By Lori Parks
Beth spent the following year shuttling into
Manhattan every Friday, alternating between radiation
therapy and chemotherapy. We still were in touch, but
rather than call her every day, I would phone a few days
after her treatments, always aware on those intervening
days that she was scared, alone. Those days she spent in
agony –vomiting, her entire body aching – were as
unfathomable to me as the size of the universe, as
untouchable as the farthest star. I couldn’t imagine
what those days were like for her, those hours of
wondering whether she would ever celebrate her 25th
birthday, bear children, see her sisters grow old. She
spoke about those d a y s only afterwards: She slept a
lot, read a lot, thought a lot.
Today, two years later, with Beth 95 percent certain that
her cancer won’t return, there are things she has been
through that I will never know. She lived at the threshold
of her own death for a year, and I can only wonder what that
was like. And, for all our wanting to intertwine our lives,
for all our shared moments of laughter and anguish, she
survived this ordeal – those moments flung up against her
own mortality – with only herself to sustain her.
We still are close, still see each other every week for
coffee, trying to unravel the meaning of our lives, lives
growing more complicated as the years pass. Yet sometimes
when I look at her, I remember the journeys through tunnels
of darkness that each of us must make: alone, afraid, with
only ourselves as our guides.
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