Category Archives: Sarah

Anywhere With You, Part I

Around the world, Sarah

I was never much of a tourist. Left to my own devices, I would probably never leave the house. Sarah, on the other hand, was a world traveler. We complemented each other nicely. I reined her in from her more extravagant travel plans (“Let’s bring our infant son to Churchill, Alaska, to see the polar bears!”) and she helped keep me from growing moldy (“Let’s stay here and watch the Law & Order channel for two weeks straight!”).

When I first met Sarah, she was planning a trip to Egypt. We had been dating for only a few months when Sarah announced that she was thinking of cancelling her trip to Egypt, because she couldn’t bear to be parted from me. I knew immediately that this was a test. Is Dave husband material? I am proud to say that I passed with flying colors. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You’ve been looking forward to this trip for years. I’ll go with you.” I was a little bit scared, but it was wonderful. I’m glad we went when we did; I wouldn’t dare to travel in the Middle East now.

Sarah took me all over the world. After Egypt, we went to Canada, England, Italy, the Bahamas, and Australia. Once we had Nate, we toned it down a bit. We took him to New Orleans when he was just twelve weeks old, and then to Hawai‘i when he was about a year old. We took a cruise to Bermuda when he was almost two.

Many of our trips were to places Sarah had already been. She wanted to show me all of her favorite places, to help me know her better. I loved London right along with her, and Venice was simply magical. But we were always glad to come home. Well, almost always.

When we staggered off the airplane in Sydney, Australia, we were completely fried. The flight was something like twenty hours long, and it would be another six hours before we could check in to our hotel. We were wandering around Hyde Park and the Royal Botanic Gardens, looking for a place to nap that contained as few venomous spiders as possible. Even through our jet-lag stupor, we were taken by how beautiful, clean, and open the city was. Our running joke was for me to pretend to be grumpy at being dragged halfway around the world, so Sarah was surprised when I said earnestly, “I absolutely love it here. When are we coming back?” If it weren’t for our family ties, I really think I could have persuaded her to move there.

Sarah’s philosophy was that one should take the trip of a lifetime every year, because one never knows how long a lifetime will be.

She was very wise.

More than a finish line

Sarah

I received an e-mail this morning from my dear friend Jess. She asked me to pass this messsage on to you.

Hello to all of Sarah’s friends!

As you know, Sarah died last year after a six-month battle with cancer. It was fast; it was scary; it was the saddest part of my life, outside of losing my own dad in 2001.

Of course, the most tragic part is that she left behind a beautiful little boy. I had 31 years with my dad, while Nate only had two years with his mom. On Sunday, September 16, 2007, I will join more than 7,000 walkers in the 19th Annual Boston Marathon Jimmy Fund Walk. I am walking in memory of Sarah and in honor of all young mothers who are faced with having to say goodbye to their kids too soon.

Because Sarah had so many friends, I created a team called Sarah’s Crew (a little play on her love of sailing), in the hopes that we could all walk together and help beat cancer. The entire walk is the 26-mile marathon route. I have chosen to start in Wellesley and walk the last 13 miles. You can also walk just the last 5 miles or 3 miles. I think Dave and Nate are going to walk the last 5.

I know some of you live too far away to join Sarah’s Crew, but I hope you will support my efforts by contributing to my walk. No amount is too small. I set a personal goal of $1000, and a team goal of $3800, as Sarah would be 38 this year. By supporting my walk, you are helping to end cancer. Donating online is safe and easy. If you do live nearby and want to join Sarah’s Crew, you’ll be able to do that online as well.

Thank you!
Love,
Jessica Bolger

I hope you’ll join us.

Silver Spoons

Sarah, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Okay, it’s a bit random, but Mir got me thinking about silverware today.

When I was growing up, my grandmother used to send the most peculiar birthday packages. She spent a lot of time in thrift shops. I remember one birthday box that contained a particularly odd assortment. There was a T-shirt that looked like an air mail envelope; a silver dollar; and an Effersyllium container filled with mismatched spoons.

