The Girls from Ames (29 page)

Gathering together on that king-sized bed happened spontaneously. But in that moment, all ten of them later realized, they saw clearly that true friendship means a willingness to share both joy and complete despair.

As Kelly later described it: Outside that door, grief was waiting to envelop Karla. But in that bedroom, for that half hour, a profound sisterly love was holding it all at bay.

O
ver dessert one night at the reunion, Jane asks if she can stand up and say a few words. Her daughter, Hanna, has just celebrated her bat mitzvah. For her “mitzvah project”—her effort to do a good deed—she chose to raise money for Caring Bridge, the Web site where Christie had posted her journal.

When Christie was diagnosed, Hanna was only eight years old, but she had immersed herself in Christie’s Web postings. Now Hanna is thirteen. “She’s the same age as Christie was when she was sick,” Jane tells the other girls. “So Hanna feels even more moved by what Christie went through.”

Hanna raised $420 for Caring Bridge, and wrote an essay about how Christie’s journey helped her put her life in perspective. “My challenges seem like ants compared to Christie’s challenge, which was a monster,” Hanna wrote. “She has inspired me to never run away from my dreams. From now on, I will not take each day for granted. Christie’s spirit lives on inside of me. I will never forget her.”

When Jane finishes reading, she looks up and her eyes meet Karla’s. Both of them smile weakly at each other. Around the table, some of the other girls have tears in their eyes.

The room is silent for a moment, and then Kelly talks. “Christie had this short life,” she says, “but there was this force about her. You see it in her photos. She literally glowed in her years here.”

A few of the other girls weigh in with compliments, too, and Karla tells them she appreciates their words. She says she’s buoyed when people tell her how they’ve been touched by Christie. “Her oncologist called her the most balanced and focused person she had ever known, child or adult,” Karla says.

She knows how the other girls ache for her. She knows that her loss has left them all doubly grateful that their children are alive and healthy. “Please thank Hanna for me,” Karla tells Jane. “Christie would be proud of her.”

 

 

O
n the evening of Christie’s memorial service, after everyone had gathered at Karla’s house in Edina, the time eventually came for the Ames girls to leave. They had to drive back to Marilyn’s house, thirty minutes away, to get their suitcases. The following morning, they would head for the airport to return to their own lives.

Karla watched them gather up their coats and felt an urge that she didn’t articulate. “I want to go with them,” she thought. “I don’t want them to leave without me.”

It would be such a relief if she could squeeze with them into a crowded car and just drive away, as she did on so many nights when they were young—crammed together, giggling and chattering and nudging each other. Of course, she didn’t tell them, “Please take me with you.” She remained strong. She hugged each one of them good-bye, longer and tighter than she ever had, and then she returned to the kitchen, where some of her newer friends from Edina were gathered.

The weeks and months that followed were extremely difficult for Karla. The girls would call her house and invariably get her answering machine. That was because Karla often just let the phone ring. Her life had become very narrow. She was getting up in the morning, making breakfast for Ben and Jackie, packing their lunches, getting them on the bus, and then vegetating for much of the day, often in bed.

For months, her biggest goal was to shower and get dressed before the kids got home from school so there would be some semblance of a normal home life. “That’s all I could do,” she later confided to Kelly. “I don’t mean to sound dramatic. It was just the only way I could cope, in little steps.”

Bruce was a rock for Karla, a hero, but she tried not to overwhelm him with details about her emotional pain. She just tried to get through, mostly on her own.

It took about a year after Christie’s death for her to begin turning back to the Ames girls, sharing with them things she had trouble telling others in her life.

She told them of how she’d fall asleep each night feeling sad and restless. At 3 or 4 A.M., she was often waking up with a start, in a cold sweat, confused, thinking she was back with Christie and needed to help her with her IV line.

Early in September 2005, she sent an email to everyone. “I’m having quite a week, grief-wise,” she wrote. “The first day of school was agonizing, only putting two kids on the bus, and knowing Christie would have started high school that day. Cancer sucks. I’ll sign off now, I’m such a downer this morning.”

As time went on, Jane became an especially valued confidant for Karla. “I don’t think I’ll ever again be the happy person I was,” Karla told her on the phone one night. “I accept that. I know I can’t expect to be happy, not right away, not in the same way. But I just feel as if it will never happen at all.”

When they were younger, Karla and Jane weren’t considered a close pair within the Ames girls universe. Jane was more serious, always twinned with Marilyn. Karla had more of a free spirit. So Jane and Karla were never an obvious twosome.

As adults, however, in the wake of Christie’s death, they became more closely connected. Jane could see both the intelligence and the heart within Karla—facets of her she hadn’t always paid close attention to before. And at her very lowest times, Karla found Jane to be a wise and loving source of comfort.

Both were pleased with the blossoming of their relationship, and it was noticed in the dynamics of the larger group. At their reunions after Christie died, some of the girls would mildly complain that they couldn’t get time alone with Karla because Jane was always by her side.

( Jane would remain forever bonded to Marilyn, of course, rooted in how close they were in Ames. As adults, though, there were subjects they didn’t talk about in great detail. Marilyn had married a man who viewed his Christian faith as the cornerstone of his life, and she had embraced that way of living, too. She had been taught that the only way to enter heaven was to believe in Jesus. Because she had close Jewish friends in Minnesota, and then Jane, of course, she was troubled by the thought that she’d get to heaven and might see people she cared about being turned away. “I would hate that,” she said. “I’ll want to see all my friends again after I die.” She called Jane, who explained that many Jewish people believe that when they die, they die. Jane pretty much rejected the idea that there was an afterlife. Marilyn said she has great respect for the beliefs of others, but “I’m concerned by the idea that some people may be excluded.”)

