Christine and the bug soup

I'm overwhelmed with emotions lately. I keep thinking of Christine and trying to piece together memories. The years of our friendship weaves together into flashes of time. For years, we had lunch together at least three times a week. We ran errands at lunch, paid our bills, did our banking, went shopping- sometimes we even ate lunch.

So many little memories...

There is a cafe that was in the next building that made amazing soups and salads. Christine really liked this soup. Chicken and Wild Rice. It was pretty good but I couldn't eat it because the wild rice always looked like bugs. The wild rice was also a little more firm, furthering my 'bug' theory. I used to laugh and tell her if there WERE bugs in there, you'd never know. She loved it, and every Thursday we'd go there and I'd get the jambalaya and she'd get the bug soup. Just yesterday I got some Tomato Florentine Soup at the cafeteria at work and there was rice in it. As I was ladeling the soup into my bowl, I said outloud, "ah... bug soup." I stopped and the memory came back to me... and I started to cry.

I can't put this together in my head. Maybe it's because I didn't see her getting sick. Maybe because before two weeks ago, in my mind she was still well. I didn't know she was so sick. Her mom told me that when she was diagnosed three years ago, the doctors gave her 2-5 years. I do remember her telling me that but I think that I just blocked that out. The first year, her treatments seemed to be working. The second year, she was getting thinner, but she still wasn't really 'sick'. She wasn't losing her hair, her tumors were not spreading any farther. Not until year three. It would have been three years this August. 2-5 years, they said. They were right.

Perhaps my view of how things happened are different than they really were. Clearly there were things she didn't want to tell me. Clearly she wanted me and all of her friends to remember her in her healthier days. I guess I can't argue with that logic.

She was a better friend to me than I was to her. When I look back at all the wonderful things she did for me and my family, more on that another time. I don't have the tissues for it right now.

Until the end she thought of the everyone elses feelings more than she thought of her own suffering. I will never forgive myself for not being there more for her in those last months.

But I know I am a better person for having known her at all.