Last Encounter with Kate

for Linda and the rest of the family:

Last time I saw her - we had met for coffee at the original Starbucks across from Pike's Market in Seattle. The kids are skeptical about our claim that we are sisters. They keep hoping they can trip us up in a lie.

We walk through the market admiring flowers and the displays of perfect rows of zucchini and radishes, Japanese eggplant and glistening salmon tossed through the air by fishmongers.

She has made an appointment for later with the oncologist and in her subdued and stoic commentary she tells me "the news isn't all that good, spots on the sternum in bone scan. Linda is freaking out, but well..." There. She's told me - no drama and on to the next topic, or the next food stand where we sample some pepper-ginger jelly. It's a brief visit but we cover a lot - cover the basics: fine, not fine, happy, not happy. In this moment, just the pleasure of the moment -the vivid market of colors and life, fish tossed about for entertainment.

We are headed toward the new library -and she walks us part of the way. When we part ways as we have parted ways now - she to another destination, we say goodbye and she walks off as we continue where we were headed.

Later in that trip, I get a call from her, "I'm going to come meet you in Portland." "I'm not going to be there," I say. "I'm leaving the family there by themselves for a couple of days." I try to be discouraging as I'm not sure Richard wants to deal with her on his own. It doesn't work out - we don't connect.

Plans are proposed, here and there, but nothing materializes, the parting of paths now complete, complete for now. Moments shared, remembered, captured in photos or on video, added to websites, added to the collective memory of who this being was and what she meant to us all.

What was that? - A light, a laugh, a wit? Oh yes, a wit - sometimes sarcastic, biting, though not ill-intentioned, wit coming from a deep place, an open raw, vulnerable wounded place - laid open and exposed without drama or pretense or bullshit, frankly without the blah-blah. How hard is it to live like that? Only she could say - disappearing into it for months on end to sheepishly resurface begging her friends for patience and forgiveness, which would give or would not give her absolution.