Meanwhile, in part because of her time spent with Jane, Karla became interested in Judaism. Christie’s death had led her to question her faith, and the idea of heaven and hell. She felt Judaism might be clearer about things: You die and you return to the earth. It felt more direct and manageable to Karla.

Jane answered Karla’s questions about Judaism, but never pushed. She knew that Karla’s uncertainties about faith were part of the grieving process.

Karla also confided that she sometimes felt uncomfortable seeing people at church or when she was out in public. Many people in Edina were aware of Christie’s story. After a child dies, word spreads. So when Karla ventured out of the house, she could feel people looking at her. She sensed they were whispering: “There’s that mother who lost her daughter.” She’d meet someone, introduce herself, and the other person would invariably recognize her name and say, “Oh yes, of course, you’re Karla. How are you doing?”

“Here in Edina, Bruce and I will always be the couple who lost a child,” she told Jane. “That’s just the way it’s going to be. And we make some people uncomfortable. I know we do. There will be acquaintances at the supermarket. I know they see me. But I can feel them turning their carts to go up a different aisle. They don’t know what to say, so they avoid me.”

As time went on, Karla was asked to be a spokeswoman of sorts for parents who had lost children to cancer. She agreed to attend some local cancer-research benefits, but it made her uncomfortable. “All I wanted was to be a mom, at home with my husband and kids on a Saturday night with a big bag of popcorn, watching a movie,” she said. “Now I feel as if everyone wants a piece of me.”

Karla also spoke frankly with Jane about the emotions she felt when she’d run into Christie’s old friends around town. A part of her loved seeing them blossom into teenagers—reaching age fifteen, then sixteen, then seventeen. But she also found herself feeling melancholy when she saw them.

As Bruce and Karla tried to resume their normal lives, they made a point of going on a “date” to Starbucks once a week. One day, while they were having coffee, they saw Christie’s close friend Kate at the counter. Kate gave them a big hello and told them that a lot of Christie’s old pals were there, too. “We’re all in the back doing homework,” she said. “Come say hi.”

Karla saw them back there, all of them looking so mature. “They had their laptops out. They were cramming for finals,” she later told Jane. “They’ll be seniors soon, looking at colleges. And I couldn’t stop thinking: Christie should be there. She should be there in Starbucks with those girls, buying coffee, studying for finals, talking about going to the prom, picking a college.”

There were too many encounters like that, and it was hard for Karla to find a place where she could retreat from it all, somewhere she didn’t feel sad or uneasy. “I’ve always loved my house. But I’m unhappy being in it,” she said. “I’ve always loved my neighborhood, loved Minnesota, but it doesn’t feel right being here.”

Jane and Karla today

Jane listened to her. “I think it’s hard for you to be in a place where Christie suffered so much,” she said, and her words resonated with Karla.

Christie had been cremated, and a portion of her ashes were in a garden at the church Karla’s family attended. Christie’s room had been left pretty much as it was when she lived there. For those reasons and hundreds of others, it would be hard to move out of Minnesota. The family didn’t want to feel as if they would be leaving her behind.

Still, maybe Jane had it right. “Maybe I can never be happy again if I stay here,” Karla said. “Maybe we have to think about going.”

 

 

I
n the first three years after Christie’s death, the Ames girls tried to calibrate the depths of Karla’s grief and her progress in finding ways to smile again. Many times over the phone, they just let Karla talk.

“This woman asked me if I think about Christie in every thought,” Karla said one night to Kelly. “I told her, ‘No. She’s not in every thought. But she is still definitely in every other thought.’ That’s a change from how I’ve been. So maybe that’s progress. For a long time, I was thinking of Christie every minute of every day.”

The girls had long discussions about a gift they might get Karla that would mark their friendship and remind them that they’d always be there for her. Eventually Jenny decided to commission a
Scherenschnitte,
which is German for “scissors paper-cutting.” It included the words “Friends by Chance, Sisters by Choice,” along with silhouettes of ten girls holding hands, encircling a map of the United States. On the map, ten stars marked the ten cities where the girls now live. The city of Ames, just about in the center of the map, was marked by a heart. Inside the heart was another little silhouette of a girl; this represented Sheila, who grew up in Ames and is buried there. The paper-cutting turned out to be a gift for Karla that they all shared. The next time they gathered for an annual reunion, at Diana’s house in Arizona, Jenny gave everyone a copy as a gift.

When they weren’t physically together, the girls found email to be a great way to unobtrusively stay in touch with Karla and support her. In their chatty “reply all” emails, sometimes they would mention Christie and sometimes they wouldn’t. Whether Karla answered them or not, the emails allowed Karla to know they were all thinking about her. They sent emails to mark Christie’s birthday, January 9, and the day she died, February 20. Karen sent Karla flowers on her birthday, April 25. Jenny was always sending handwritten cards.

Since both Kelly and Marilyn lived in Minnesota, they were able to pin down a few lunch dates with Karla. Once, the three of them walked around a nearby lake, just talking. Karla told them of her worries about Jackie and Ben. Ben was always a bright boy, but when he had a few issues at school—focusing, turning in homework—was it laziness? Attention deficit disorder? Or was he mourning Christie and unable to focus because he was worried about how his parents were coping? “I just don’t know the dynamics,” Karla said.

“Ben and Jackie are so protective of you,” Kelly told her. “When I see them with you, I can see them taking care of you, as if they’re saying, ‘Mom, don’t worry. It’ll be OK.’”