, and they just wanted to see it again.  We always welcomed them and listened to their stories.  And now I would be the visitor, so grateful that the place is owned by friends who have told us we are always welcome.  Tamar, who lives near there, does go in from time to time, for a walk or a swim.  I’ve only been back a couple of times since we sold it in 2016.  But I go back in my imagination often.”

I’ll go back to my memories of T’nette often, and always with gratitude.