She smiles at Flo, but it’s a sad smile. “I’ve never married. That’s why I got a cat. I was getting too lonely.”
Flo looks up quickly at Teresa, who smiles and shrugs. “It’s true.”
Flo has always appreciated someone who leads with honesty and openness from the get-go, someone who doesn’t wait to say things that they feel are important to say. One of her best friends, Gretchen Hardy, was a woman she met at a party who, after they exchanged names, said, “I have to tell you, parties make me terribly nervous. I might have to disappear into the bathroom a few times to collect myself.” And Flo said that she felt nervous at parties, too, and asked would Gretchen mind if Flo joined her in the bathroom? Gretchen said certainly not, and that was it, they were close friends for many years.
And so now, feeling free to be honest herself, Flo says, “Huh, I would not have pegged you as being lonely. You seem so friendly and outgoing.”
“I try to be. But lately the loneliness has gotten a bit more…pronounced,I guess I’d say.”
“I see. Well, I’m sorry about that. Loneliness can be awful hard to bear. After my husband died—this was years ago—I thought I’d plum lose my mind from missing him. I have to say it never went away, completely. But now that I’m…Well, I won’t have to worry about it much longer.”
“How do you mean?”
Flo puts down her fork. “I’ve been given only a few weeks to live. My doctor just told me. I hadn’t even been feeling that poorly, just losing a lot of weight, and feeling dizzy sometimes. Isn’t it funny how you can have a thing raging in your body and be so unaware?”
Teresa sits very still, staring intently at Flo. Then she asks gently, “Do you want to talk about it? I’m a death doula.”
“What’s that?”
“We help people transition from life to death. Some call us death midwives.”
“You don’t say,” Flo says, in what she hopes is a polite way, but she is thinking,Death midwife!!She looks out the kitchen window, where the clouds are pinkening with the sunset, and points to them. “Look at that,” she tells Teresa.
Teresa looks out and says, “Beautiful. You know, I had a patient once tell me that the best index he had to his mental health was whether or not he looked up at the sky every day.”
“I do have to say I wish I didn’t have to go quite yet,” Flo says. “Not just yet. But then I guess that’s what everybody says to you.”
“It depends,” Teresa says. “Sometimes people are ready,even more than ready. Other times they’re not ready at all. One man I knew was terminal—he had been given just a couple of weeks, and he was sent to a hospice facility. He’d been a wonderful gardener; people used to come by his house just to stare at his flowers and vegetables. He told the staff he didn’t mind dying so much, but he was worried about who would take care of his garden.
“Well, he lay around and waited. Waited some more. Days passed, then weeks, and finally he said, ‘I have a proposition. Let me go home and garden some more and then I’ll come back.’ He moved out of hospice and back into his house. Got right back out in his garden. Two years later, his granddaughter found him sitting in front of his fireplace on a winter afternoon. He had passed away peacefully there.”
“Isn’t that something,” Flo says.
Teresa leans forward slightly to ask Flo, “Do you believe in miracles?”
Flo shrugs. “I never really asked myself that question. But I guess I do. Seems like miracles abound, only usually we aren’t paying enough attention.” She gestures out the window again.
“I mean miracles like unexplained cures for illness,” Teresa says.
“I’ve heard of that,” Flo says, “only, with someone my age, seems like it might be unlikely. Not impossible! But unlikely.”
“I always think thatwillhas so much to do with it,” Teresa says.
“Will who?” Flo asks, but she knows it’s not much of a joke. She says, “I have heard of people making up their mindthat this or that was or was not going to happen. One of these new wave things, I believe it’s called—”
“New age?” Teresa says.
“That’s it. They say you manifest something. I guess the idea is that if you just believe hard enough…Well, anyway, I may be old, but I am not too old to get me some daisies from the backyard to put on this table!”
Teresa smiles. “I’ll help you pick some.”
Flo goes to her cupboard for a certain dark blue vase, her daisy vase. “Wait till you see how perfect they look in here,” she says.
After they gather daisies in the fading light, Flo puts them on the table and they eat the delicious cookies Teresa has brought—the old Mrs. Fields recipe, Teresa tells Flo. Then Teresa looks at her watch and says, “I’d best get back to Flash. That’s what I decided to name him.”
Teresa washes up her yellow casserole dish in the sink, dries it off, and then tells Flo, “I have a tradition where if I bring someone dinner, I gift them with the dish it came in. May I leave this for you?”
“Oh, my. Well, I do love the color yellow and I love polka dots, too. But are you sure you want to part with it? It’s just as cheerful as can be. A kind of Kewpie doll of a dish, do you know what a Kewpie doll is?”
