Fran Elise Lipman

Those of you who have ventured over to the blogs I have linked over there to the right might have read Since When, a furious, all-encompassing chronicle of life uprooted, tossed, and made overwhelmingly challenging in the aftermath of serious illness.  The author of that blog was Fran Lipman.  Fran and I met  in Mrs. Dubie's 9th grade "English Vocabulary" class at Carrie Palmer Weber Junior High School in Port Washington, NY.  Our lives after high school took us in different directions, hers to Penn and then into advertising and life in Manhattan (to my abiding envy at the time), where she met the fabulous Chip Sleeper and his little son Lydon.  Fran and I would lose touch for a while and then always get back in touch again - there was never any question of any loss of touch being permanent, it was always just a phase - and I still remember vividly being home on leave from Moscow in something like 1990? - and her serendipitously calling my parents' house and her bringing Chip out to Port Washington and my meeting him for the first time - I'm pretty sure the power was out and it was by candlelight - and me thinking, she's found a good'un.

Fran was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma a number of years back, that very "treatable" cancer, and the odds were excellent that she'd be just fine after treatment.  I remember Jerry and me in NY for our annual New Year's trip, and me going with Fran to the barber shop on Astor Place and both of us getting our heads buzzed when her hair started thinning and falling out due to the chemo.

But things didn't go as planned with the "treatable" cancer treatment, Fran got sick with infection, and months later emerged from hospitalization and near-death with ARDS - go here, among other places, if you've never heard of it - as I hadn't before Fran's experience.  She spent the rest of her life at home, dealing with ongoing physical and emotional torment, but was always our Frannie when Jerry and I would have the rare chance to see her on our visits to New York.  The top photo is from one of those visits.

Fran died yesterday.  Every fiber of my being wishes I could spare Chip everything that he's going through and will go through, because individual as it is and will be to him, I know it's going to be hell.  A hell I don't wish on my worst enemy.

There's other news, of course.  Talked to a landscaper yesterday, and pending plans and estimates, will be having him turn the yard back into manageable "lawn."  So there goes the last of what Jerry was planning for our yard, the native plants and wild flowers.  "Lawn" will be more sellable.  The "estate" documents have been finalized, and yesterday I impulsively went and traded in Jerry's minivan for a more fuel-efficient Honda Fit... and cried in the dealership as I took my things out of the Sienna and put them in the Honda.  So there goes another basic of our life together, the van we drove to work in every day, the van we drove to NY and to Alabama and to Iowa, the van he picked me up in the first time I visited him here in Illinois, the van that was the last vehicle he rode in, to the hospital just about a year ago, except for the ambulance that brought him back home to die.

I'm having a hysterectomy.  I don't know when exactly or how it will be done, but the enlarged uterus and the fibroid (sorry for the TMI) are making this the right choice, finally, and I have a consultation with a surgeon in a couple of weeks.  Either less invasive "da Vinci" robotic surgery or a "bikini" incision, my gynecologist told me.  It'll have to be after the business trip to Boston I have to go on the first week of June, to be a flunky and underpaid staff creature at the association's annual meeting.  The staff exodus has started - health insurance is keeping me there for now, and the friends I've made there make all the difference.  But I plan to keep them while not staying there... as they will not... not forever.

I will miss you for the rest of my life, Frannie.