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.

Claiming My Sisters

Kate on Bainbridge Island, c. 2000 - a glorious day!

written 2/8/06

A quiet, unassuming, and kind person – friends from a shared interest in writing, expressing, being vulnerable, being Iowan cat lovers, Claudia. Claudia I see you happy for your release from a body, broken and no longer serving. Kate, Kate, Kate – we play together in the words of the Scrabble Board – neither of us has other words to post to the other, just this sad game where the points flip the scale with – every turn, an evenly matched competition – well, she usually has a 10 pt edge on me, knows how to play those 2 letter words for double/triple points. Kate, living with cancer, living with bi-polar, which, has almost been more deadly, the downs worse than the highs which drove away all the friends. How we became friends – I gave her a counseling session after she moved here, shaken too much by the 89 quake and seeking solid ground in the Midwest. I let her dance and move in her session, gave her permission to be the ballerina the 3 yearold never got to be and is trying to be. She can dance now, move, breathes – shakes a little too loose at times for the comfort of others. Some need that kind of freedom. Some need to break those boundaries. My kids don’t believe she is my sister. And keep asking my brothers if they have another sister, thinking they caught me in a lie. It isn’t a lie – she is my sister, Claudia is my sister, too – I’ll claim her – she deserves me more than she deserves Sylvia. In this circle of women, she has a real home and family.

The Need for Coffee

written 11/30/2001

Kate's sister Linda asks her "Do you really want to die"? Every decision for her at this point becomes an existential question. Whether to drink coffee or not may or may not be a matter of life or death. The sister, trying to be rational – your hormones, sis – think of your hormones, and Kate just wanting the taste of Java, the taste of this one small pleasure of life in the sucking vortex of stage whatever breast cancer. She tells me about her retreat for breast cancer survivors and how they tried to coach her into a decision. That decision of their agenda – get the radiation, they say, is a decision of a knife slice in hard rock, goes nowhere, against the surface with a dull thud, doesn't get to the broken wall of pain. Kate says all the women there had too much to lose, families, children, wealthy baubles of houses in Darien, Connecticut, but she has nothing to lose – can't get behind the belief that there is even one good reason to live, except for the occasional coffee at Starbucks, sitting in the sumptuous chairs staring out at the rain with a friend in conversation waiting for the rain to stop.