My Glory Was I Had Such Friends Read online

  Dedication

  For Scott and Casey

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  12 Days

  11 Days

  10 Days

  8 Days

  6 Days

  Two Months Later

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Amy Silverstein

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  The conversations in this book are written from my best-efforts recollection and memory to capture the accurate essence, meaning, and sentiment of what was said. All incidents and people are real, although I have changed some names and identifying characteristics to preserve anonymity.

  I want to mention here the vital presence and extraordinary role played by my husband, Scott, who was with me in this story every day in every way with infinite heart and mind. And while I could have crafted a beautiful memoir about the glory that was Scott (as I aimed to do in Sick Girl), this time around I chose instead to shine a light on women’s friendships. Scott has been gracious to support my writing him into the background of this book when, in fact, the inimitable power of his love was front and center in California and was the constant that held each and every one of us afloat while there.

  Prologue

  Joy

  Jill

  Leja

  Jody

  Lauren

  Valerie

  Robin

  Ann

  Jane

  We were grown daughters all, some mothers of high school or college kids, a few of us seasoned career women. We had become our middle-aged selves—our wisest, steadiest, most powerful selves yet. And we discovered a new best in ourselves together because I was dying, really dying this time, and we weren’t twenty-five anymore.

  I had been ill back then too. Shockingly ill. But in our midtwenties, we had not yet become fully formed women. Still emerging into adulthood, we easily turned as moody and flip as self-interested teenagers. Our focus was on dating or setting up newly married lives, finding our way at first jobs or completing graduate school. We floated above small troubles, giggling arm in arm through parties and bars that kept us out late into the New York City night. We invested more in great shoes and best-fit jeans than in how to rise up for a friend who needed some kind of crazy surgery we could not begin to understand.

  Our empathy had not ripened at twenty-five.

  At fifty, it had.

  So in the winter of 2014, when a doctor said that my transplanted heart was in precarious failure, my friends paused their lives and rallied around me. When I was told my best shot at retransplant depended on my husband, Scott, and me moving immediately from our house in New York to a hospital room in California, friends followed in constant rotation—abandoning must-do responsibilities that left husbands scrambling, bosses irritated, and teenagers unsupervised by the crucial mothering eye.

  A spreadsheet appeared, and friends signed on for three- or four-day blocks, some for multiple visits, filling every calendar space for March, April, and May so that each woman could pass the baton seamlessly from one to the next. They booked plane reservations for cross-country flights, looking for bargains and counting up frequent-flyer miles, hoping for the best but paying full price if that was what it took to ensure that I would never have to spend a night without one of them there.

  When I woke again and again in the darkness of that hospital room so far from home, engulfed by what felt like a literal heart on fire that scorched a line of breath-stopping pain from shoulder to shoulder, my friends threw their arms toward me from where they slept on a low cot beside my hospital bed. So exhausted, these angel women, barely able to keep their heavy eyes open as they reached under my pajama top and swept their fingertips across my trembling back—at midnight, two in the morning, four thirty, and again at five. And that was on a good night.

  Jill, my closest friend since the second grade, usually so perky and tireless in spite of a demanding job in advertising sales and two young kids, now bleary-eyed and slumped, hair gathered on her head in a pineapple-top ponytail. Lovely Jane, my go-to style guru who never seemed to mind my copycat attempts—Tell me where you got those boots! What’s the name of that lipstick?—at once turned hospital drab in frayed sweatpants, her perfectly arched brows collapsed under worry weight. Lauren, the ever-meticulous mother of three and my stalwart escort to many of the surgeries, procedures, and scary medical tests that came along with my decades of heart transplant life, transformed by this California hospital stay into a cautious half-sleeping night owl in case she had to run and grab a nurse, flailing for her glasses at the faintest sound of my recurring whimper, “The pain . . . it’s coming again . . .” Val, all steadiness and serenity even as my roommate during our grueling first year of law school, suddenly under extreme stress mixed with oncoming menopause—sweltering, self-spritzing frenetically with the spray bottle–fan combo she had brought with her all the way from Durham. And Ann, my hippie sister-in-law in platform flip-flops, her Mother Earth smile surrendering to tautened lips, wordless, just holding my hand.

  Rougher than I had ever seen them, these five friends—along with four others—cared for me until the sun came up, showered quickly, if at all, and got right back to my bedside, cheerful and energetic. They pulled surprise gifts from their suitcases, anything to help me get through another day: buttery flannel pajamas with puppy-face print, peppermint lip gloss, lavender spray, a mud mask for two that transformed the hospital bed to a spa chaise one night. And then there were the rubber chickens and feather boas tacked to the wall, purple peace signs and Hawaiian leis hanging from the window shades—all purchased and arranged by Joy, my friend with a high-powered, executive-level job in Washington, DC, and yet also the one who flew to California to sleep beside me more nights than anyone else, always with a bag of new decorations to outdo the old, intent on transforming my room into its most ridiculous, death-distracting state.

