Hey Brenda!

Thank you for being a friend

If you’re really lucky, you will have five good friends over your lifetime.

I lost one of the Big Five this week. Her name was Brenda and she died of inoperable lung cancer after being an unrepentant smoker for decades. Brenda was diagnosed more than a year ago, and it was only a few weeks ago that I found out that she was dying.

She messaged me on Facebook, saying she was sorry I had colon cancer, but guess what? She only had a few weeks to live.

I was shocked. It was true we hadn’t kept in touch after she moved to the country. In fact, we hadn’t seen each other, or even spoken for more than a decade. After I had moved out of the neighborhood we shared, we just lost touch. I invited her to reunions and other events, but she never showed. I supposed she had simply moved on with her life.

Shit happens.

To hear about her impending death from her in this manner, in the middle of my own health crisis, shook me to my core. Why didn’t she tell me she was on the Grim Reaper’s timeline? I could have helped her or held her hand.

“I didn’t want anybody to know,” she told me, matter-of-factly.

After her diagnosis, she moved from the country, where she was living with her niece, to a bleak and horrible seniors’ residence in Kanata. It was the kind of place that was the stuff of nightmares and Stanley Kubrick films, a place full of ghosts and the neglected, a place where a visitor had to run the gamut of sad seniors in wheelchairs lining up for pills, or just sitting there, waiting to die.

The place was a renovated hotel, more like a Bates Motel than the Sheraton, if you asked me. It was furnished with a lumpy bed, a scratched desk, a mini fridge and a dresser. There was a divider between her room and another senior who blared their television really loud.

The staff was far from friendly, and was comprised of bitter immigrants who obviously had hoped for a better life, but were stuck wheeling grammas around and wiping up drool. Brenda said she hadn’t had her shower cleaned the whole time she lived there.

“And the shower barely works,” she said with her characteristic grin.

Our first meeting since I heard the news was at the Ottawa General Hospital in a place the hospital calls “the gym”. It was, in fact, an occupational therapy room that had been converted into tiny compartments, separated by curtains, and minded by a couple of nice nurses. This was the place the hospital used for yo-yo terminally ill patients who come in for the occasional top up of medication and blood products.

“The guy next door, I think he’s going to the Bruyere for palliative care,” she grinned, as I handed her a Tim Horton’s coffee and muffin. “You know me, Rose, I’m always nosy.”

Brenda looked great, thanks to a transfusion and some new meds that the doctors prescribed for her. She was rake thin, and bald under a jaunty pink cap, her tiny frame covered by a bulky sweater.

“Have you seen this?” she asked and pointed to her foot which was absent the big toe. “Blood clot.”

“When did that happened?”

“Oh, a couple of years ago.”

Why did I not know this??

Well, as the Beatles would say, life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

We spent three hours catching up. It was like old times, as if we hadn’t missed a beat in our friendship. I told her about my cancer, she told me about hers. We gossiped and laughed, and then I gave her a ride back to the hole she was living in.

“Can we stop on Lynda Lane for a few minutes?” she asked. “I really need a smoke.”

“Sure,” I said. “Have two.”

Over the next few weeks, I got to spend time with my old friend, driving her back and forth to the General. I was so happy to be able to talk about the old days when she and her husband Pete used to host me and my kids when I was a single mom.

Brenda and I watched American Idol and Survivor while my young daughter Marissa sat on the floor with crayons. My son Stef was up in Pete’s multimedia room playing video games. Occasionally, we would hear Pete cackling and Stef shouting.

Pete and Brenda lived in a townhouse in not the greatest part of town, but Pete took pride in taking my kids trick or treating on “Hallowe’en Row”.

“Everybody knows that poor people give out the best candy,” he said.

Sadly, Pete died a few years back of a massive heart attack he suffered after going to bed, and leaving Brenda asleep on the couch. She struggled mightily over the next few years, until moving in with her niece.

The years weren’t kind to Brenda, but she never complained. Over the weeks we had together, she griped a bit about the home, but did so in a good humored manner.

It is what it is, she said.

The last time I saw Brenda was three weeks ago, on one of our usual visits to the General. She had decided to forego any further treatment because it made her feel sick. She was having problems breathing, sleeping and eating.

No matter, Brenda said. She had made plans to have the Grim Reaper come visit and administer a kill shot when she was ready.

We waved goodbye, and I told her I’d come see her after our vacation.

She smiled warmly and told me she’d see me soon.

She took the shot when I was sunning my stupid self on the deck.

There was no text from her, offering me a fond farewell, or a call. No chance for me to thank her for all she did for me and the kids.

I found out she passed after getting a call from her niece.

I was upset, but not mad. It was just her way. Brenda always did things on her own terms, and nothing had changed.

She lived, she loved, she laughed, she left.

Oh, and she told me she had arranged for a water burial, whatever that is.

Farewell, old friend.

P.S. I know you’d be pissed that I wrote this.

Tough shit, Brenda.