in Cambodia and dancing at dawn on the grand walkways of the Taj Mahal. As I
balanced my checkbook, picked up my dry cleaning, and watched the leaves
wither and drop from the trees along Euclid Avenue, Suzanne was careening
through hot, humid Bangkok in a tuk-tuk, hooting—as I imagined it—with joy. I
don’t, in fact, know what any of her travels looked like or where she actually
went, because she wasn’t one to send postcards or keep in touch. She was too
busy living, stuffing herself full of what the world had to give.
By the time she got home to Maryland and found a moment to reach out to
me, the news was different—so clanging and dissonant from my image of her that
I could hardly take it in.
“I have cancer,” Suzanne told me, her voice husky with emotion. “A lot of
it.”
Her doctors had just diagnosed it, an aggressive form of lymphoma, already
ravaging her organs. She described a plan for treatment, pegging some hope to
what the results could be, but I was too overwhelmed to note the details. Before
hanging up, she told me that in a cruel twist of fate her mother had fallen gravely
ill as well.
I’m not sure that I ever believed that life was fair, but I had always thought
that you could work your way out of just about any problem. Suzanne’s cancer
was the first real challenge to that notion, a sabotage of my ideals. Because even if
I didn’t have the specifics nailed down yet, I did have ideas about the future. I
had that agenda I’d been assiduously maintaining since freshman year of college,
stemming from the neat line of boxes I was meant to check.
For me and Suzanne, it was supposed to go like this: We’d be the maids of
honor at each other’s weddings. Our husbands would be really different, of
course, but they’d like each other a lot anyway. We’d have babies at the same
time, take family beach trips to Jamaica, remain mildly critical of each other’s
parenting techniques, and be favorite fun aunties to each other’s kids as they
grew. I’d get her kids books for their birthdays; she’d get mine pogo sticks. We’d
laugh and share secrets and roll our eyes at what we perceived as the other
person’s ridiculous idiosyncrasies, until one day we’d realize we were two old
ladies who’d been best friends forever, flummoxed suddenly by where the time
had gone.
That, for me, was the world as it should be.