Her name is Alyssa. She is 53. We reconnected several years ago and called each other often.
In the 70s, we lived down the road from her family; a dirt road; after all, it was an equestrian neighborhood, and people riding or leading their horses up and down all day, sometimes with dogs or foals alongside, was the norm. It was wonderful then.
Alyssa always rode bareback, barefooted, on a Welsh pony, Ida (Idaho) who wore only a halter and a single rope for a rein. She was 13. When she wasn't riding, she had her nose in a book. Her mother became my very close friend until she died within a few weeks of finding out she had lung cancer, 15 years ago.
There was never a day or night that I remember, that Mary, her mother, didn't have a cigarette in her mouth, between her fingers, in an ashtray, or in a pack in a leather case with a Bic lighter in front of her. They were on the goat milking stand; on the dashboard, stuck in her blouse; they sat and waited for her on fenceposts. They were next to her in the garden (she had an enviable green thumb). Mary was my hero. She was a double amputee. She could do anything; everything. She was funny, full of mischief, intelligent, self-reliant and confident. She lost her legs in an accident when she was 14 months old, crawling out of the house unbeknownst to the family, and was sitting on the track when the train ran over her. She never knew she was different, and really, she wasn't. No one coddled Mary.
She had no patience with people who felt sorry for themselves because of circumstances or disability. She passed that down to Alyssa, who was also self-reliant, became a member of the USAF, and lived a life of make do. She also didn't mind when Alyssa picked up the cigarettes and became a chain smoker who watched her mother die of lung cancer. She didn't stop. That was 15 years ago.
Last summer the call from Alyssa - "I have some bad news." What she and the doctors thought for years were relics of Valley Fever, was lung cancer. There were MRIs, x-rays, CT scans, bone scans. There were tumors; in her lungs, in her brain, and something suspicious on a bone in her arm which hurt so much, she thought she had broken it. The cancer was attached to the bone.
She kept the remnant herd of ponies at "the ranch" which her mother bequeathed to her. It was just a collection of abandoned mobile homes, a half adobe house with a caved in roof where her half brother lives, which was in sight of the Mexican border on that new superhighway that will eventually connect Mexico to Canada. It hurt her arm to feed them, and she needed help with the bales and feed sacks.
Her conversations became at times, very bizarre. She started falling. Her behavior was strange and then she was fine. Mood swings. Delusions. She nosedived into the bathtub one night. The doctors said it was due to the tumors in her brain. Some could be removed and give her some quality time.
So Alyssa bravely chose the surgery, lamenting that it had taken her 10 years to grow her hair
but the doctors only cut a small patch out. She was discharged from the hospital in record time, though she imagined many odd things because her brain was still swollen from the surgery. One of them was that she would gamble, win big and do good for others. Maybe no so odd. Not for Alyssa.
They radiated her tumors, too. She sat with patches of hair in her lap. She lived with a man. They had nothing much. She never had any creature comforts, not even in childhood and for that I feel very sad. I sent her a pretty blouse. She was thrilled. She had nothing nice to wear for her doctor appointments.
We chatted every day for months. Then she had trouble with her phone, or so she said. Then she got a Trac phone. Then that went missing. I finally hunted her down by calling her friends.
She was having terrible pain in her neck, and going to the chiropractor, but it didn't work. She thought she had ruptured or cracked a disk when she took the fall into the tub.
Initially the doctors gave her four months. I think she told us in late July. But she was convinced she would lick it. She read about alternative medicine, got a prescription for medical marijuana, and then retreated to her recliner and her Chihuahuas, losing weight, losing contact with friends. I called a friend one night recently, and he said she had lost an enormous amount of weight, that she was very weak and occasionally did not make sense. He took her to the VA for some appointments. She had decided not to take the chemotherapy offered and stopped.
She was taken to the hospital three days ago in terrible pain. Last night they gave her heavy medication. This morning when I called she was sleeping peacefully, not quite in a coma.
Tonight she is in a hospice ward, unresponsive. Four hours or a day - she is not expected to have more time.
I will remember that girl on her gray Ida going up the street; coming back from Hansen Dam with my first donkey, Samantha, who would not cross water. We laughed hard and long about the charros with the jingling spurs on their hot horses, one on each side holding Sam's halter and dragging her across a tiny, shallow trickle of a stream. She never did cross water. And I remember her walking into her house one night with a cat named George. He was half Burmese, and she had him under her green jacket, with only his head showing. I wanted that cat. He had moonstones for eyes. He was two shades of chocolate with white trim. When he killed a baby chick, she gave him to me. I remember the family move to Three Rivers, to a block house with no heat except the old fashioned cookstove. There was no electricity, no plumbing and to flush the toilet, you had to get a bucket, take it down to the river and use it to flush. They took all the dogs, cats and livestock including the geese and of course, the Welsh ponies. They even had a cow. We spent Thanksgiving with them there once. She was happy and newly married then, but it ended in divorce.
Alyssa was loving and kind, an animal lover. Like her mother, no one was ever a stranger. She was an "easy keeper", lived a simple life and didn't require much to make her happy - guacamole salad, her cookbooks, her ponies and her dogs and cats.
Alyssa has the deep voice of her mother and her mother's laugh.
I'm going to miss her so much. She was so young - too young to do this to herself.
If you're reading this tonight, and if there's a cigarette nearby, please, to honor Alyssa, just put them down - forever. What everyone says is true. Cigarettes and all tobacco will kill you.
She and her friend were smoking 40 cartons a month between them, buying them cheap in Mexico.
As I write this, there's a good chance Alyssa, in the hospice ward, will have passed on already.
Goodnight, sweet girl. I miss you so much already. Maybe you are dreaming while your mother is with you, holding your hand. She's right there by your side. Don't be afraid. I love you.
Alyssa died easily and peacefully in the hospice and palliative care department of the Tucson VA hospital at 5:30 p.m. with her gentleman companion by her side.
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