  But more than the tending and diverting, there was conversation—our best talks yet. No filters. Last-chance candor. It was a time and place for unfastening. We got serious. Turned silly. Came clean. Worried. Mused. Raged. Laughed. Our honesty soared with purposeful abandon, answering a call of necessity that challenged each of us: If not now, when? We dove into truths and discoveries about ourselves, our husbands, our children, and our group of friends that lit the space around us to shimmering, no matter how alarming the signs that time was running out on my heart. Suspended in this desperately enchanted bubble, we found a new way to talk about life.

  And when death did come up, in what were the frankest conversations of all, it was clear that no friend wanted me to die on her watch.

  But neither did she want it to happen when she was not by my side.

  Intense hours were spent together over the span of two and a half months—friend to friend, with unprecedented privacy for long stretches during the day and late into the night, and the sense that time was so short we absolutely could not delay going deep and learning from one another. Because, after all, every time one of these women left my California hospital room and flew home, she assumed she might never see me again.

  This is the story of what that assumption brought out in each of us: our finest yet.

  The result was transcendent.

  1

  Our words are winding down. There are silences, which means one of us is
going to suggest we call it a night. And I’m thinking, Okay, here it comes, it’s got to come now—a question from Joy that I should be prepared for, but I’m not.

  She gets up from the couch and stands in front of me, puts her hands on her hips, and, yes, just as I thought: “How about if I sleep in your room tonight? It might make you feel more comfortable.”

  I look up at her and force a grin, closemouthed.

  I’m buying time here. A quick answer could hurt her feelings.

  Joy extends her arms, and I grab hold as she pulls me to my feet with a heave-ho. “Hey, look at that,” she says, pointing, and I turn to see the deep well in the sofa cushion left by my arms-around-knees position.

  “Guess I haven’t moved in a while.”

  Joy nods. She and I both know that I didn’t protest when she told me to stay put at lunchtime and fetched us each a yogurt from the fridge, and then again when dinner came and she carried into the family room two bowls of soup on a tray.

  “So how ’bout it? Bunk up tonight?” she asks again, this time doing the raised eyebrow thing that prompts me to put my hands on her shoulders and say I’m fine and make a little joke about how, with Scott away on a business trip, I want to take advantage of the rare occasion when the remote control is mine, all mine.

  It’s a flimsy excuse, I know. But it’s the best I can do on the spot.

  Joy keeps on, “I hereby cede the remote control to you, my friend, and may you watch The Real Housewives of New York until your brain melts—won’t bother me a bit. I’ve got a pile of work I planned on attacking in bed tonight anyway.”

  At midnight? After a day like this?

  I don’t believe her.

  But, then, she doesn’t believe me either. I am not one to care a whit about the remote, and I’ve never once seen the Real Housewives of anywhere. And Joy knows it.

  “What if I put on The Kardashians?” I say, teasing her with the guilty TV pleasure we’ve both fessed up to following with odd fascination.

  “Then I’ll hope it’s a rerun.”

  “Oh, you watch those too—admit it,” I say, trying to keep the banter going because it feels—for the moment, at least—like us. But each successive comeback is an energy drain. We’re both so weary, even our kidding words drop to almost whispers.

  And now we’re moving through the family room and on toward the kitchen—fluffing one cushion and not another, grabbing two mugs and leaving two glasses, turning off random lights. We float, wide-eyed, absent, leaving imperfection in our wake.

  Without saying out loud to each other in agreement, Let’s leave the rest ’til morning, we drift to the base of the staircase as one. Here, we find Joy’s overnight bag at our feet, unmoved from the spot where she dropped it in deliberate haste after coming straight from the airport. “And don’t ask me if I want to head to the guest room to freshen up,” she instructed early this morning after a quick hello hug on arrival at my front door, the New York Times from the driveway tucked under her arm, “because I don’t. Just tell me which couch to sit on and let’s get to it.” I cocked my head to the side and smiled, not knowing quite what to make of this whirl of bossiness that was now spinning itself out of its winter coat and heading toward the kitchen, calling out, “Let’s make tea!”

  This was my friend Joy—exaggerated.

  I’d noticed the same a week earlier when I called her at the office and interrupted her pressure cooker workday with an awkward ask: “Here’s the thing—on the sixth, Scott has to go away for three days, ah . . . do you think maybe you could . . .”

  “Done!” She didn’t even pause to check her calendar.

  “But, Joy, wait . . . let me just tell you, it’s not going to be any fun. I’m at my worst and—”

  “I’m there. End of discussion. Email me the exact dates. And now I . . . I’m sorry, but I have to, uh . . .”

  “You’re in a meeting.”

  “Sort of, I mean, it’s okay, I can talk now if . . .”

  “Go, go! I’m good—really!”

  And so began the dance—the gliding around each other, watchful, careful.

  Uncharacteristically choreographed. I wasn’t good at all, and Joy’s executive-level job was not flexible enough to allow her to just drop out of the office on a week’s notice.

