She Loved Food

Everyone felt lucky to know Marcia.   There was a time when we boogied to Johnny Limbo and the Lug Nuts and enjoyed the smaller, “off-Broadway” Portland plays.  She was my colleague at legislative sessions.  I watched on the sidelines as she faced breast cancer with courage and resilience.  She faced divorce with the same flair.  She always wore an impish smile.

Marcia died on a Sunday morning in August, and I tucked that news into the back reaches of my mind, willing myself to deal with it later.  By that Tuesday, “later” was “now”.  Driving down Highway 101, I listened to her obituary read to me over my cell phone.   I was fine until I heard “She loved food”.  I remembered seeing her in the capitol coffee shop in 2003.  She’d gained a lot of weight, and she laughingly pointed that out.  “I sure had fun doing it” she chortled.  I was reminded that Marcia didn’t operate under embarrassment or apology, she just faced whatever came with that sweet smile and mischievous glint in her eye. 

Marcia was gone.  I felt a tsunami of grief rise up from the depths of my soul, and I found myself driving with tears streaming down my cheeks, my chest heaving with sorrow.  I eased my way carefully back to the beach condominium and plopped heavily into the bed.  Through the bedroom window I could see large oak trees and birds fly through them – and I found the scene comforting and solid.  My cells felt anchored down by feelings akin to words like forlorn and cheerless.  I lay for hours, dozing on and off, searching for meaning in this world of pain and despair.

Toward noon I began to realize that when I remembered Marcia, I saw me.  She had the same Kris Kringle balloon tummy that I’ve cultivated over the past year.  She had the same deep crow’s feet around the same green eyes.  She had the marionette lines reaching down from her smiling mouth on the same fair freckled skin.  I realized that I was taking her death very personally.  Marcia was dead.  She would never see Italy again, or play another round of golf.  She would not hug her nieces and nephews or care for her ninety-year old father.  It was done for Marcia, and every day I’m vulnerable to the same fate.  The world hadn’t just lost a fabulous woman; my world had turned upside down with grim reality.

I pulled myself up out of bed and logged on to the laptop, downloading the obituary so I could read it and catch the parts I missed when it was read.  That’s when I got her message and her legacy.  A minute part of the obituary mentioned her career.  What really mattered was her love of travel, theater, music, and reading.  The obituary writer made it clear that she loved golf, and made a point of playing every chance she got.  And, she loved food.  And, she loved her friends (who, like me, will miss her desperately).  She wasn’t important because she worked for Congresswomen and lobbyists.  She was important because she adored life and embraced all things so completely.

I shut off the computer and dressed for town.  I drove to the spa and signed up for a massage. 

The next day I was at the Lincoln City community center at 10:00, lifting weights.  By 11:00 I was in the pool, bouncing up and down with fifty others, laughing and joking and relishing in the aliveness of each man and woman alongside me in the clear blue water.  Later I instructed the massage therapist to lay many of the pacific stones on my heart chakra, because it needed healing.  I frolicked in the water pool naked, and laid my head against the side of the mineral pool as I gazed out over the spit and the distant ocean.  I stood for a long while under the rain shower, feeling the warm simulated rain fall around me.  That night I went to a meditation group and basked in the joy of peaceful reflection and found even more new friends.

It was one of the best days of my entire life.  It is the beginning of many.

I too love food.