I think I was eight years old. I loved my grandmother, but I really did not know what to make of this gift. We put the spoons in the silverware drawer, but it always vaguely offended my fledgling obsessive/compulsive disorder, because they didn’t all fit in the organizer, and besides, they didn’t match!

Over the years, I sneaked the mismatched utensils out of the silverware drawer, one at a time, and stashed them away in a shoebox in my closet. There they sat until I got my first apartment, when I pulled them out and proudly started using them once more.

When I met Sarah, she taught me about the critical importance of china and silverware. She already owned two sets of china, but the flatware was her roommate’s. I think she was actually relieved that I obviously didn’t care about such details, because when the time came for us to set up our wedding registry, she was clearly in charge. I timidly questioned why we needed to add a third set of china, but I knew it was a losing battle.

Now, I’m going to skip ahead here for a moment; bear with me. When we first looked at the house we ended up buying, we mocked the seller mercilessly. She had dried flower arrangements over every doorway in the house, on every flat surface, just everywhere. Crazy, I know.

After we’d been living here a year or so, I realized that Sarah had put ceramic fish in every single location that had previously held dried flowers. There is not a room in the house that doesn’t have some kind of fish decoration. We have fish drawer pulls, fish measuring spoons, fish light switches, you name it. If it isn’t fish, it’s nautical. When I mentioned it to her, she just laughed and said, “If you’re going to have a theme, you might as well beat it into the ground.”

Okay, back to the wedding registry. She had picked out Villeroy & Boch Switch 3. The serving dishes were fairly innocuous, with a quiet leaf pattern. But the plates had waves and fishes around the rim. The teacups had waves, fishes, and seashells. And there was one big platter that had waves, fishes, seashells, and a big picture of a sailboat in the middle.

So there we were, sitting with the wedding consultant at Ross-Simons. Sarah was deciding how many teacups we would need, and I was rolling my eyes at the abundance of fish. I tried to get the consultant on my side, but she wasn’t having any. Finally I snarked, “Thank the Lord there’s no such thing as fish silverware; your head would probably explode.”

The wedding consultant cracked a wicked grin, and said, “Actually, we just received a sample of a new pattern from Yamazaki. It’s called Gone Fishin. May I show it to you?” Sarah’s eyes almost popped out of her head when she saw these utensils. She started to hyperventilate, and had to sit down. Even I had to admit they were cute. The spoons and forks look like fish; the knives look like whales. I moaned and groaned and said I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut, but secretly I was delighted that these fishies would be coming to live with us.

As for my grandmother’s legacy, I’m pretty sure Sarah threw all the thrift shop flatware in the trash when we moved out of our apartment. I still have the silver dollar, though. I keep it in the Effersyllium container.

I wish my grandmother had lived long enough to get to know Sarah. I would have enjoyed seeing Sarah’s reaction when she started receiving care packages from Bizarro World.

White Noise

Nate, Sarah

I have tinnitus. Some folks have it bad, but it’s mild in my case. A faint, high-pitched ringing in the ears, is all; mostly I don’t even notice it, except when it’s completely quiet. I sleep with a fan on, so it’s never completely quiet. No big deal.

I’ve slept with a fan on since I was in high school. Right now it’s the HEPA filter; during the winter it’s the humidifier. When it gets really hot it’ll be the air conditioner. Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s broad-spectrum. Sometimes when fans get old they’ll start to heterodyne, and you can hear a kind of thrumming pattern in the noise as it comes in and out of phase. That keeps me awake; time to get a new fan.

Now, it’s well documented that white noise can produce auditory hallucinations. So can sleep deprivation. Put them both together and that spells trouble. When Nate was born, of course we had a baby monitor. Those first few months, the sleep deprivation was hell on earth. He’d wake up hungry or wet every two or three hours. After a couple of weeks, I was so desperate for sleep, so afraid that he was going to wake up, that I would listen to the fan and hear him screaming all the time, even when he was sound asleep. I eventually trained myself to control the hallucinations, kind of like lucid dreaming. If I could make the scream hold the same pitch and volume for ten seconds without taking a breath, there was a good chance it wasn’t really Nate and I could go back to sleep.

