Still Hanging In…

My dearest friend will be paying us a visit tomorrow, a quick stopover in Toronto in the midst of a heavy work schedule that has her crisscrossing Canada for three seasons each year.

I’m always very happy to see her. However rare our opportunities have been to get together in person over the years, distance has never been an obstacle in our friendship. Granted, we’ve likely seen more of each other in the last eighteen months than in all the years leading up to them combined.

We’ll greet each other with a big hug and enjoy our hours together. The goodbyes however, get more difficult each time we part. We both know that it might be the last time we see each other. Yet we continue to end our visits saying that we’ll see other soon again.

There are friends whom I see more frequently, others less so when distance and busy schedules get in the way. There are also the friends (and family) for whom I know seeing me is overwhelmingly difficult.

I try to understand.

The hard part for me is not knowing if the last time I visited with a friend will have been the last time I’ll have seen them. I suspect for some, their perspective is that they’ve already said their goodbye to me. Sometimes I wonder if I missed it. Were they saying farewell and I didn’t recognize it for what it was?

Looking from the outside in, this situation is ugly. I’m hooked up to oxygen tubing, confined to bed, and I know it’s hard to watch me try to shift about in bed, or hobble to the bathroom, or see me wincing when I’m not doing a good job of covering up the physical pain.

From the inside out however, I’m still me. I still want to converse about everyday subjects, joke around and share in the ups and downs of the lives of my family and friends.

Inside, I’m still very much alive. My body may be wasting away, but my mind is sharp and wanting to keep engaged with life outside of this bedroom. It just has to come to me now.

My hope was, and is, that I’m not going to need to say goodbye to anyone. I’ll hopefully just slip away in the night, and would be happy at the prospect of friends saying “I just spoke with Sandy the other day, discussing the kids, our vacation plans. Who would have imagined that she’d be gone just like that?”

Of course it’s not “just like that”, the way out the door has been agonizingly prolonged. Even so, I’m not yet ready for goodbyes. In fact, I’m still making new friends along the way (a brave lot, wouldn’t you say?)