Goodbye Maggie

My friend Maggie died in October 2008.  I  found out just two days ago. I lost touch with Maggie about ten years ago after a twenty year friendship. By then I lived in Boston and she had recently moved from New Jersey to Richmond, Virginia, where her youngest daughter Kristen lived.  The last time I called her she seemed a little remote, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. When my daughter Erin, who had been born on Maggie’s birthday, didn’t get a birthday card that year, I thought of it as a sign of an untended friendship.  It was actually a symptom of something more insidious:  Maggie was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

Holmdel Park (NJ) one of Maggie's favorite walking haunts

I met Maggie in 1980 when I started working at AT&T Bell Laboratories.  A group of us taught management training courses which Maggie administered.  She was smarter than any of us fancy PhDs, with a keen sense of humor and unerring kindness toward her colleagues.  She was the only other woman professional in the department, so when the testosterone levels in the hallways got too high, it was a relief to walk into her office, close the door, and just be myself.  She was only five years younger than my mother, with 4 grown daughters, but we felt like contemporaries. We began to spend time together outside of work, taking walks, eating Japanese, seeing movies, and indulging in our shared fascination with politics.  Maggie hosted my baby shower.  She comforted me through my divorce.  She happily entertained my toddler with a huge collection of “grandkids” toys.   After I moved from New Jersey to Boston, I returned for many weekends with Maggie while my daughter visited her dad nearby.  Our favorite pastime during those visits was our weekend movie marathons.  Not videos, mind you, but go-to-the-theater-and-sneak-in-your-own-snack excursions.   We’d pore over the movie section in the newspaper and establish our plan of attack.  One weekend we managed to go see four movies.

Maggie enjoyed her life even while dealing with a series of significant health issues.  It seemed every few months Maggie fell prey to some new illness or condition.  Seasonal and food allergies, kidney stones, gall bladder issues. She developed Type 1 diabetes a number of months after a bad virus. Throughout each episode of illness, she was almost pathologically self-reliant.  She drove herself to the hospital when she had kidney stones and again when she had a gall bladder attack.  She drove her daughters crazy by not calling them for help.   When the AT&T phone operators went on strike, Maggie was among a group of managers sent to Chicago to fill in for the operators.  While there she got very sick, and ended up in the emergency room, where they diagnosed a bad stomach virus.  In fact, Maggie had just suffered her first heart attack.

Over the next year or so, Maggie’s undiagnosed heart condition worsened.  She was a walking time bomb.  By the time she was diagnosed, her major cardiac arteries were completely blocked.   Maggie had quintuple bypass surgery and a valve replacement.  She woke up on a ventilator, and was so traumatized by the experience that she vowed she would never have that surgery again.  Maggie figured if she was lucky, she’d live another 10 years before the bypasses failed.  Maggie, always an avid walker, recovered well from her bypass surgery.  But after another surgery, this time for a deviated septum, (somehow managing to drive herself home afterwards) her daughters insisted that she couldn’t continue living so far away from any family members.  So she headed to Virginia to be near her daughter Kristen and Kristen’s young children.

Once in Richmond, Maggie’s heredity really began to catch up with her.  I had known about Maggie’s family history of heart disease, but Maggie had never mentioned to me that her family also had a strong history of Alzheimer’s.

I regret missing the last eight years of Maggie’s life.  I regret not having the opportunity to comfort Kristen who, along with her husband and kids, cared so lovingly for Maggie as her condition worsened.  It’s easy to make excuses:  Shortly after my last conversation with Maggie, hell broke loose in my own life.  I was laid off.  My mother developed a host of medical problems which landed her in and out of the hospital for procedures or surgeries.  My youngest sister was diagnosed with breast cancer.  While spending much of my time preoccupied with getting work and trying to help my mother and sister, I felt too overwhelmed to keep up with my friends.  Maggie was not the only one of my friends who fell through the cracks of my overloaded life.  During those difficult years, other friends of mine would call up to complain that they hadn’t heard from me.  But Maggie had lost the ability to do that.  Maggie was saying a long goodbye, but I couldn’t hear her.

Earlier this year, I felt compelled to get back in touch with Maggie.  Her phone had been disconnected.  A letter to her old address was returned.  By May 10th, Maggie’s birthday, I still hadn’t found her.  Thanks to the internet, I was finally able to locate a relative who put me in touch with Maggie’s daughter Kristen.  I wish I’d seen Maggie even one more time.  She wouldn’t have recognized me, but she would still have had stories to tell.  And we could have watched another movie together.  And hugged each other goodbye.