I THINK YOU NEED NEW FRIENDS by Joyce Dehli
1.
I think you need new friends, my oncologist tells me as she finishes my exam.
Her gloved fingers tap the length of my spine, press along my chest scar and then softly into my remaining breast. No sign of cancer’s return.
No need to worry, she says.
But I worry.
I tell her that five friends have died from cancer in the past three years and one more is dying now, all but one with breast cancer. I mention Hannah, who was her patient.
You need new friends, she says, turning toward the door.
What she means is: Your friends’ bad luck says nothing about your odds.
What she means is: You’re at high risk for cancer’s return, but your odds still lean toward years of life.
What she means is: You risk relentless loss when you make friends at cancer support groups. The dying stay to their end, but the living – soon enough, they flee.
What she means is: You need more friends on the living side of the line that cancer draws between life and death.
2.
I didn’t flee from Hannah, but I considered it.
We met at a cancer retreat in Washington, D.C. Seven women, middle- aged to old. We each came loved, but still lonely. We came weary of protecting others from our fears while soothing theirs. Some of us came resentful. We wanted someone to hold still and listen. Someone who wouldn’t flinch or run. Or strive to cheer us. Someone who could become the friend we knew we would someday need.
Hannah became that friend for me. I see that now, but it’s not how I saw it then.
When we met, my cancer was in remission. Maybe gone for good, maybe not. My doctor recently had pulled three- year- old slides of my tumor tissue to give it a second look. The cancer, it turned out, had been even more aggressive than first thought. My prognosis worsened. Yet it was better than Hannah’s.
When Hannah introduced herself to our retreat group, she lifted her t-shirt halfway to show a cluster of tiny bumps on her abdomen – the first sign that cancer had returned and spread. She didn’t have to say – but did – that when breast cancer escapes the chest, it crosses a line into terminal disease. Her fingers fluttered across her pale skin, as if to connect her words to what her fingers felt. To what we could see.
I can’t believe it’s real, she said. I feel fine.
Her cheeks reddened as she wiped tears away.
Hannah wasn’t soft. She’d say that. A lifelong atheist, she grew impatient with talk of God or spirituality of any sort. She was a marine biologist. She liked facts. She’d never married. Never had a lover who mattered. It didn’t mean she was cold. She loved her friends ardently and connected them one to another with earnestness and glee. A matchmaker for friends. I soon saw that.
In the months after the retreat, several of her friends became mine. She invited my partner and me to her holiday parties, block parties in her alley, teas on her deck. Before long, we bought a rowhouse less than a block away.
Good, Hannah said when I told her the news. You’ll be close when I need you.
I felt it then, the impulse to flee. It quickly passed. But I wondered then, as I do now, if Hannah saw me shrink.
3.
In the darkest hours of an autumn night, our friend Eileen fled her apartment and ran screaming into a city street in her nightgown. Pain had lacerated her narcotic slumber.
I felt electrified, out of my mind, she later told Hannah and me.
I pictured lightning striking a tree – a lone oak, burning from the inside out, its bark exploding, its roots seething from the charge.
Eileen never thought to call for an ambulance. A cab roaming Dupont Circle picked her up and took her to an emergency room.
Our retreat group – by now we were friends – had worried when we didn’t hear from Eileen for weeks. We tracked her down to a nursing facility where she’d landed after the hospital. We found her, thank god, before pain meds completely muted her speech. We took turns sitting with her, bringing her what she wanted: flowers and chocolate milk. We talked with her doctor, nurse, social worker, and aides.
Eileen had a few longtime friends, but we never saw them visit. A neighbor couple came once. Her brother didn’t come to town. But a nephew she loved – the one with whom she shared stories and laughs, the one who traveled with her, no matter that he was barely thirty and she was sixty- five – he came.
Hannah and I met him at Eileen’s bedside. He’d come to look after her, he said. He hoped she would improve enough to take short trips by the following spring.
Hannah signaled to me to follow her into the hallway.
He doesn’t want to see, Hannah said to me.
