My Friend Janet

Dear Blog Readers,

You are the best. You read this blog -- you sew, you laugh, we share stuff. And you almost NEVER yell at me. That's the very definition of a good girl friend.

I feel like we're in this thing together -- and even though we maybe never met -- I know you.

You are somebody's daughter, mother, sister, friend. When I write this blog, I think of you as my "sewing sisters".

And there is nothing more important to a woman's sanity than having other women as friends.

This is a piece I wrote for a writing class. The assignment was to write a letter to somebody you've lost. I wrote to my college roommate Janet.

She died almost 20 years ago. I try to make the most of every day...maybe a teeny little bit because she never had that much time.... And I miss her.

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Dear Janet,

When Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer, I thought about you.  You always made me believe you were going to beat it. It was like that with us. From our first day as roommates at Wartburg College, I believed everything you told me. You were the smartest girl in the dorm and we all knew it.

You learned everything about everybody. It was a gift. You would meet a new person, and within the first 20 minutes – they would spill out their whole life story. But you were private. It was as though not talking about your childhood would make it disappear. But I knew that freshman year in college was the moment you’d been waiting for…your chance to get out in the world.

Everybody hung out in our room. You had a stereo with surround sound, every Johnny Mathis album AND you could play the guitar. I remember your soft alto voice singing “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” You introduced me to so many things –-- blowing smoke rings, Dostoyevsky, Slo Gin Fizzes, Ayn Rand. Of course – poetry. Although, I didn’t get Rod McKuen any more than I got the Woody Allen movies you loved so much…

A bunch of us would play cards and smoke cigarettes and talk and laugh until 4:00 in the morning – but you were the only one who never missed an early morning class. You were on a full scholarship and you needed good grades. You were so happy to be there – you loved every class and you made it look so easy. You breezed through English Lit, you were the top student in the psychology department -- and the only person I ever met who could use the word existentialism in a sentence.

I didn’t know until 30 years later how hard it really was. Even though we were roommates, I didn’t notice that you only had two bras. I didn’t know you worked those three part time jobs because you were sending money back to your bipolar Mom in Ohio.

You were fighting pancreatic cancer when you told me about the day your family drove the 600 miles to Waverly, Iowa, with your college supplies packed in the trunk of a borrowed car. You were terrified that something would go wrong. You did the driving…with your Mom in the passenger seat, reading the map you had memorized. Your younger sister was in the backseat with your lobotomized uncle. They had to come along because there was no place for them to stay -- and you had been taking care of them for so long – they couldn’t manage without you. When you stopped at an Illinois restaurant for lunch, your uncle drove the car away. You stood in the parking lot -- knowing it was all gone. Your album collection, the second hand stereo, the new clothes....every single thing you owned or cared about was in the trunk of that car.

It was six hours before the highway patrol brought him back…

The night you told me that story, I cried myself to sleep in your California guest room. Sad because we’d been best friends for 30 years and you never told me about your uncle. Sad because you’d lost 60 pounds by that time and could barely talk. Sad because you never got over being shamed by them....

Mostly –Janet, I was sad because I no longer believed you were going to beat it...