Recently, I had my buddy Tom replace my bathroom ceiling and exhaust fan, which is a story in itself. He demonstrated the new fan for me. “WHISPER QUIET, MY ASS,” he yelled. “I’D HATE TO SEE THE NEXT LOUDEST MODEL.”

Last Sunday, you may recall, was Mother’s Day. As I’m sure you can imagine, it was a rough weekend. Nate’s classmates made Mother’s Day cards for all their moms, but Nate made one for me instead. I couldn’t really look at it without crying. He sensed that I was fragile, and true to form for three and a half, he moved in for the kill. I thought it was bad when he tried to throw his Apple Cinnamon oatmeal on the floor, but it only got worse from there. I was ready to fashion a size 4T straitjacket out of gaffer’s tape just to get ten seconds of peace. I would set him up with a video and go upstairs to pee; the moment I shut the bathroom door, he’d start calling me. “Daaaaaaddy… daaaaaaddy…” He just couldn’t leave me alone.

I finally got him to go down for a nap on Sunday afternoon, and I decided I would take a long, hot shower to try to work some of the knots out of my neck and shoulders. I cranked up the WHISPER QUIET exhaust fan and turned on the water, half expecting Nate to wake up and demand my attention. When he stayed asleep, I gave a little prayer of thanks to Morpheus. I stayed in the shower for half an hour and used all the hot water. It was lovely.

When I got out of the shower, I looked in the mirror, and thought, damn it, Sarah. You should be here. Never mind Mother’s Day; it is so your turn to watch him.

And clear as life, through the sound of the fan, I heard the front door open, and Sarah’s voice call, “Marco!”

I burst into tears. Polo, honey. Here I am.

She sounded so happy.

Feed me, Seymour

Can we build it?, Sarah

I actually enjoy working on our little house. I was inordinately proud of myself when I fixed the leaky faucet in the kitchen, for instance, or when I replaced the fugly chandelier in the dining room.

Sarah was always my cheering squad; she just loved that I was so handy. When she moved in with me, I noticed that her bookshelf was about to fall apart, so I laid it on its side, glued it back together and piled some weights on it to help it hold until the glue dried. It wasn’t much, but she was just thrilled by how matter-of-fact I was about it. It was busted, I fixed it, no big deal.

That said, there are a few things about home ownership that I do not enjoy. One of them is yard care. When we bought the house, it came with what is euphemistically known as “mature landscaping.” The wisteria had swallowed the back fence and was working on the maple tree. It had torn down the gutter downspout and was working its way into the bedroom window.

Wisteria, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, is insidious. It grows inches a day and can span great distances by twining around itself. I saw it reach up a good six feet into thin air to climb back into the maple tree after I cut it down. It will strangle you in your sleep if you aren’t careful. Sarah insisted that it was beautiful when it bloomed, but after three years, it never did. Last summer, she was no longer around to defend it, and I cut it to the ground. It’s still there, but I think I have the upper hand. I just can’t countenance a plant that requires twenty-four hour supervision to prevent it from killing all the other plants and lifting my house off its foundation.

We have a glorious star magnolia in the front yard that just finished its annual florgasm. We have many healthy hostas. We have an extremely enthusiastic honeysuckle that has almost completely devoured the yew bush on the corner. We have a bunch of nearly-dead rhododendrons that I am not sure what to do with. (I didn’t even know that rhododendrons were supposed to flower until I saw a picture a few weeks ago.) And we have at least a hundred other plants, bushes and flowers that I cannot identify, to the extent of being unable to tell whether they are weeds or not, or even whether they are alive or not.

One of my neighbors is a gardener, and he was kind enough to point out that I had some six-foot milkweeds growing out front: “Those are weeds, by the way.” Good to know. I ripped them out, and darn if they didn’t grow right back. Last summer, every night, as soon as we got home, we would go over to the honeysuckle corner and search for milkweed shoots.