We pulled the nephew into the hall. Hannah was the one who spoke, not me. I can’t remember her every word, but she told him that Eileen wouldn’t be taking any trips because she was dying and would he please sit with her, maybe hold her hand.
The nephew leaned a shoulder against the wall. He looked to me. I nodded. He went back in.
On the day of Eileen’s funeral, I drove Hannah to the Quaker Meeting House. She rested frequently on our walk to go inside. She wheezed. It tired her, I could see.
4.
I’m having just a little trouble breathing. Can you drive me to the emergency room? Hannah asked. It was a month after Eileen’s death.
I’ll be right over, I replied. But I froze – for an instant, not more – as if I were the one in danger. I willed myself to move, grab my keys, get out the door.
On the drive, she told me her doctor, our doctor, urged her to think about hospice. Treatment wasn’t working anymore. But Hannah said she wasn’t sure. I can’t remember what I said. I hope I said that I was with her, whatever she decided. What I remember is that Hannah showed me a shortcut to the hospital and, to this day, I use that route for my own appointments.
When an old friend of Hannah’s met us at the hospital, Hannah told her that a doctor had mentioned hospice.
Oh, no, it’s not time, her friend interrupted, raising a smile like an alarm. Hannah looked away. A nurse withdrew fluid from her lungs to make room for new air.
Late that night, before I left her hospital room, Hannah asked me to email her sister Ruth and brother Henry to tell them she was hospitalized, but doing okay.
Henry flew to D.C. two days later, and one night he, Hannah, and I sprawled out on her big bed to go over what her doctor had said.
An experimental drug had failed. Hannah was back on chemo. She’d had a catheter inserted directly into one lung so she could drain excess fluid herself. Still, she didn’t think it was time, as she put it, to give up. Henry agreed.
The doctor said she could continue on chemo for a while longer if she could keep her stamina up. After that, I’d see Hannah walking in our neighborhood, huffing every few steps. I sometimes walked with her. Not long – not even a block.
For a couple of weeks, though, it was enough. Henry went home, and Hannah went back to living alone.
5.
I wasn’t Hannah’s closest friend. I wasn’t family. I was a friend who didn’t flee. Not because I was brave, but because she expected me to stay. And because sometimes life burns brightest right before it goes out, like a flame rising to its last air. In moments, that’s how I saw Hannah. And she saw me. Light calling forth light. It left me trembling.
We didn’t talk about that. Often, we didn’t talk much when I began visiting most days. By then, nineteen months had passed since we met at the cancer retreat. By then, just three minutes across an alley separated Hannah and me.
Henry, Ruth, and their elderly parents had moved in. Their love and dread simmered in her home like spices in a sauce, deepening by day. They permeated her air.
Hannah had hoped to wait longer to tell them how hard things had become. She thought she could get by some months longer with the help of friends. But after a hospice nurse visited, Hannah said I could email Ruth. She knew her family would come to Washington, leaving their homes and offices on the West Coast. She knew what their coming meant.
One day, as I pulled open Hannah’s back door, a mist of garlic, oregano, and basil enveloped me. Ruth was cooking marinara sauce. She hugged me like family, her wild gray curls brushing my cheek.
I found Henry hunched over his laptop at the kitchen table. I squeezed his shoulders, not saying a word. Hannah once said their minds thrummed in the same register, as if they were twins.
Our parents are upstairs, Ruth told me. It’s fine. Just go up. I’ll put on water for tea.
What about the others? I asked, pointing toward the dozen or so friends talking in the living room.
Don’t worry, they’ll have their turn, Ruth said, shooing me forward with a dish towel.
I hesitated, not wanting to intrude on Hannah’s parents, not wanting to skip ahead of others, not wanting to go upstairs. I entered the living room. Its maroon walls, usually warm and inviting, pressed in. I wove my way through Hannah’s friends, reaching for their hands, welcoming their hugs.
