My friend August is dead. And it's going to be a long time before I really feel that news.
We met 40 years ago at an outdoor concert in Connecticut. I don't recall who was playing. Two groups of friends with little overlap had gathered together. She from one group, I from the other. We'd grown up in the same town but had attended different schools and so our paths had not crossed until that warm summer night when, as we both preferred to describe it, we met over a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
It's funny. It never dawned on me before but Kentucky Fried Chicken really did loom large in my childhood. The earliest recording I've ever heard of my own voice was, I think recorded when I was two or three years old. Certainly pre-nursery school because in the recording I can be heard saying (with great glee and enthusiasm) "Can we get Kentucky Fried Chicken?" And we're sure the recording was made before I crossed the threshold of any school or daycare because I am asking for this chicken in a decidedly Polish accent.
But I digress. August and I were both legendary eaters. And so, naturally, when confronted with a bucket of KFC, we lingered. And so, naturally, we started talking.
Turned out she'd heard a bit about me from one of the older boys who apparently had his eye on me as his next conquest. And, well, it was clear to me even then as the seduction was unfolding, that my new gal pal was meticulously orchestrating the entire affair. She thought I was unaware. But I was rarely unaware. Especially when it came to her machinations.
It seemed a shame that we'd only just met a couple of months before I would leave town to go away to boarding school. And we might not have cemented a bond were it not for one important shared detail.
We were both gay and both on the cusp of our sexual awakening. And, as our teens blew into our twenties, we became that gentle safe harbor for each other, a place where we could bring our excitement and obsession with every person we either pined for or bedded. As a lesbian, she never fit the stereotype of chaste monogamous stability. I, on the other hand began my queer career with an absolute inability to hide or even camouflage my feelings of love which seemed to spring up in me whenever I got naked with another man.
August took me to my first gay bar, a dive in New Haven called Partners. And she watched with delight as I made out on the dancefloor with an off-duty cop. She made out with a tall black woman who she was disappointed to discover was actually a drag queen. And so, another story was added to the file.
My friend was very smart. And probably could have been attending any of the Ivy League colleges were it not for a hostile father who hid her acceptance packets from top-rated schools that didn't square with his plan to keep his daughter local so she could help him manage his properties, manage his estranged wife and manage his ever-worsening heart condition.
At the age of 16 she'd saved up enough money working the front desk at the GTE Management Development Center that she waltzed into the local Cadillac dealership and purchased her first car with cash.
She and I would sleep in that car parked at Compo beach after a night out with the gays. She couldn't face her parent's homophobic rage and so would make up all sorts of lies to cover for our late nights. As for me, after the first morning I came crawling home after spending the night with my sort-of boyfriend and ran into my father descending the stairs on his way out for his morning jog, Dad informed me that he'd prefer it if I just spent the entire night out and called ahead to say so, rather than hurrying back in time for dawn. My father was practical in ways few parents I knew were. And instead of appreciating that, I still managed to mine his reaction for as much shame as I could possibly endure.
From the moment August was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer, she refused to be upbeat. And as I watched her survive more than a dozen rounds of chemo, and nearly 11 years of treatment after one doctor had given her 6 weeks along with her diagnosis, I grew to respect her for knowing what worked for her. Her rage at doctors and nurses who made mistakes, at friends who forgot the details of her illness and really at bottom at the absolute horror of the disease and its relentless pull down, down, down into the grave... her rage kept her alive. And so I celebrated it.
An interesting thing I observed in the final weeks she was with us. Without exception, as each nurse or doctor filed into her hospital room to deliver bad news or say goodbye-disguised-as-hello, tears were shed. And make no mistake. There is hardly a staff member at Yale New Haven Medical who did not at least once find themselves on the receiving end of one of her full-throttle tantrums. She had yelled prolifically at all of these people. And somehow they were all having a really hard time keeping it together seeing her in the end stages.
I chalk this up to a simple truth about human nature. No matter how annoying at the time, at our core, we appreciate being held to a higher standard, being pushed to do better, work harder, and dig deeper for the logic that most assume must be lying there at the bottom of systems, protocols, rules and regulations. If something was stupid, August would say it. And I think in the end, by pushing every person she encountered to focus, think, do better, she made herself something more valuable, more precious more painful to see disappear.
And if I was acting like a fool, she'd say it and she'd also cry. So many times as I struggled to overcome my seemingly bottomless reservoirs of self-doubt, self-loathing and guilt, she had difficulty stomaching it. It was in those moments that I knew she loved me.
And it was when she told me she finally wanted to die and I resisted the impulse to return to one of my monologues about more clinical trials and hope and instead looked her straight in the eye and asked "Are you sure?" that she must have known I loved her equally.
My friend was stubborn, opinionated, judgmental and prone to paranoia. But when we ate or laughed together, the whole world seemed to fade into the background.
As is sadly often the case with me and the people I love, now that she's gone, really gone, I'm stuck reviewing an endless list of missed opportunities I had to enjoy her. I'll try to find a more positive view of things... though she'd likely not approve.
