Scarlett O'Hara

Tomorrow is another day

Tuesday, August 13:

Me: 7:38 AM: Is today or tomorrow chemo day? How are you doing?

Jennifer: 10:18 AM: Admitted today for fluids and to watch my kidneys.

Me: 8:41 PM: I hope you are feeling better.

Sunday, August 18:

Me: 4:11 PM: Jennifer? Are you okay?

Monday, August 19

Jennifer: 1:36 AM: Julie, this is Brian, Jenn’s husband. Jenn passed away yesterday. If you need anything…”

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In Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O'Hara closes the story by famously stating, "After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Tomorrow.

Sometimes todays are so overwhelming that to get through them, I focus on tomorrows, for sometimes it is easier to believe that tomorrow is sure to be a better than the gray, heaviness of the sorrow I currently find myself drowning.

Sometimes todays are really hard.

I met Jennifer Patterson on Substack about 15 months ago. We quickly moved our relationship from the comment feature on the platform to regularly texting via WhatsApp. While she once lived in Seattle, she and her husband Brian moved to Spain a few years back.

She once texted, “It is a lot of Scarlett O’Hara attitude this cancer thing.” And with this reference, she surely nailed it.

I will miss her sense of humor.

She once posted “tread carefully (cancer) muggles for I might turn off the comment feature” on her Substack Circle and Squares. I found this hilarious. I will miss her writing. I will miss texting her knowing I would hear back from her later that same day. I will miss the pictures she sent me of her girls Winnie and Lola, two goofy, cuddly, puddle dogs. She called them puddle dogs for how they looked sprawled on her floor. I will miss her adventurous spirit. She shared many vacation photos from sailboats and beaches and a recent trip to Hood Canal where she and her friends took a polar plunge:

I will miss how she understood the ridiculousness of our situation. “The side of my face swelled up yesterday while I was eating a sandwich. Not sure what’s up with that.” She often made me smile. “It is a BIG cancer killing dance party happening in my body right now!” I will miss her description of foods that made my mouth water. She emphatically believed Faro has the best oranges and therefore the best fresh squeezed orange juice or carrot-orange juice in the entire world. She liked to visit a local cafe just down the road from her that served her favorite mid-morning snack “torrado” two big pieces of toast, either pao da forma (loaf pan) or pa caseiro (rustic loaf) completely saturated in butter and cut into sticks. She loved gelato and the cheeses in France.

I will miss our ordinary check ins with each other, “Just popping in to say hi! I’m gearing up for chemo on Wednesday. How you doing?” I will miss her compassion. After I wrote about a PET scan that left me feeling overwhelmed and scared, she left me a voice memo telling me how upset and sorry she was for what I was going through. She sent hugs and resilence through the phone. Words of encouragement telling me I could do it. One day at a time. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Our focus on baby steps rather than the big enormous weight of the life sentence we were carrying was sometimes what it took to feel good about saying yes when all we wanted to do was say no.

I will miss the selfies we sent to each other - big glasses and bald heads. She really missed her pigtails. She shared, “I held a friend’s hand through it once so I had the gall to think I had some insight.” There is nothing like losing your hair to this disease, and you will never know it until you know. I will miss celebrating the little things: cows in a pasture, naps, short walks, ceramics. I will miss sharing both our ordinary and extraordinary experiences. We understood them all.

I miss having her in my life for it made the emotional heaviness of this load a little less isolating, a little lighter.

The View from Jennifer’s Home

My friend Jennifer knew.

Jennifer knew as do I that it takes a special kind of resilence living with an incurable disease knowing that the horizon is never clearly defined. There is no predictability, no clear targets, no sure shots no matter how hard we try.

“Sometimes I cry because everything is all too much.”

In her, I found someone who truly understood.

And I miss her very much.

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She once texted, “It is a lot of Scarlett O’Hara attitude this cancer thing.”

It sure is

for

After all, tomorrow is another day

and somehow, someway

I will find ways of making it a little better than today.