The Week in Review, Part III

Just to warn you--this is not going to be a happy post.

The baby is, B"H, fine. Barak is fine. MHH is fine. I am fine. But the friend I've been asking you fo daven for, off and on, for the last year, is not fine.

She has ovarian cancer. Has? Had? I don't even know. She went into remission about a year and a half ago, and just over a year ago had a recurrence. If this happens with ovarian cancer the second round of treatment is usually considered palliative. Her husband did not take this approach and they did everything. But the chemo failed, the first clinical trial failed, the experimental treatment seemed to be working but then ripped her intestines apart. Right before we left for Israel, her husband called me and she was in the hospital. She nearly died then, but after a few surgeries went home a little over a month later. Before the second surgery, I talked to her on the phone about vidui, tahara, funerals and shiva. She is Jewish but not observant; her family didn't know how to have the conversation, or couldn't do it, and her sister asked me to talk to her. So I did.

She's my age--just about six months older than me. She wanted children so much. When she was diagnosed, the idea that she could never have a baby hurt more, and scared her more, than the idea of cancer. Last summer, I asked her if we could do a shinui shem for her--change her name in the hopes that it might help her evade the Angel of Death. That Shabbos, I lost a pregnancy, a few hours before we changed her name. Somehow, irrationally, I thought that maybe Hashem had let us trade--that he had taken that baby so she could have one of her own. I thought, irrationally, that maybe she would get better.

She isn't getting better. Her sister called me on motzai Shabbos, and put her on the phone, and she told me that she's dying. I don't know how imminently, but she said it was the end of the road. She said she was okay with it--she was so tired, and she was glad not to be "in fight mode" anymore, as she put it. We said goodbye. How do you do that? How do you think of everything you might ever want to tell someone, ever, and not forget anything, because you won't have another chance? And how do you do it when you are sitting in the hospital with your brand new baby boy, who will B"H be okay after all, while talking to someone who won't ever have a baby of her own?

I don't know.

I've been updating her blog for her for the last few months. It's pretty widely read. I'd post the link, but she has a trackback feature and I don't want to be sending people to my blog from hers. I don't know if she's still alive; she said someone would call me, and no one has yet, and I don't know what to say if I called. She's there with her husband and her parents and her sister. It's their time.

What is hardest about this--what kicks me in the gut the most--is the way our lives suddenly seemed to switch paths. She had a loving family, met her husband early, had every expectation that her life would give her what she wanted. She never thought anything bad would happen. I was the opposite, and I never thought anything good would happen. Now I have everything I've ever wanted, and she is, very possibly, dead by now.

What do you do with that?

I don't know. I can cuddle my boys, and be grateful for what I have. I did everything I could think of to help her, and I will try to be there for her family if they want me. But I will never understand this.