santos scribes

There are twelve of us here today. 

The “Sacred 12”, you call us.  

A couple days later, while waiting for my flight home to Colorado, I’ll text the group-in the thread without you on it- with some reflections from our weekend together and my thanks. In the emotion of it all I will mistakenly flip my ‘a’ with my ‘c’ and end up calling us the “Scared 12”. It will be your beloved Amanda who texts back, “Scared works too.” Amanda, flown in from California, one of your oldest dearest friends since childhood or high school or maybe both.  

Back in that room, surrounded by the leading ladies of your life, I feel a touch inadequate or perhaps just displaced, dropped suddenly into a 200 square foot room of lifetimes of love and personal histories. If you are the center of this group, our ground zero, our number 1 then I am number 12; the last to join only 12 years prior. 

It’s unbelievable to me how seamless the abrupt change in your birthday celebration arrangements are: yes, some of us are mothers and the majority of us have backgrounds in hospitality and service, but we’ve been email planning this party for you for weeks. We are suppose to be gathered together at a friend of a friend’s gorgeous home overlooking the Boston Bay and here we all are in room 888 at Mass General and no one it seems has bat a tear-stained eye. We just want to be with you, it doesn’t matter where. Your fall the morning before is of course cause for some very real concern as is your subsequent admittance to the hospital we’re all currently gathered at but I’m not sure how many of us recognize this as the beginning of the end of your life; we’re here to celebrate your birthday for Christ’s sake!

In just two short months, the week of Christmas, you’ll enter The Regional Hospice of Danbury and just six weeks after that somewhere before or after the new moon, your body will die- your spirit on to its next great adventure, perhaps. But this cool late October day in Boston, just four days before your 46^th birthday none of us is thinking about all that. We’re eating & laughing and meeting one another, swapping stories and introducing ourselves in-person, some of us for the first and only time and sharing our connections to you with the group.

Geographically we know each other from Block Island, from that summer working together at the Manisses and then of course Boston, where you helped me get my first apartment and job in the city but spiritually our connection is far more interesting and meaningful to me- when we met in 2006, I’d never known or met anyone remotely like you before.  There was a truth and a light within you that was so bright it made me consider my own truth and light for the first time in my then 26 years.    

Back at MGH, after the arrowroot & avocado chocolate cake, you gift us each a gorgeous crystal beaded bracelet (“Moonstone for Emily; loving intuition. Moss Agate for Jules; calm composure”). The party begins to wane and the sacred twelve begin gathering their coats and pot-lucked dishes. Slowly finding their ways back to Rhode Island and Connecticut, to the Hilton, Logan International. With coat & bag in hand I lean in to kiss and hug you tight, to leave you there with your loving ladies and you turn to me with that brilliant smile and say, “You aren’t going anywhere.” And so, I don’t. I stay. Watch as you hug and kiss the others goodbye from an inclined recumbent bed inside a cold room that beeps too much and holds too many machines and running wires to count.  

And when it’s just us left, I take the seat at your bedside and we hold hands and talk and giggle softly about the things ancient friends talk & giggle about. When a young nurse comes to take your blood pressure you notice her tattoo and we listen as she tells us about it like we are the last three people on earth and all we have is time. “Now I see” her inked forearm script reads: amazing grace, naturally. And it’s the most beautiful thing: watching you give your time and curiosity to a kind, caregiving stranger. It’s so. very. you.

when it’s clear your exhaustion has reached the point of no return, I know it’s my turn to leave but I am so unbelievably ill-prepared for what the impossibility of this notion requires of me. 

I believe someone or something must be in the room with us then because there is simply no way in which it is me holding myself together in this moment. Who knows it may have been you- always with one foot in the other plane like watercolors that bleed to the other side of the page. Even as I make it to my feet, I can’t bring myself to tell you good-bye, so instead I whisper from the corner of the room, “See you soon, my love.”

I can still hear the heavy door click softly shut behind me, can feel the textured wall I clung to, the giant squares of alcove flooring just around the bend from your door. It felt fortuitous, that gift of a break in the wall, a place to fall in to with my grief and overwhelm.  

The next days and weeks, months- most of 2019- are blurred and heavy, hard in completely new and extraordinary ways and even now six years later I can’t totally believe or make sense of all that’s happened since this day in 2018. I miss you. The sounds of you. Seeing your name come across my phone. The feel of your wisdom, the penmanship of your words, your spirit. But every 888, every seemingly random playing of Southern Cross, every time the moon catches me by surprise, every unexpected delight, somehow some way I know it’s you, my sacred sister. Sarah.  

a bit about this writing

when I woke up this morning, I had no idea what date it was. on my way home from dropping my daughter at school I got to thinking about my writing prompt for writing group this week- it is simply to ‘write about a time you were at a hospital’. I got back home, parked the car and began wondering about when exactly the date had been of the party we had unexpectedly thrown for Sarah in a hospital room at MGH in October 2018 and discovered it was today, because of course it was today- so I forwent my walk and instead put pencil to paper and this is what squeaked out…more unexpected delight via my beautiful beloved sister Sarah Livesey. thanks for reading- xo, s.