For decades we connected nearly every day. One terrible moment changed all that.
The nurse had to unwrap the bandages that were holding the skin grafts in place in order for Miriam to use the bathroom. I had just arrived at the hospital — the first nonfamily visitor since the accident — and my timing was such that I got to see my best friend naked for the first time in our many years together.
Miriam laughed, holding her tummy while trying to stand. “It’s OK for her to see me this way,” she said to the nurse, “because we have no secrets anyway.”
The nurse chuckled, steadying Miriam as she shuffled to the toilet. The door closed and I stood there, glued to the floor, not certain yet as to my role.
Since the accident, I had been working with Miriam’s husband to set up a visitor calendar. When you’re in the burn unit, you’re only allowed one visitor a day other than your family member. And when you have suffered third degree burns all over the top of your body and the side of your face, it takes a while before even that is permitted.
This was indeed a day to celebrate. The first two grafting surgeries had been a success, and we believed that things were looking up.
Once we got Miriam back to the bed, the nurse began the process of rewrapping the bandages and helping Miriam get settled again. I saw that the side table was covered with sugary treats from friends who probably didn’t know about her diabetes diagnosis a couple of years earlier.
Miriam picked up one of the boxes and, with a conspiratorial smile, offered me a chocolate. Knowing that I wouldn’t say no, she took one too and we bit into the gooey truffles, sighing with guilty pleasure, knowing that the sugar was bad for her but not nearly as bad as why she was here.
“Kate is the best of all the nurses,” Miriam said. “She knows how to wrap me up without hurting me. I know I shouldn’t have too many of these sweets, but today is a day to celebrate. I can have visitors at last!”
While it was hard for her to move her head since the burn had snaked its way around her neck, she leaned over to Kate and said, “And I’m so lucky because my best friend was the first to arrive.”
We had been friends since meeting at work 23 years earlier, both hugely pregnant with our daughters. She and her husband were preparing to move to Washington, D.C., and she was trying to figure out what she would do after the baby was born. Our daughters arrived about a month apart, looking a bit like cousins — both with big, brown eyes — and our families began to meld.
The early days of our friendship were conducted through long, gossipy phone calls. Miriam had suffered profound hearing loss through a bout of Ménière’s disease, and our conversations were slow as I worked to speak loudly and clearly and she worked to hear.
During the nine months our family lived beneath hers in a duplex while our house was under construction, we were able to be together in person more, which deepened our friendship. Our husbands were also close, playing poker and sharing the experience of having lived in the same yeshiva in Israel at the same time many years earlier.
At some point texting became an easier method of communication for Miriam and me, and we began having long, rambling text conversations every day. We knew the players in each other’s lives; there was a shorthand for everything. Since we worked in the same field — nonprofit fund-raising — we also understood each other’s work problems and accomplishments. We even shared the same favorite children’s book, “Charlotte’s Web,” and she often quoted its last lines to me: “It’s not often that someone comes around who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.”
Miriam loved to cook and to feed her friends. We had spent many a Jewish holiday and Thanksgiving at her home with lavish feasts and a house filled with love and laughter. And she always made sure to make a chocolate dessert for me.
The night of the accident she was cooking dinner for just her husband and herself. She had not yet changed from her work clothes and was wearing a billowy blouse. The sleeve brushed one of the burners and caught on fire. Instead of stop, drop and roll, Miriam screamed and froze. Her husband came running into the kitchen to see her engulfed in flames. He doused her and called 911.
I was coming home that same evening from outpatient knee surgery. By the time I got the call that they were in the hospital, I was home with my leg up and unable to do anything to help.
The second and final visit I made to the hospital was on Miriam’s 60th birthday. Several weeks earlier she had been planning a party, a festive gathering to mark the end of our pandemic isolation. But instead, she was in the burn unit, continuing her trajectory of surgeries.
I arrived that morning empty-handed, as the presents I had bought had not yet been shipped — two silky scarves that she could use to wrap loosely around her neck when she was out of the hospital. Miriam took her style seriously, and I wanted her to feel chic and beautiful. When I told her about the scarves, she was delighted.
After that day there was a long line of close friends who were signed up for visits, and I demurred going again, figuring I would have time with her after her return home. I started preparing to make room in my schedule for daily visits during which I imagined I would help her walk, move and dress — whatever she needed. It was going to be a long road to recovery, but the people in her life who loved her were legion, and we would form a team of support and healing.
After the fifth surgery, Miriam was no longer laughing with the nurses. She had given up the effort it took to be a good patient, and her spirits had darkened. Then we got the word that she was being released. The evening of her homecoming was to be the first night of Passover.
I was hosting a small Seder with my partner and his son. I held up Miriam’s Cup — a new Seder addition, usually filled with water, representing liberation and life — and told the story of how Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Moses and Aaron, led the Jewish women as they sang and played timbrels, celebrating the crossing of the Red Sea and the freedom of the Jewish people. Then we drank to my own Miriam’s liberation, after a month in the hospital, the same evening.
What I didn’t know is that while I was retelling the story of Miriam’s Cup, my Miriam arrived home, walked into her house, lay down and died, most likely of a pulmonary embolism. Her liberation was never to arrive.
In Judaism, when someone dies, the community sits shomer with the body until burial, keeping its hovering and restless soul company until the body is interred — a sacred task.
I signed up to sit shomer, and when I arrived at the funeral home, I found the room in the basement. It was next to the space where taharah is performed — the gentle washing and dressing of the body, also done by community members trained in this ritual.
Instead of sitting in the shomer nook with the tiny sliding window that allows you to be present without sitting with the body, I walked directly into the taharah room — chilled and white — and saw Miriam’s body, so still, wrapped in a plain bag on a steel table, reminiscent of the bandages that had wrapped her in the hospital. I could feel her presence — her soul was there with us, waiting for direction.
I sat in a chair a few feet away and tried to say something, but for the first time in our many years together — chatting, laughing, texting — words failed me. Instead, I took out the copy of “Charlotte’s Web” I had brought and read the last few chapters aloud to her, weeping because I didn’t know how to tell Miriam what she meant to me, and I would never have the chance again.
As I read the final sentence of the book, I closed my eyes and imagined I could feel the tendrils of a gossamer web spin out between her body and mine. And I could visualize in the middle of the room, out of the complex web that represented our lives and our relationship, a word knitted into sticky threads, sparkling with fresh dew: “Friend.”
Karen Paul, a writer and nonprofit fund-raiser in Washington, D.C., is working on a memoir.
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