My father called me one Sunday afternoon in 1994 to tell me that a long-lost friend of mine had sent him a letter and asked him to put her in touch with me. He didn’t want to do anything without talking to me first, so he called.
“I got a letter from your friend, Debbie,” he said.
“Debbie Englishman?” I asked. “Why on earth is she writing to you to get in touch with me?”
“Apparently, she has cancer and wanted to talk to you.”
I took down the information from my dad, and asked him to mail me the letter.
I was incredulous. Why on earth was Debbie interested in speaking with me? In 1989, she was my closest friend. Well, that is until she dumped me.
It was stupid in hindsight, you know. Even she admitted it. I had just given birth to my first child, Sarah, just two months earlier. It was my birthday and Deb had planned for us to have lunch at a restaurant near her home, which was about one and a half hours away from mine.
Sarah had her first cold and I was terrified to drive for so long a time with an infant. I was new at this mommy stuff. What if she cried? What if I needed to nurse her? What if? So I called Debbie and told her that I just couldn’t handle the three hour round trip with an infant in the back seat. I was so sure that she would understand.
Wrong.
From that moment on she stopped talking to me. Just like that. The three of us even stopped by her home when we were in her area on a family outing some five months later. Don, her husband came to the door.
“She isn’t available right now, “ he said, looking embarrassed. I needed to pee, Sarah needed changing and I missed my best friend.
Don slowly closed the door. And we headed back to the car. That was that.
Still, five years later, she wrote to my dad. I have an unusual maiden name and so finding my parents in the Philadelphia area was pretty easy. She sent them a letter asking that they tell me that she wanted to get in touch. She had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years earlier. She felt her time was short and she wanted to make amends. Jesus was telling her that it was the right thing to do.
For Debbie, that meant she had to do it. She lived the life of a good Christian and if Jesus was telling her to get in touch with me, then she was going to swallow her pride and get in touch with me.
My dad read me her phone number.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” my husband said when I told him about the letter. “She’s sick and she’s afraid that she’ll go to hell if she doesn’t apologize to you. What if she dies? Do you really need this in your life right now?”
I thought about it for maybe two minutes. Then I picked up the phone and called Deb.
She couldn’t believe it. I never asked why she did what she did. I just asked how she was feeling and what the doctors were saying. We caught up with each other… my little family had grown by one… I gave birth to Max in 1991, we had moved to the Philadelphia area in 1993, my parents were doing well, and all was right with the world.
She filled me in on what had happened in her life since the day she walked out of mine. In 1992, she started to feel weird. She was sick a lot. And during one really bad bout of fever, her stomach became badly distended. She claimed she looked pregnant.
So Deb went to the doctor, who sent her for tests. Within a week, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She underwent treatment and was now doing okay, though the prognosis was not good.
We decided to get together for lunch a few weeks later. She too had moved to the Philadelphia area, though she still lived almost 90 minutes from our home.
I arrived at her house and as you can imagine, it was awkward. I made small talk with her and Don and shared some photos of the kids. Then Deb and I went off to a quiet country café for lunch.
It was like the five years had never happened. We gossiped about old friends and talked about the old days when I was a copywriter and she was my art director at the small local ad agency where we had first met. We talked about religion, family, work and the ordeals of cancer treatment. Cancer wasn’t her only challenge. Her family was going through difficult times, she couldn’t work and so money was tight.
“How on earth do you get out of bed in the morning?” I asked.
I expected her to tell me that Jesus was getting her through all of this. But surprisingly, she said that she focused on a new way of thinking.
“Well, I just take things one day at a time,” she replied. “If today is a bad day, then I just let it be bad. I don’t fight it. Hopefully tomorrow will be better. And it often is!”
“Oh, I could never do that!!!” I replied.
“Sure you could, Sue. It’s a matter of perspective. The past is past. You can’t really control the future – even though you think you can. The only thing you can control is today, or maybe only this very moment – or rather, your reaction to it.”
She was completely right. But it took seven years before I learned that lesson. And it took a jolt to my system for that lesson to take.