A little research revealed that milkweed is a rhizome. I picture it as an evil snake that lurks far below, sending up shoots but never revealing its true self. I don’t know how it manages to survive with no sunlight, because I get those shoots the second they break the surface. But they keep coming.

So, I am slowly learning what I don’t like: plants that will take over my entire yard if I don’t pay close attention to them. Milkweed, bad. Wisteria, bad. Hostas I like, because they stay where you put them. I know enough to uproot maple seedlings before they get too big. But I don’t even know what else is thriving in my yard, plotting to destroy me.

Finally, we have a little garden out back. Strawberries, tulips, maybe some chives. Raised beds, a fence. It was beautiful, once. It could be again, but it needs a lot of work, and someone to care for it. I can take direction, but Sarah was the gardener of the family. She fed and watered; she nurtured and pruned; she sang little growing songs. Now termites have eaten the fence, and the weeds grow up to the sky.

The Melting Point of Wax

Nate, Sarah

I took Nate out to dinner tonight at the local seafood shack/ice cream stand. For dessert, he wanted soft-serve vanilla ice cream with rainbow sprinkles. We had a brief discussion about the proper terminology, although we went around so many times that I can’t even remember who said jimmies and who said sprinkles. I guess I am marginally more likely to say jimmies than sprinkles, although it always reminds me of my college roommate Michelle. She told me that a jimmy was slang for a condom, and if you asked for jimmies on your ice cream in New York, you’d probably get punched just in case, even if they couldn’t quite figure out what the hell you were talking about.

Anyway, Nate was way more enthusiastic about the sprinkles than he was about the ice cream. Basically the ice cream was just a vehicle for sprinkles. He would carefully reach in with his fingers and pick up the sprinkles around the edge. Then he would place them on top of the ice cream so he could spoon them up.

He comes by this trait honestly; Sarah loved chocolate sprinkles, or jimmies, more than almost any food. Once, when Dan was visiting, he walked into the kitchen of our apartment in Salem and caught Sarah eating them with a spoon, straight out of the jar.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Not getting enough paraffin in your diet?”

Cat People

Sarah, That Darn Cat

From day one, Sarah and I had an ongoing discussion about the relative merits of cats and dogs. Each of us said the same thing: dogs just love you, while it takes time and effort to earn a cat’s trust and love. But we disagreed on which was the good part and which was the bad part.

Sarah had never lived with a cat before. She wasn’t willing to accept that she would have to learn how to approach Figaro, and how to read his body language. This got her scratched quite a bit in the early days, but they did eventually reach an understanding.

Before Nate came along, our weekend routine, and God, do I miss it, was to have breakfast at Red’s, and then wander over to the churchyard so Sarah could pick and eat mulberries off the huge mulberry tree.

By midsummer, the mulberry tree, like most mulberry trees, had a thick carpet of overripe windfall berries underneath it. Sarah would wade right in, heedless of the mess, and her Tevas would leave purple footprints down the sidewalk afterwards. I, fastidious to the point of helplessness as always, would pick my way around the perimeter, trying not to get messy, but she would always beg me to stop dithering and come help her reach the best berries.

One day, while she picked, we were chatting about cats and dogs, as usual: Sarah depicting cats as aloof and mean, and I characterizing dogs as slavish and sloppy. All of a sudden, this ENORMOUS dog (a “hound from Hell,” when she told the story) came tearing across the churchyard, making a beeline straight for us. Sarah told me later that she was thinking, “Oh, crap, it’s going to eat us and Dave will win the argument.” He pounded through the mulberries, planted his giant paws on my chest, slobbered all over my face, and took off. I stood there, paralyzed, unable to speak. She giggled, “Oh, quit it, you big baby. He was just being friendly.” I turned around to face her, revealing the two huge purple pawprints on my favorite white T-shirt.

When she finally stopped laughing, she told me she could get the stain out. It took her two weeks of repeated soakings and rinsings, but she did it.

