Preparing to live

My friend Jan whose presence spanned my entire life has been gone for just a little more than a year.

I wasn't very old when my mother was struck with pleurisy. My parents lived and worked on the Goshen farm. Jan was one of the "withersoeverers," sent by headquarters to help take care of us kids and carry my mother's load of the chores until she could get back on her feet. Jan was barely nineteen and painfully perky. Her sense of humor and adventure kept us hustled and bustled and well-cared for during those months that my mother was too weak to leave her bed.

Years later during my first (and last) year of Bible school, Jan and her husband would let me stay with them when a stomach ulcer grew like a Sycamore tree up out of my guilt. She would make me peppermint tea and lend me books that were definitely not on the approved reading list. I learned to appreciate her spirit, and how even though she tried to bend and conform, she never really lost herself.

In the early 90's when Jim, Jayna and I moved to NH, we worked on staff with Jan and her husband. She had given birth to a daughter late in life. We had something in common through our girls. Laurie was two and Jayna was three when we began to know one another in a new way. We learned about each other over our children's squabbles, through the sticky days of lemonade stands and cookie baking, and in those moments of deep motherhood understanding that you share when you watch your children climb on the bus the first day of school. The bus is so big, and they are so little that you are sure the doors will close and they will disappear forever behind that hinged mouth. We prayed for our kids. Swapped recipes. And, we tried to be good wives and mothers.

We also shared an intense passion for yard sales. Because we didn't shop on the Sabbath, we would sometimes take the van to Lewiston, ME where yard sales always started on Friday. We would leave before the sun came up and arrive at the Ramanda Inn just outside town. We would gulp coffee or cocoa from our thermos and eat some sort of nourishment from a baggie. Then we would buy the paper. Jan spread a laminated map out on the hood of the van. Because she was most familiar with Lewiston, it was her job to circle all the addresses as I read them off. This process would take about 10 minutes. Then Jan would calculate the best route to hit the most yard sales in the least amount of time in the best neighborhoods first. This ritual was always part of the trip, and it yielded us both a great deal of pleasure and treasure. We would fill the van and sometimes even strap furniture to the roof as we headed back home at sunset.

It was Jan who taught me how to haggle. How to look not interested when you were most interested. It was a fine art, but one she had mastered. While my heart would pound at the mere thought of asking someone to lower the price on their mother's rocking chair, Jan would maneuver so smoothly that the people would end up thinking it was their own idea to take $10 off the original asking price.

The fall before she died, I visited Jan with my friend, Peter. I wanted Peter to know who she was. She loved him and was every bit the gracious lady sitting with us in a pile of leaves on her lawn. Her full denim skirt billowed like a tent around the flesh and bones that had been so dear to me through the years. She weighed 105 pounds at the time.

A few weeks later, I returned alone to see her. I spent two hours with her in her room helping sort photos of her life. When she got tired, I lay with my head in the crook of her arm. She absent-mindedly stroked my head and comforted me. If that was wrong, I am sorry, but I needed a chance to say g'bye to a woman who had meant so much to me through the years.

She asked me if I thought God intended sickness, and did I think that maybe if she just believed more, would she be healed. Grief and anger choked me too much to respond immediately.

When I did answer, I said: I don't know what you have been reading or who you have been listening to, but you need to stop. NOW. God does not always heal people, and it doesn't mean that you failed somewhere along the way.

We had been so taught that if bad things happen, it could be directly traced to sin in our lives. Like the guy in the Old Testament who hides something in his tent and everyone gets sick until he confesses. The legacy. Our legacy. Even at the end.

She said she was preparing to live and preparing to die. And, I thought that if I learned nothing else from my dear friend, that was a lesson I could practice every day.

Less than six months later on a Sabbath morning in March, I was traveling to the Maine Boatbuilders' Show in Portland. What prompted me to think of Jan in that moment, I will never know, but an image of God's breath warming Jan from the inside out came to me in such a real way that I felt only peace. It was then that my phone rang, and I heard the news that Jan had gone to heaven.

"Prepare to live while you prepare to die."

I don't think you can go wrong with that one. No regrets.