I should have known
how wrong things were when she rang my bell suddenly at midnight on a day
before work. I didn’t know what to do and at first considered not ringing her
in. I hadn’t heard from her for at least ten years. I rang her up and tried to
make short work of it but spent over an hour listening to her repeat the same
sentences, sometimes as many as three times. I knew something was amiss but
couldn’t figure it out. I wondered if my old friend had Alzheimer's. Sally was
only 43. How could she have Alzheimer’s? It seemed strange that she would
repeat sentences I told her and act like it was the first time she asked the
question. I gently asked her, “Sally, don’t you recall? We just said this same
thing 20 minutes ago. Realizing that it was now going on 1 a.m., I told Sally I
had to get up at 6 for work the next day and escorted her to the front of my
building both of us promising to keep in touch. After many unanswered calls, I
ran into John, her ex-husband, in front of the hospital where he’d worked for
25 years. It was 10 p.m. He sat there calmly eating a sandwich in his blue
scrubs, chatting with a co-worker.
“How’s Sally?” I asked.
“Didn’t you hear?” John responded.
“Hear what?”
“Sally’s dead.”
“Dead from what?” I asked
surprised.
“She died in her apartment about a
month ago. She’d been dead at least a week and neighbors noticed the smell.”
“She visited me two months ago and
I hadn’t seen her for years,” I said. “She showed up at midnight.”
John laughed. “That would be
Sally,” he said. “No one could handle being around her anymore. Even our
daughters moved in with me.”
“I didn’t know that. How old are
they?”
“Stephanie started college this
fall and she’s 18. Brenda is 23 and just graduated Queens College.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “How did
Sally die?”
“Sally just stopped eating and
going out. She was found on her bed. They said it was death through
starvation.”
“Oh my God! Just starved herself to
death just like that?”
“She said she was too fat and
needed to diet. She used to come here on my lunch hour and sit here with me
while I ate my sandwich. She did it at least once a week.”
“Yes she told me too she’d gotten
too fat but she didn’t seem too fat. Maybe she could’ve stood to lose 15 or 20
pounds. She had no one else in her life?”
“Her mother died some time ago. Her
grandmother is gone too. There was no one left. I guess that’s why she used to
come here to sit with me. She had no one else in her life.”
“No one knew how desperate she
was?”
“We were all used to her
eccentricity. When she showed up here a month ago and said she was starting a
new diet, we figured, here goes Sally again, off on a new spin.”
“No one saw how ill she was,” I
said, “not even me. I saw she repeated herself over and over but I didn’t
suspect things were that bad that she’d starve herself to death in seclusion.”
We said our goodbyes and I left
wondering if there was anything I could have done to prevent her death. I knew
her mom had been institutionalized when Sally was a child and we used to hang
out at her grandma’s apartment. I remember we visited her mom together in the
institution. Her mom never left the hospital except once for a visit. I remember grandma made us matching dresses in
a beautiful stretch nylon sleeveless with a round neck and knee length. Sally’s dress was gold,
burnt sienna and brown diamond patterned and mine was blue, turquoise and green
diamond shaped pattern. I remember because it was the first really pretty sexy
dress I had clinging to all my curves. Back then I wore a size 34 size A bra
and had a 25 inch waist. I weighed 125 pounds. Sally weighed 115 and had brown
gold eyes and a heart shaped face. I introduced her to her husband. She married
him when she turned 17 and was pregnant with her first child.
I sit here today, 18 years later,
remembering Sally and wondering if anything could have prevented her death. I
miss Sally too as she was my first true friend.
Sally took this pic of me in the dress her grandma made for me when we were 14 years old.
