Until I Say Good-Bye (17 page)

Mango Madness

I
had a Mango Madness party in early June to christen the Chickee Hut and thank the people who have helped us. Our friends took hundreds of mangos from our trees and cooked with them, then brought the dishes back for the party.

I invited 125. In the end, about 100 folks came. All people who have helped me: made food, sorted photos for scrapbooks, run errands with me, pitched in to buy me an iPad, babysat, donated money.

There was the contractor who was making our home handicap-accessible at cost. Pat McKenna, the private detective. Droves of journalists and photographers I worked with at the
Palm Beach Post
.

The paper's publisher came and thanked me for giving him confidence when he first stepped into that huge role. A former writing coach from the paper, Mary, drove from Oklahoma. Tracey brought me a bracelet with a cross on it and told me she was praying for me.

My neighbor—a salty sixty-something retiree—cried as he spoke to me. “I am just so sorry, Suzanne,” Glenn said, his wife, Brigitte, tearing up as well.

Wesley often wanders next door to their house and asks to play, and they oblige. Wes was over so much and asked so many questions about the nude statue by their pool that Brigitte made a little modesty sarong for it.

People like that deserve a party.

John and I went all out. Borrowed tents and tables. Placed tiki torches all around the pool, waterfall, and Chickee hut. A friend hand-made decorative candles on round pieces of corkboard. We floated them in the pool.

“Your backyard is like a scene out of
Tropical Living
magazine,” said one guest.

We roasted a turkey and a pig outdoors. Had margarita and pina colada slushy machines and enough booze to satiate a shipful of pirates.

At one point, some dolt pulled rather than pushed the lever on the pina colada machine. It broke, spewing coconut concoction as if from a fire hose on nearby guests.

Perfect. I LOVE memorable moments!

Our friends brought eighty-five dishes, all mango, of course. There were mango quesadillas, mango slaw, mango upside-down cake, mango and jicama salad, mango black bean salad, mango salsa and chutney, mango shrimp, mango cobbler, and much much mango more. Foodie friend Jan, of Christmas dinner fame, did a yeoman's job organizing and displaying the feast.

So there we all were in the backyard. A handful, like me, under the Chickee hut. The rest on bamboo and teak chairs, or at tables covered in tropical cloths. There were lights floating in the pool, tiki torches blazing, fresh flowers, food on plates, drinks in hand, music playing.

And it rained.

Yep, it drizzled for a good hour, just enough to dampen everything, frizz the ladies' hairdos, and hang a haze of humidity over the scene like a circus tent.

Among the guests was a man named Ron, a fifty-something former reporter we lovingly call “the cranky cousin.” Ron loves to complain.

During the rain, Ron zipped over to me through the crowd and gushed: “It's wonderful, Susan. It's so wonderful. Even the rain.”

The crowd migrated under the party tent and Chickee hut, chatting away in clusters. There was an occasional squeal as people who hadn't seen one another in years embraced.

Years ago at the newspaper, there was a downsizing. A passel of people took buyouts and walked out the door. The party was the largest reassembly of those folks in years. “Probably the only time they would come together like that,” wrote a staffer to me afterward.

On Facebook, guests gushed it was “a magical evening!” and a “triumph by SpenWen!” Which made me smile.

At the party, I did not mingle. I did not see the banquet of food inside my home. I did not leave my chair.

When I walked, John had to hold me under my armpits, steadying me much as you would hold a toddler. I didn't want people seeing me like that.

It's called pride.

I also did not eat a bite of mango. With my weak hands, I ate about as tidily as a two-year-old, and it's difficult for me to talk and eat without choking.

Rather, I kept a bowlful of olives next to me. Olives are (1) delicious; (2) easy to grasp, chew, and swallow; (3) mignons of high fat—more bang for the effort; and (4) salty enough to reduce the number of times hubby had to schlep me like a toddler to the bathroom.

I remember years and years ago when I flew with my infant daughter in my arms, feeling sorry for myself that I could not put my seat tray down and eat the meal. A feeling repeated scads over the years as my young children derailed many a meal: crying, pooping, spilling, fighting.

I wondered as we planned and planned the party how I would feel when I could not eat with my friends. When I could not overindulge in booze slushies, as I already struggled to walk and talk.

I wondered how I would feel watching the lovely ladies prancing in their high heels. Heels always gave me a sexy feeling, an I-am-woman-make-me-roar sensation. Loved 'em.

But after I fell and broke my clavicle, I began to give my heels away. “What size do you wear?” I'd ask someone who'd done something nice for me.

I stopped giving them away after the following epiphany: You will be able to wear them again one day in a wheelchair. Doh!

So how did I feel the night of the party about all the above? Heels? Booze? Food? Eighty-five dishes! I formerly would have waited until no one was looking and plowed my fork into every one for a taste test.