  We were not ourselves with each other. But how could we be? My transplanted heart was coming to its abrupt end. It was not a case of Let’s try this medicine or Let’s watch and wait. No—it was over. There was no definitive bright spot of hope, only retransplant—if my heart had enough beats left to get me there.

  And if I chose to let it try.

  This was the subject matter we would take on for three uninterrupted days together: whether I would choose to rise up one last time and brave the harrowing ordeal and risks of a retransplant. It was so far beyond anything we had combed through or sorted out in the past, even considering how adept Joy had become at digging into the nitty-gritty of medical crises in her role as good friend to a heart transplant patient for more than two decades. It would require of each of us a new kind of poise—an affected one—and a backbone so straight and sturdy it could support a basis for communication we’d never had use for in the past: sparing each other.

  With her high-energy, can-do determination to be the best friend ever—at my side 24/7, taking Scott’s place by listening, reasoning, and weighing the terrible options with me—Joy strove to keep hidden the deep worry and sadness that had her dabbing her eyes right until the cab dropped her at the bottom of my driveway. By the time she rang my doorbell, the wad of tissues peeking out from her fist and the red-ringed eyes that greeted mine were the only outward sign of her concern, masked by her otherwise bright smile and enthusiastic embrace.

  And me, with my I’m fine nonsense, greeting Joy in a way that would put her at ease—dressed in exercise leggings and a bright-colored running top, as if I might head to the gym at any moment. I even broke my weeklong stint of bedroom-slipper shuffling with a purposeful lacing-up of well-worn Nikes, the ones I ran miles in until about a month ago when intense pain started shooting down my arms at random moments and my doctor told me, “Maybe you should lay off exercise until we know what’s going on.”

  I hadn’t had reason to put on my running sneakers again until today, for Joy.

  For the performance I would do for her, the high kicks, twirls, and dips to show how fine I was.

  There I was this morning at the front door, with my freshly washed, bouncy hair, a little mascara and blush, and a lip-gloss smile that I stretched wider than usual. This way, I hoped, I might create more room in my airway to better handle the breathlessness that accompanied even the smallest expenditure of energy. Like when I followed Joy’s quickstep dash into the kitchen, trailing behind in slow motion, hoping she wouldn’t notice the lag. By the time I joined her, she’d already flipped the lid off the teakettle and had turned to the sink to fill it. I grabbed hold of the nearest countertop for support. She swung back around and I let go in a flash.

  “I have to say, you look great . . . mmm, maybe a little on the thin side, though,” she said, placing the kettle down and turning her head this way and that, taking me in with a long look.

  “I’ve been eating fine.”

  I haven’t been.

  Joy’s cell phone rang just then. She ran back to the staircase to retrieve it from her bag and called out, “I gotta pick this up, it’s the office. But it should be quiet after this—no more calls for the rest of the day.”

  Joy had a team of nearly seven hundred people working under her at Fannie Mae. Her decade-long senior vice president role in the Washington, DC, office had shifted with the fallout of the housing crisis, and she now found herself at the very center of the national programs to restructure mortgages and help people stay in their homes. She rose tirelessly to the challenge of round-the-clock hours and daunting demands, often sitting in hot seats in front of US Treasury big shots who would make a less stalwart VP melt. Always quick to u
se a baseball reference, Joy would tell me that she strove to “knock it out of the park” when it came to her work, and this meant overpreparing and overperfecting to achieve an outcome that reverberated beyond corporate walls.

  Her work mattered on a grand scale, certainly, and also a personal one. Joy told me many times how deeply connected she felt to the results of her efforts—to the thousands and thousands of people who could benefit from or be hurt by the policies she helped inform and shape. After all, she herself grew up in a barely middle-class family that lived on an income that might easily have placed them in the same financial perils she now sought to relieve for others.

  So when she picked up her cell phone early this morning—and then again at eleven, twice in the late afternoon, and one more time after dinner—“Oops, it’s the Treasury again, I’ll take this in the other room”—I was not at all surprised. Part of what I love and admire about Joy is exactly this: her unstoppable devotion, both as a working person and as a friend. She’s one of those rare women who somehow manages to succeed in filling these two roles to fullest capacity without showing a hint of strain. Friends, as well as the tall stacks of work on Joy’s desk, get the absolute best out of her. But this comes at a personal cost, of course.

  “I’m a giver, what can I say?” is how she has responded to my frequent urging to ease up on her work schedule after consecutive weeks of punishing business travel, or at least to say no to those out-of-town friends of friends who ask last minute to stay at her apartment for a few days of sightseeing in Washington the weekend she finally returns home. (She welcomes them instead.)

  And now I see in front of me again a worn-out but ever-willing Joy. This time, though, I am the one taking her giving, having stolen from her one full workday so far and, at this late hour, some much-needed sleep time as well.

  I reach for her overnight bag at the bottom of the staircase and am met with a grab for the handle and a squawk along the lines of Are you kidding me?