Saying Goodbye to Elizabeth

In the early morning of June 27, my oldest sister-in-law, Elizabeth Soyster Herrick, died of aggressive metastatic cancer.  She left the world gracefully, quietly, surrounded by her three sisters, but way, way too early.  Elizabeth was a month or so shy of 70, and four days earlier had driven from her home in Maryland with one of the sisters to a 70^thbirthday party in Washington for all her Potomac School classmates.  As one of the sisters said at her memorial service, “Her death was the first time Elizabeth was early for ANYTHING.”

About Elizabeth: she presided gently over three active and strong-minded sisters, a lawyer, a doctor, and an Episcopal priest. (There’s a classic in the Episcopal hymnal about saints of God. Among them, one was a doctor, one was a priest, and “one was slain by a fierce wild beast.”  Perhaps that last was a lawyer; I couldn’t possibly say.)  For her part, she worked with distinction for the US Department of State.  She lived for years with a Washington lawyer who many of us felt was not good enough for her, but whom eventually – thanks to the offices of her sister the priest – she married.  She loved tennis and figure-skating, often traveling with a sister or two to watch national tournaments and competitions.  She attended one of each during the last year of her life.

She cooked well, and very slowly.  Her dinners were sometimes not ready until after eleven P.M., but they were always breathtaking.  She found it often impossible to throw things away.  Clearing her house after her death has been a daunting task. In retirement she and her husband lived on Gibson Island in Maryland, a gated island community in Chesapeake Bay with lots of amenities – tennis courts, a golf course, a yacht club, a garden club of which she was president during her final year, a club house where she regularly played bridge and canasta with a host of friends.  In fine, she was a wonderful woman, friendly, wise, much loved. She will leave a gaping hole in the fabric of her family and her community both.

And it was cancer that did her in.  Discovered about a year ago in her uterus, despite chemotherapy it spread eagerly to her liver, her lungs, and her brain.  The Emperor of All Maladies, as Siddhartha Mukherjee calls it.  Elizabeth seemed determined to spit in its face, albeit always with her characteristic grace.  She went to bridge and canasta, to Happy Hour at the club, to social engagements, to Garden Club meetings.  Only for the last four days of her life did she decline to go upstairs to sleep; and then her sisters called hospice and had a hospital bed brought into the downstairs study.  She lay in that bed, non-responsive on the third day, until around 4:00 the following morning, she died.

I had driven across the country from California to Massachusetts during the second week of June, and Jane and I had spent a week in Stowe, Vermont, where we have a time-share at the Trapp Family Lodge.  A couple days later, alerted by her sisters, Jane flew to Maryland, and a day later she asked me to drive down. The end was coming. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon; Elizabeth was in the hospital bed, barely opening her eyes. I would not have recognized her. Her hair was short and gray, her face thin and drawn.  Early Thursday morning I awoke briefly as our nephew Alexander came into the bedroom to rouse Jane.  By the time I rose, about 6:30, it was over.  Later, when everyone else was out of her room, I went in to her, said good-bye, and kissed her cold cheek.  I thought of e.e.cummings’s poem:

Buffalo Bill’s

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what I want to know is

how do you like your blue-eyed boy

Mister Death

I know, she was an Elizabeth, a girl, hazel-eyed, not a Buffalo Bill, not a boy, not blue-eyed – but Mister Death had claimed her too. So how do you like her, you old fart? I thought with some bitterness.

Thirteen days later we were back in Maryland for Elizabeth’s funeral. In the meantime we had driven back to Vermont, where we took Sam, our younger son, his new fiancée Georgia, and his brother Gardner, and wife Tiffanie to inspect the wedding possibilities at the Trapps’. The ironies of lives ending and lives beginning were not lost on any of us.

Then Sam and Georgia flew to BWI, and Jane, Gardy, and I drove to Gibson Island. Those of you who have read earlier posts here are familiar with Old Blue, my trusty Prius, who proved himself a real hero during these weeks. Jane conducted a wonderful service at the Gibson Island club, where more than 150 of Elizabeth’s friends and family said goodbye. The next day I drove alone back to Boston, while Jane and her sisters went to Washington to inter her remains in the columbarium next to her husband and her mother, in the same church where Jane and I had been married thirty-seven years earlier to the day.

This is a sad essay – how could it be otherwise?  But it’s also about circles closing, and opening.  Elizabeth dies, Sam and Georgia prepare to marry. Last year I described Old Blue’s  near-demise from rodent attack, and here he is carrying me and the family over 10,000 miles in a month and a half largely on behalf of Elizabeth.  Last month I wrote about end-of-life planning, and here I am writing about the end of a dear life. Elizabeth has shown all of us how to leave life as gracefully as she lived it. I am blessed to have known her, and now, perhaps, so are you.