How did I feel?

I exited without a word.

It was about ten thirty, the party pulsing, the music blaring, people laughing loudly, when John helped me walk to the bathroom for the first time.

I knew then I was too tired to talk anymore, walk anymore, and asked him to help me into bed.

The stereo was right next to the bedroom. The oldie goldie by Squeeze, “Black Coffee in Bed,” was playing. I fell asleep near instantly, perfectly happy.

A triumph indeed.

It wasn't till the next day in peace and quiet that I remembered that Mary, the woman who drove from Oklahoma, had handed me a small bag. “A present for later,” she said.

I had set it by my chair and lost track of it.

The next morning, John asked: “Who gave you the ladybug?”

I knew it was Mary.

Now Mary and I, back in the day, were not close friends, but I respected her a great deal. And upon her retirement I sent her a card with ladybugs on it.

After my diagnosis, Mary sent me a check and mentioned that she loves ladybugs—their “blessing,” as she said—and still had that card by her kitchen window.

I wrote her a thank-you note explaining that ladybugs have a special meaning to me too.

No, I don't have ladybug place mats and ladybug hand towels and ladybug salt and pepper shakers. In fact, I don't have one ladybug in my house. Just one memory of them seared in my soul.

Our nephew, Charlie, suffered for years with a rare childhood cancer called neuroblastoma. He died at age seven. He was laid to rest by his parents—John's sister Karen and her husband Bernie—in a cemetery beside a Jesuit cathedral in Pennsylvania, under a canopy of amber and gold leaves and among the graves of priests and nuns.

Two sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, including young children, were there. None of us knew what to say. We all stood paralyzed around the white box.

Then a swarm of ladybugs landed on it, and the small children ran up to it, laughing, trying to catch them.

I saw that as God's sign to us that He was welcoming Charlie. And in the smiles of the children, His reminder that life goes on.

I thought of that moment as I drew out Mary's gift, a small crimson-and-black enameled ladybug with rhinestone-edged wings that open to reveal a little box.

The huge party tent is now disassembled. The dishes cleaned. The coolers emptied. The slushy machines and keg returned.

The little ladybug sits on my dresser.

And life goes on.

The Journey Inward

May–June

Scrapbooking

P
hotos. I have thousands of my children, of our travels, of our lives. Thousands.

You know those people who have all their photos squirreled away all tidy in one spot? Each labeled with the date and place?

Yeah, I am not one of those people.

I had a digital diaspora and a print disaster. I had for eons thrown pictures in shoe boxes, stowed maxed-out digital photo cards in my desk drawer, downloaded randomly to iPhoto. I was workin' and livin' so fast, I just snapped and stowed without a second glance.

In thirteen years of parenting, I had not made one photo album for any of my three children. All their firsts were buried in boxes or scattered along the information superhighway.

Oh, the shame!

After I got sick, I'd lie awake at night, thinking, Holy crap. No one but me can find the photos, much less organize and label them. No one can make photo albums for the children—except me.

Do it now.

Right now, Susan, while you still can.

I put “photo albums” on the bucket list after my diagnosis, along with the trips. A journey not out into the world, but back through my own life.

A personal photo album for each of the kids, focused on them.

A slide show of photos of my life, for anyone who wanted them.

Stories about us. Stories that turned into this book. You are holding my gift to my children. My wish that they have their mother, even after I am gone.

I started the scrapbooks in autumn, shortly after Wesley's birthday trip to the zoo. The first task? Thumb through every single picture John and I (and our friends, and even the kids) had ever taken.

You've heard it takes a village to raise children? Yeah, it took my village to make three photo albums.

My hands and arms were so weak, I could not grasp a pile of pictures or move a box. So I asked friends to help. Day after day, while Mom lay in the hospital and I planned my travels, people came to my house and thumbed through photo boxes as I watched and barked orders.

If there was one great snap of all three kids, we needed three copies. Of two kids, two copies.

My friends couldn't distinguish the boys from one another as babies. “That's Aubrey!” I'd snap, annoyed at having to say it over and over.

It was frustrating to explain repeatedly my vision of the end product: an album for each child with every milestone. The first year, each month of miraculous growth, each birthday, each holiday, each school event, and onward.

We would make an envelope of pictures for each page, dated and labeled. I knew I would be hiring a professional scrapbooker to mount the photos. I couldn't physically do it myself, not with all the small pieces and fingerwork. So I needed organization and detail. I would give the blueprint and core material to a stranger, and she would build it.

I envisioned large, elegant leather-bound photo albums, embossed in gold, keepsakes to last my children a lifetime.

The photo sorting and labeling took months. They were social events, full of laughing, gossiping, chatting. Living while reliving.

At first, I'd linger over the adorable—the snap of roly-poly Aubrey at five months, naked in the pool, looking like a little Buddha.