Hannah’s stairs curved toward the living room like an invitation I couldn’t ignore. All the times I’d climbed those stairs, I’d never really looked at them. They were a golden oak, a little worn. I pressed my hand onto the banister. My steps were slow.
Ascending the stairs, I heard the low whir of a small motor. I heard a long sucking sound, then short puff. The two- note refrain grew louder with each step. It was Hannah’s oxygen machine. Three weeks earlier, Hannah’s hospice nurse, Renee, had brought it over. I’d been sitting beside Hannah’s bed when the doorbell buzzed. Hannah had pushed herself upright against her pillows. Her legs already were heavy with fluid.
Hannah had tried to draw a deep breath for Renee, but wheezed and gasped. She told Renee she feared dying like that – unable to breathe. It’s not a good way to go, Hannah said. Renee warmed her stethoscope’s silver disc in her hands before placing it on Hannah’s chest, back, and abdomen. She pressed gently all around Hannah’s belly. She pulled a chair close to the bed, sat, and leaned in.
Your fluids, she had told Hannah, are mostly in your lower abdomen, but they’re rising. Pressure is going to rise. Your blood vessels could burst. You’d bleed out. You won’t feel pain. You’d go into a sleep- like state. But it might be hard for anyone here, seeing fluids – blood – released.
It might be hard for anyone here.
I tripped at the landing.
Sounds swelled from below – plates clinking, people talking, people laughing, a doorbell buzzing.
Hannah’s door was ajar. We saw each other. Her hand beckoned.
I followed a clear tube from the oxygen machine outside her door into her room and across to her bed, to my friend. Her eyes, once dazzling as coral, had dimmed. I sat beside her.
Her parents stood and nodded at me as they shuffled out.
Hannah tried to speak. She coughed but could not clear her throat.
I held her hand. A blue vein ran its surface. I felt it pulsing.
A tea kettle whistled from the kitchen.
6.
A year after Hannah died, a fierce storm ripped branches and leaves from my neighbors’ trees one summer night. I welcomed the mess it made of my patio. I could set it right. I knew what to do, a relief in my own season of medical gowns and body scans – my chest, then right eye, and that very week, my brain – to see if cancer was back. It wasn’t. Something minor had set off weeks of vertigo, headaches, and nausea. A mystery, but not cancer. No need for me to slide inside another MRI machine anytime soon. Morning came quietly, and I grabbed a broom and headed out.
A wobbly wooden fence enclosed the stone patio and tiny yard behind my rowhouse, the one Hannah had urged us to buy. That morning, my eye caught a shimmering black bead on one of the fenceposts. I got close to see. It was a carpenter bee. I stared, absorbed by its stillness, but soon I grew impatient for it to fly. I tapped it with the broom. It fell to earth. It made no sound and did not move. I picked a purple clematis petal and placed it close. The bee’s black torso and golden thorax rose. Its antennae twitched. With one wing dragging, it clambered half an inch to heave itself onto the petal’s edge.
I felt myself exhale. Sounds rose to my ears. A chattering squirrel raced through a black walnut tree. “Papa, papa!” my neighbor boy called on his side of the fence, laughing as his rubber ball, with stripes of green and blue, rose and fell overhead. Traffic revved in fits and starts just beyond our cloistered alleys. A song played in my mind: “Blue skies smiling at me, nothing but blue skies, do I see.”
I cleared the storm’s debris and, with the care of one who bandages wounds, tied twine around bundles of branches and twigs still clutching their leaves. I swept the patio well and my edge of the alley, too, before checking on the carpenter bee.
I crouched close to see.
My bee had gone stone still.
7.
Hold still, I’m told, for mammograms, ultrasounds, MRIs, and bone scans. Afterward, I listen for my doctor’s steps in the hall. I hear her two quick knocks on the door, the handle pressing down and snapping up, the door opening, my heart beating. Everything stops. The moment between not- knowing and knowing evaporates. The word is delivered. The word is received. Each time so far, no evidence of disease. I breathe.
“I Think You Need New Friends” is Joyce Dehli’s debut creative nonfiction publication.