A Good Woman Remembered in Better Days

An old friend died on Monday.  I should have felt a shudder in the warp of space and time, but my friend was not that kind of woman.  She was one of the day-to-day warriors who triumph simply by putting one foot in front of the other.  Yet, if her story were writ large, she would have been many things to many people.  If only Lois had been born beautiful, or wealthy, or powerful…instead she was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus.  She told me once that the doctors told her parents she would never leave the hospital; see her first birthday; reach adulthood; live a normal life—the list went on.   She died at 81, the mother of four children and a woman who had lived a complete life.  She sang in the choir, loved to read and played cards. 

My, did Lois love to play cards.  Bridge was her drug of choice.  She did not play it well, but she enjoyed the game, the society and laughter.  Our Philia Bridge Club has been together longer than some of us have been married.  We have been through births and deaths, marriages and divorces.  We have celebrated success and supported one another through failure.  When we started playing together, back in the early 70’s, we were rabid bridge players.  Scores for an evening of cards were frequently in five figures.  We would start around 7 p.m. (most of us worked outside the home) and dessert was never served until around midnight.  We rode the cards lean and mean, and a “…card laid was a card played.”  Now the winner of our traveling trophy is the woman who can pull together points on the high side of 3000.  We have to remind each other who leads the first card, and many is the person who has been three tricks away from game when they suddenly remembered that we were playing in no trump and not hearts.  But, and this is important, the company has gotten better as the cards have gotten worse.           

One of our favorite pictures shows four of us at the bridge table, one in shorts, two in sweats, and one woman with a bag of frozen peas on the back of her neck to help cool her hot flashes.  It is a testament to our, “menopausal” phase.  Those phases have been remarkably in step, except for Lois, who was better than a decade older than the rest of us.  But with age comes wisdom.  Lois had already been where we were going and chose not to laugh out loud when we voiced opinions on how we would handle every adversity.  She knew the deck is always stacked against the smugly confident. 

Lois lived her life in constant and intense pain.  Somewhere along the line she decided that it would hurt the same whether she complained or not, so she didn’t complain.  She lived her life in modest circumstances, experienced every frustration a parent can, made as many mistakes as the next person, and ended her life a widow and an invalid.  She also lived her life sure that God had given her this chance to survive and she was going to grab that chance with both hands.  The daughter of a Lutheran minister she once told me “I know God has a plan for me, but sometimes I wish he would lighten it up a bit.”  Then she would laugh. 

Playing bridge with Lois kept my mind and fingers nimble, but knowing her kept my heart light and my soul a softer, quieter thing.  

Thank you Lois, for keeping the faith.