THE HEALING POWER OF CHICKEN AND PASTA

Please, please, this is not a living obituary. Inflicting such morbidity would be wrong for me and for you, much more so for Lenora, who might also read this column.

I got the call a scant six weeks ago. Lenora, a friend, congregant and fellow educator from my Charlotte days was riddled with cancer. It exploded all at once. By the time it was detected, it had invaded lungs, liver and bones. Desperate chemo has not worked.

We still cannot find within ourselves the clinical objectivity to spit out the word “terminal,” but we already choke on words like “incurable” and “dire.”

Part of our denial is just plain denial. A good measure of the denial, though, is the good nature, glibness, even silliness, that still emit from this woman who knows the eventuality and whose body is overtaken by disease. I mean, Lenora is a once chubby, moon-faced woman who reveled in dressing up like a huge M&M or a French maid to underscore some facet of living a life guided by mitzvot.

As I say, though, this is not a living eulogy.

Please, then, afford me the cathartic self-indulgence of reflecting on my own struggles with this moment in her life that are such a jumble of the bitter and the sweet.

For a decade, I had not been a good friend to Lenora. I had not even seen her in six years. No, we had had no falling out, simply the loopiness of life’s paths that bring two people together, then lead them on their separate ways. Hence, my responding to her crisis certainly was tinged with, if not consumed by, the guilt of now coming too late with too little. Ironic, but as hard as it is to account for “Where were you in the bad times?” it is sometimes even harder to answer to “Where were you in the good times?”

Yet, we can dispel guilt. The avenues of confession, contrition, new resolve, absolution, forgiveness, remain open. Helplessness, though, is a terminal condition. We stand by as the life of a lovely, decent person slips away before our eyes, and we flail our arms in desperation and curse our futility in making it better. No matter how much peace we ultimately make with the resolve that “we did our best,” the pall of helplessness remains forever.

The ministry of our presence is all that we have left. Perhaps this is the most sublime gift of all. Our presence cannot cure Lenora, but it can help to heal her, and heal us, as well. Every moment of our unconditional presence affirms that she will not face her fears alone.

Yet, even in offering our presence we remain unsettled. The thought that “I don’t know what to do, but I gotta do something,” eats away at us. The feeling is so pervasive that we laugh at sitcom scenarios when, facing whatever the crisis, someone is bound to say, “I’ll go put up some coffee.”

Personally, when I do not know what to do, I cook. So, yesterday, I cooked frenetically, as if I had taken half a bottle of dexies – chicken marsala, pappardelle, field greens with balsamic dressing and candied pecans, garlic bread, peach compote . . . I even found a long lost bottle of not-too-bad Israeli port. Then I schlepped it up to Lenora and Bob’s in Charlotte. She had conserved her strength to set a beautiful table in the dining room of their modest home. Schlemiel and schlimazel that we are, the power went out, but it fortuitously came back on in just enough time to warm the warm and chill the cold.

Soon, elbow-to-elbow, friends came and surrounded the table. We blessed the bread. Ate with gusto. Drank wine with abandon. Toasted each other. Joked and laughed. Caught up on old times. No sense of teary bon voyage.

And, Lenora kept pace with us all the way. She promised to take me to a new restaurant that she knew I would love, and there was not a touch of bitter irony or squirmy denial in her voice as she extended the invitation. There was no discussion of Divine justice or theodicy or God’s presence, for in our ministry of presence was the most manifest sense of God’s presence. Yes, we affirmed, God is best sought and found in breaking bread in the midst of human fellowship.

How long will the afterglow last? Call me a Pollyanna, but I believe it will endure until the next dinner, and the next dinner, and the next dinner, cooked by loving friends who “didn’t know what else to do” and served to a circle of the beloved who know to celebrate the eternity of the soul more by instinct than by theology.

As I finally drove off, I cried. Yet, the tears were as much of the sweet as they were of the bitter. For, ten years of indifference had somehow melted away. In its place, a modicum of comfort settled in as I realized that the simplicity of chicken and pasta and the presence of friends may not cure my friend Lenora, but it may help her – and us – to be healed.