Fall Apart, Carry On

From my office on the second floor of our more than century-old house in Fresno, I am trying to narrow the lens on what it means to have a beating heart. My friend Diana is dead and I am alive.

In this small room – a sleeping porch originally – one window is open, and a rare breeze filters through the screen. I look out and down at the backyard. What was once a concrete slab next to silt so stale it would turn to dust with a mere whisper is now a retreat. Citrus trees, a pomegranate, a dwarf fig: bounty hidden inside a fence. But widen the lens and what grows here is but a speck within the immense agricultural valley where I live. I was not a gardener before moving to California, but sun, compost, and a drip system provide magic powder for abundance. There are roses and rosemary in my view, lavender and a lilac. And succulents, which look both alien and right at home. 

There’s heft in the massive agave that started out as a young transplant but is now at least seven feet tall and probably as wide. It sits near the northwest corner of the yard stealth-like as if it knows its potential to dominate.

Just watch me, it says. The life force in its stiff, thorn-lined fronds is palpable. Honestly, I’m surprised it doesn’t walk. The plant is graceful in its strength; its privilege rests in having the perfect spot to grow. If I were writing a radio story about my garden, I would give this succulent a voice.

I belong here, it would say. I am a part of the earth in ways you will never be. I’m not ruthless. Just a survivor, and I will cut you if necessary. 

But I am not writing a radio story, at least not now.

Nearly two years have passed since Diana and I huddled over cold diet cokes (her favorite) to talk story ideas as journalists. At that point, she was still working as a feature writer for the L.A. Times. I was still the news director at our local public radio station. We left those jobs fairly soon after, me to move to Ireland for a year, her to figure out something new after decades of pounding the pavement, the most apt idiom for any decent reporter. And Diana was a great reporter. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for “Scenes from the California Dust Bowl,” her series on the driest drought in California history. She also published two travel memoirs and had begun a third when she died from a brain tumor.

Now back home in Fresno, back from my year in Ireland, apart from Diana who no longer lives nearby, I wonder who I am, this woman with a broken heart that still beats. I will turn sixty next year. That fact plays like a bugle in my head, waking me up to the strange timeline of life, how some years move quickly and others slowly and how you are young in your head until you are not. There is no real middle age, I think.

Of course, sixty is still young if that’s when you die. “She left us way too early,” people (even young people) say of my larger-than-life friend.

From my office window, I see a trio of rose bushes with orange, red, and fuchsia blossoms and imagine them singing sweetly to the giant succulent. Their beauty belies their hidden strength for their thorns are also sharp.

On those days when I am in the yard deadheading roses, I try to stay clear of the agave. But then I see that trumpet vines from the fence have invaded like soldiers parachuting in and entangling themselves in the agave’s fronds. I can’t stand their entitlement, and I try to pull the vines out. I’m so focused on the stringy green strands I often miss whatever thorn is right in front of my face. 

Even now in May, there are still oranges on the largest of the citrus trees. It is the one that offers us shade on our deck in the brutal summer heat, a giving tree that likely took root around the time our Prairie Style house was built.

I don’t give the tree a voice. Its bounty is taste, not sound. 

The eight crepe myrtles that line a wide stone path with a long picnic table in the middle grow so slowly that the shade we’d imagined for outdoor summer dinners rests in the future. At the end of the path is a large fountain, the pièce de résistance flanked by two lemon trees, one a smaller Meyer, the other a towering Eureka. Their tiny, perfect thorns are like doll swords. Near the trees sit raised beds made from the concrete chunks we took up when the yard was as much slab as it was dirt. From a distance, they look less like concrete, more like stone. An illusion.

The picnic table is an anchor for all the gatherings we have hosted here: music events, book readings, dinners, the high school graduation parties for both of our sons. Always outside, always in the late evening when our slice of the earth has turned its face from the oppressive sun.

But it is not the picnic table where I see myself sitting when I scroll back in my mind to one of the last times I saw Diana. No, my eyes instead go to the deck, to a cluster of metal chairs under the quiet orange tree, the tree I love the best. It is July, 2022.

I zero in on the scene, recalling who else is there, what we are saying. There are many people around us, some at the picnic table, some at other chairs on the patio below the deck. But I don’t see their faces as I return to this moment. I only see these few friends: Diana, Mark, and Selena. There is an odd intimacy in this little circle, as if it is the end of something.

Mark is also a writer, a much lauded one. An incredible journalist and author whose work elevates our understanding of the world. But on this night, we are not talking about stories, at least not the ones that come from the pens of reporters. The conversation is about leaving and Diana is uncharacteristically emotional.

The party is to say a temporary goodbye. My husband Ben, our younger son Asher, and I will leave in a few days to spend our year in Limerick, Ireland. Ben, a jazz musician and college professor, has a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and collaborate with other musicians at the university there. Asher has just graduated high school. He’s going to enroll in a one-year world music program. My hope is to freelance as a radio journalist.   

But we are not the only ones departing this dusty city. Selena is moving north to Petaluma to be with her new husband. Her connection to people is as an acupuncturist and doctor of Chinese medicine, and she’s currently working on a master’s degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. For some reason, Diana thought Selena also planned to be away for only a year to do an internship, and now she is upset to learn she was mistaken.

Diana has a way of making us feel like we are all one big beautiful unit. The reality is the four of us are so rarely in one place at the same time that this moment of togetherness feels weighted, significant. Diana and Selena had been out of touch for years but have recently rekindled their friendship. Is that why Diana seems so sad, I wonder? Is it because she thought Selena, a person whose generosity and kindness runs deep and solid, was just leaving for the year? Or does she sense some greater shift happening in our lives?

“You didn’t know she was leaving for good?” I ask. I feel envious that Diana has lived with this fantasy of Selena coming back when I’ve been stuck with the awful truth.

Selena is my closest friend here. We raised our children together from day one. We share a certain morbid sense of humor, a sensitivity to the world buoyed by a self-reliance born from very different childhoods. She is the friend I see or talk to daily, the one who plays off anything I say that is remotely funny. Selena and I have been inseparable for twenty years, but she grew up in San Francisco and we both knew she would leave one day and return to Northern California.

While I’m sad on the inside, Diana is visibly upset. She can’t believe this is the last time we will all be together as citizens of Fresno.

If there is one thing Diana loves, it is the idea of a village, the possibility that people will casually drop in on each other, that we will have time for a coffee or tea and conversation. She is designed for that style of easy relationships.

If she gripes consistently about anything, it is that we don’t take the time to just visit, just talk, just stop by unannounced.

Diana wants our neighborhood to be more like the villages in the Azores, Portuguese islands she fell in love with and described beautifully in a travel memoir that highlights the connection between them and the San Joaquin Valley where there’s a large Azorean diaspora.

A few tears well up in her eyes. None of us expects this. We are momentarily silenced by it, as if we are witnessing something too intimate for words. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Diana cry. She lost both her parents when she was a teenager, two deaths within a year. No one gets out of that hell without developing a protective veneer, a practiced look on their face that says let’s not go there.

This is a rare, tender moment, and we embrace it because it is sacred.

We respond to her sorrow with hugs and words of “We’ll all get together again” and “It will be all right.” But life soon teaches us we are wrong on both counts.