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<\/span><\/span>The other night, I spoke to a group of women in Lexington, Massachusetts.\u00a0 It was rainy and cold, the kind of night when anyone would be excused for staying home, putting the tea kettle on, going to bed early with a book.\u00a0 But the room filled, my nerves quieted, and this group of mothers found plenty to say to one another.<\/p>\nAs always, the best part of the evening was not the formal \u201ctalk\u201d I\u2019d labored over for a week, but the questions that came at the end, the freewheeling conversation between women whose life stories are woven through with familiar themes–friendship, loss, change, growth.<\/p>\n
This morning I opened my e-mail to find a note from one of them, saying, \u201cI wanted to ask you a question last night. \u00a0If it’s too personal, not to worry, you don’t have to answer. \u00a0I was just wondering how your friend from the book is doing, eQuanimiti? \u00a0She sounds like such a wonderful person, hope she is still on the mend.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is a question I am only too happy to answer.\u00a0 Two years ago today, eQuanimiti was bedridden, wracked by pain, her face ravaged by shingles that had spread into her eyes, down her neck, over her scalp.\u00a0 Her business had been shuttered for months, there was no money for doctor bills, and, day after day after day, no improvement in her condition, which seemed to go from serious to more serious yet.<\/p>\n
eQuanimiti and I share an October 3 Libra birthday, a discovery we made early in our friendship, convincing us that our paths had surely been destined to cross.\u00a0 Perhaps she admired my steady, ordinary, married life with children as a road not taken.\u00a0 Certainly I was inspired by her creativity and flamboyance; the flow of paintings and projects that emerged from her studio; the window dresser\u2019s eye that made every surface in her eccentric little boutique beckon the eye; her willingness to sit down for a heart-to-heart chat with every customer who crossed her welcoming threshold.\u00a0 We were not every-day-on-the-phone friends, or even once-a-month-for-dinner friends.\u00a0 But there was a bond there from the start, a joyful, mutual appreciation for one another\u2019s very different journeys, a deep pleasure on both sides in our occasional conversations. We could catch up fast, in shorthand it seemed, and get right down to the meat of things.<\/p>\n
For a while, it seemed that eQuanimiti might lose her eyesight, might not ever recover, might sustain permanent nerve damage from the exceedingly severe case of shingles that kept her housebound for many months, in a dark, airless room.\u00a0 Even the slightest breath of air across her open lesions caused excruciating pain; the smallest bit of light was unbearable to her infected eyes.<\/p>\n
What I remember thinking back then, as I brought food to her door or slipped cards into the mail, was that there seemed to be no way out for her.\u00a0 There came a point where I couldn\u2019t imagine a life for her beyond the one she had right then–suffering, isolated, compromised.\u00a0 eQuanimiti, on the other hand, worked every single day to find the meaning in her illness, to plumb her dark night of the soul for every lesson it had to teach her.\u00a0 Hard as her days and nights were, she never lost faith in the belief that they served some deeper purpose, and that part of her job was to stay open to whatever her long illness had to teach her.<\/p>\n
As summer came, as her strength returned and her sores healed and her eyes regained sight, eQuanimiti began to write.\u00a0 The stories that poured from her hand onto the page had been taking shape in her mind for months, during the long quiet hours in a dark room, but of course the seeds of this work had been planted many years ago, and had lain dormant all this time, while her life was taken up with other things.<\/p>\n
Finally, it was time to write them.<\/p>\n
Today, it is time for the world to hear them. In a few minutes, I will jump in the shower, then, in honor of eQuanimiti\u2019s flair, I\u2019ll put on a pouffy polka dot skirt and a cardigan sweater and a pair of big earrings, and head off to hear my friend read the short story she has just had published in a literary magazine.\u00a0 It\u2019s her first pub party, but I\u2019m sure it won\u2019t be her last.\u00a0 She has a novel ready to go, a collection of stories completed, a fierce and exuberant commitment to the work she now knows she came here to do.<\/p>\n
As she said to me a couple of weeks ago, over tea, \u201cBeing sick gave me a couple of gifts in the end, including the realization, when I finally did get well, that I didn\u2019t have any more time for dilly-dallying.\u00a0 Life isn\u2019t going to last for ever. So I figured I\u2019d better get bustling along.\u201d\u00a0 I better get bustling along myself–her literary debut is in an hour, and I don\u2019t want to miss it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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