I sat in a chair facing her. She lay crossways on her bed, her feet curled up into “embryo pose”, her slippers and a pink baseball hat still on. It was clear that Ginny did not want me to be here. The moment I came into her room, she went to her bed, quickly lay down and closed her eyes. So… was she in need of a sudden nap? Probably not… she kept opening one eye, and when she saw I was still there, she closed it again and wriggled a little more determinedly down into the bed. How could she not want me, her dear friend, to be here? And how could I, her dear friend, not want to be here either?
On a phone-call, over a year ago, she told me that she had just been diagnosed with short-term memory loss. Ginny did not belong to a close family, and as she became older, what family she did have became even more distant and fragmented. When Ginny needed help the most, it was her innermost circle of friends, Donna, Regina, and Lamecia, who stepped in. They were able to help her live in her home for a while. They came on pre-arranged days to check in and help, and when that wasn’t enough, they hired a caretaker to come every day. But when the caretaker could no longer keep Ginny safe from wandering off into the neighborhood, these good women helped situate her into a memory care facility. When Ginny was still living at her home, I came to visit her, and from one visit to the other, watched her rapid deterioration. When the move to the memory care was complete, Donna called and told me where it was located and what the visiting hours were. She finally suggested that I try to visit Ginny as often as possible. For a long time, I felt a despairing reluctance to go see Ginny. Everything about my friend, and our friendship, was in irreversible decline.
But now that I was finally visiting… Ginny “slept”. I squirmed a bit in my chair and looked around her room. Ginny had been a prolific pastel artist, and I saw that someone had hung her paintings up on every wall. She painted in a signature pallet of violet, pink, purple, and hazy grays, which the walls now reflected back into the room. Her ancient stereo was playing the classical station she always listened to, and by the look of that pink hat she was wearing, all her quirky, colorful clothes had made it here intact. The ceilings were high, the windows were large, and the sun was streaming in. Really not an unpleasant place when filled up with the things Ginny loved. The only thing off was Ginny herself, on the bed, in a fog of disorientation. And also off, well that would be me, with a friend in this state. How did either of us get here?
After a while, I grabbed a bag that I had brought with me and pulled out a coloring book for adults. Instead of goofy cartoon characters, it was filled with intricate mandala designs. I brought this thinking that my painter friend and I could pass the time coloring together. But it was clear that I was on my own. Still it was a way for me to sit with her and keep busy, so I chose a page with a mandala that looked like a flower, took out a bright red marker, and began filling in tiny white spaces around the page. After a few minutes of coloring like this, Ginny sighed and sat up on the bed. I could feel her looking at me, but I decided to ignore any message she might be directing to me with her eyes and I colored on. After a few moments, she stood up and came to sit in the armchair next to me. She pulled her knees up to her chin, and looked off in the distance.
Ginny had not spoken to me since I had arrived, and suddenly I realized that it wasn’t all because she didn’t want to engage with me. As I was coloring, it came to me that Ginny had lost her voice…or her need to speak…or the words to speak with. It was hard to know for sure which was the cause. But as my coloring page filled up with red, I became certain that I would never hear her voice again. I felt the “foreverness” of it. I would never hear her chatter, her words opening up with joy or turning down into sadness. I would not hear her play-by-play stories of someone she knew and how they were handling some affair in life all wrong. How she would do it completely differently if she were in the same situation. “She said…and then I told her…then she told me…” The so on and so forth commentary of her days.
Not. Ever. Again. Like a drop of water falling a long, long distance, to a pool beneath, plop, the knowledge broke my surface and gave me a shake.
The silence was enormous and hard.
I put the red marker away and took out the yellow. Keeping busy with the coloring page, I began to talk… and then talk some more… and then talk even some more. I filled up the silence with my voice, while I filled up the coloring page with bright yellow. I talked to Ginny and I talked to myself.
“Do you remember my first trip with you to Ghost Ranch? How long ago was that?” I asked. Then I went ahead and answered. “Oh, years and years ago. When we were just getting to know each other. Remember?”
Ghost Ranch was Ginny’s special getaway. Situated in northern New Mexico, Ghost Ranch spoke to Ginny as an artist because this was where Georgia O’Keefe had lived and painted for forty years. Ghost Ranch was now owned by the Presbyterians and had become an odd mix between an artist colony and a church camp. Ginny went every summer and took painting classes. And then she invited me to go along with her. Not a painter, I went to write.
“I remember driving in on that dirt road that first year I went with you. I was kinda mad because this place looked like nothing you had described. Like, it was less than nothing. I didn’t think I’d survive out there in the dirt for a week. Bare, hot, dirt. Everywhere you looked. And then we turned that one corner in the road and that’s where everyone sees it… Ghost Ranch. Those bluffs. The light. That color.”
I wasn’t the only one Ginny got to come out to Ghost Ranch. It seemed all of her friends eventually ended up there in the summer. It’s where I met Donna, Lamecia, and Regina. Ginny’s Ghost Ranch became my Ghost Ranch, her friends became my friends. I took writing classes, Ginny painted. Everyone else took pottery, or jewelry, or collage, or art welding classes, or some other creative class that matched their creative selves.
“Remember that dormitory we stayed in that one time there? Terrible! It was so hot! One lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. We shared the bathroom with how many people?” I glanced at her. She still sat there with no recognizable expression on her face, looking at the same faraway spot across the room.
I went back to my coloring book and started up again.
“It was so hot in that room that at night we dragged chairs out to the yard to cool off. We stayed out there until one or two in the morning. It was way too hot to sleep.”
All those stars in the New Mexican sky…
“Do you remember that I couldn’t figure out what that great big cloud was? It was so dark out but we could still see it. It was huge. And bright.”
“You laughed at me. That’s no cloud, you said. That’s the Milky Way!”
Oh my gosh… it was the Milky Way!
I shook my head, seeing it again in my mind as I surely will never see it again in real life.
I capped my yellow marker and put it away. “We were so young then.” The observation fell out of me like I had just landed on the front step of old age at that very moment.
I looked over at Ginny. She was looking directly at me now, her eyes small and dark, but definitely there with me. She had dropped her feet to the floor, and she was smiling. It was a wide, wild, tired smile. You and me. Young. Together.