We each thought that this incident had finally settled the argument in our favor, but we were both wrong. I held up the nearly-ruined shirt as an example of how dogs epitomized chaos triumphing over order; she countered by saying that it took a special kind of crazy to believe that it was even possible to keep a white T-shirt pristine forever.

She was right, but I still prefer cats. At least I don’t have to empty Figaro three times a day.

Friendly Fire

Nate, Sarah

Nate’s bedtime routine

  1. Put on PJs
  2. Read books
  3. Allergy medicine
  4. Brush teeth
  5. Use the potty
  6. Turn on humidifier
  7. Lights out
  8. Select stuffed animal (using flashlight)
  9. Leap into bed
  10. Request to use the potty again (denied)
  11. Songs
  12. Request to use the potty again (denied)
  13. Goodnight kisses

I’m always interested to see which stuffed animal he’ll select. Pearl sent Sarah a Ty golden lab puppy when she was first diagnosed. Bingo-dog is Nate’s most popular choice, and we always talk about how Mama gave him to Nate in the hospital. A close second is this nasty carnival prize in the approximate shape of Bob the Builder. But recently the opossum has been in heavy rotation.

The last couple of nights, he’s been asking me to kiss his stuffed animal goodnight before I kiss him goodnight. Last night, when I leaned in to kiss the opossum, Nate snatched it away and said, “No, daddy. Possum doesn’t like you that way.”

Heavy Metal

Sarah, Talk nerdy to me

Modern Problems; or, Into each life, some acid rain must fall

As a computer geek, I think I may be a bit more sensitive than the average bear when it comes to the nasty chemicals lurking in our lives.

Old TVs and computer monitors contain cathode ray tubes, which are full of lead. LCD displays, such as you might find in a laptop or a flat-screen TV, are backlit with fluorescent lamps, which contain mercury. Thermostats and watch batteries also contain mercury. Camera batteries contain lithium. Easy to buy; hard to get rid of. You can’t just put heavy metals in a landfill or an incinerator.

When we lived in Salem, they had one “hazardous products day” every year. It just so happened that it was always in the summer, always on a Saturday; in particular, it was always on a beautiful summer Saturday when we’d been invited to go sailing with Sarah’s parents, and we had to leave early to catch the tide through the Hole.

We never did make it to a hazardous products day. Amazingly enough, sailing always won out. By the time we left Salem, we had quite a large collection of old, broken-down TVs, computer monitors, and camera batteries.

Luckily, our new town has a hazardous waste recycling center, open every Saturday from 8 to 3. The guy who runs the place knows me by name. They take CRTs and fluorescent tubes, but they don’t take batteries.

Behind the lens

Last week, my dad discovered that his former place of business has a battery recycling program. I handed him my collection of dead batteries, and I dug out Sarah’s camera bag to see what she had squirreled away. I found another handful of dead batteries, along with (surprise!) her cameras, containing even more dead batteries.

One camera also contained some exposed film.

These were the pictures from our last trip together. We went to Puerto Rico with her parents in January of 2006.

I took the camera to CVS, bought some new batteries, and put them in the camera. I rewound the film and dropped it off to be developed.

There were lots of great pictures of me and Nate.

Not one picture of Sarah.

The Story Goes On

Sarah

Sarah died a year ago this morning.

The following is the e-mail message I sent out that evening. Most of you have seen it before, but I don’t think I can improve on it, so here it is again.

I hope none of you has spent as much time in hospitals as we have these past few months. We have come to know them far too well.

One of the things we’ve gotten used to is the constant presence of the public address system. Rather than an announcer, frequently one will hear a soft “bong” or “bong-bong” over the speaker system to indicate that Doctor Someone should call someone else.

Sarah spent her last 24 hours at Cambridge Hospital, where they make extensive use of these bells. We listened to them ding and bonk all through the long night. As Sarah was breathing her last, the speaker system came on and the bells played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” softly, once through. It signaled that a new baby had just been born.