Or Wesley, so chunky we couldn't button his pants.

Or Marina looking up at me with those blue eyes, smiling as she suckled at my breast.

All through Mom's illness, I lingered there. All through my trip to the Yukon, the photos stayed in their piles.

After Christmas, I realized that at the rate I was moving, I might be dead before I was done.

I ramped up the pace. Helpers arrived, and before they'd even sit down, I'd direct them to the floor. “Please spread this picture group out, and I will pick.”

They would start to linger on images, asking questions.

“Let's move on,” I'd say, hopefully with some veneer of politeness.

For weeks, I did this. Thumbing through memories. Printing the digital past. Blowing through ink cartridges.

“My God, this year never ends!” Nancy said as she sorted 1997, the year Marina was born.

Ack! Firstborn Marina had scads of photos, but the number dropped precipitously for each subsequent child. I started controlling for picture parity, too.

Finally, we were done. The photographs were ready to be mounted on pages, and I knew precisely what I wanted: black background, photos artfully laid out, dates noted.

I put out the call for a scrapbooker to hire. One who would treat my children's treasures as if they were her own. A lawyer friend recommended a woman named Carol.

Now here I must explain something—there is an entire industry in America of scrapbooking. There are stadium-size craft stores, Michael's being the most famous, which sell a gazillion specialty papers, borders, stamps, and scissors. They have aisle after aisle of intricate stickers of everything you can imagine, barns to bees, skyscrapers to seascapes.

E-ve-ry-thing.

Because scrapbookers pride themselves on making “theme” pages. And backgrounds. And designs.

I realized this when Carol visited with samples. My friend Missy was on hand to help me talk with Carol, since my language was slurred. I urged Missy to emphasize I wanted simple and sophisticated.

Carol was a sweet, sweet lady, about sixty, passionate about scrapbooking. And, in her mind, the more decorated a page, the better!

She showed me one theme page with a photo of a child in a black-and-yellow bumblebee costume in the center. The background was black-and-yellow-striped paper. The photo had a scalloped border of black and yellow, and there were bumblebee stickers buzzing about. It was hard to find the child on the page.

The Fourth of July sample page was even busier.  Scads of people dressed in red, white, and blue bordered in red, white, and blue with fireworks and star spangles everywhere.

I got a mild headache just looking at them. Carol and I were as different in style as Andy Warhol and Claude Monet. Me being Monet.

“The beauty is the pictures themselves,” I said. “I want plain black pages where photos are the focus.”

She looked horrified.

“No color?”

I harrumphed her with the following draconian edict: “You are not allowed to even GO to Michael's.”

I told her I didn't wanna see one flippin' flag or bumblebee in the books.

The color drained from her face. “But I've never done it that way,” she said. “Sure I can't just use a few things?”

She pulled out an orange background paper with printed black cobwebs. “On the Halloween page?”

It was a chore to redirect Carol's design thinking. So why not shoo her away then and there?

Because I saw something in her: the way she gushed over her grandchildren, the way she viewed my children's pictures and oohed and aaahed at each one.

I knew she would handle them like the treasures they are.

A few hours later, after a pep talk from Missy, Carol walked out the door with Wesley and Aubrey's childhoods under her arm.

Months later (I had Hungary and a cruise and Chickee hut building to oversee; Carol had surgery) she contacted me. She wanted to show me the work she had done for the boys' books and to pick up Marina's photos.

We made an appointment. Over the next few days, Steph helped me do the final prep of Marina's pictures. I realized then that I had plowed through the earlier months without feeling. I had stopped to “ooh” and “aah,” but I had held my heart back.

There was my first baby before me. At two days old. Two months. Two years. Looking so sweet, so joyous. Nothing like the teen she is now, but exactly like her too.

“This process kills me,” I said, slurring so badly Steph couldn't understand.

“I'm sorry. What? Calms you?”

“Never mind.”

Carol came. We sat under the Chickee hut. She was nervous, wondering if finicky me would like her work. She sweated a bit.

“I called my daughter this morning and asked her to wish me luck!” Carol told me, with a worried chuckle.

It's odd how a ninety-five-pound disabled woman can be so intimidating.

But I know why: Carol didn't want to let me down.

Carol pulled dozens of completed pages from her roller bag. She had neatly stowed my original photo envelope with each page. I could see the handwriting of the various friends who helped assemble, which delighted me.

The pages had a black background, with a drop of color. Carol had sparingly bordered each photo in a color that complemented the subject, but did not overpower it. She had neatly labeled in finely cut letters.

The pages were gorgeous. “I love them,” I said.

Carol sighed. “I am so relieved.”

I shall linger for the rest of my days over the finished books, the job done, no longer plowing through.

I shall relive my children's childhoods, as I hope they will one day. I hope they will see in front of them what beautiful people they are.

And how much their mother loved them.