I slipped into the little powder room to hide, until I’d collected myself. This was the powder room that Victoria had created not many months before – before the cancer diagnosis.
In her usual high-spirited style, she had painted the tiny room a deep burgundy and had a lovely bowl sink mounted on an old bedside table. I’d been baffled by its impracticality, but in her pre-baby life she was an award-winning kitchen and bath designer, and vessel sinks were the fashion. It did look charming.
She must have searched old junk shops for the little table, because she’d also found two very old, taxidermied ducklings, which she’d displayed on the shelf under the mirror. Their obvious age of many decades, combined with the surprise of seeing them there, made me laugh the first time I saw the finished powder room. I told her “I love the dead ducks!”
Our off-beat humour may not have been shared by many of her friends, though, and once the surprise had worn off, the ducklings probably seemed sad, rather than funny. On this Sunday, when we arrived for the Easter party, the ducklings were gone.
I had run into the powder room immediately upon arriving to hide my panic. We’d been hearing generally upbeat reports on Victoria’s battle with the cancer, but it was obvious the optimism was a lie; she was losing the fight. Our precious, funny, amazing Victoria was dying. I had to get a grip on myself. Not only did I not want to cry in front of Victoria or the other guests, who were managing to put on a good show, but I didn’t dare indulge in a quiet cry; that would show.
Struggling to regain my composure, I took deep breaths, flushed the toilet, washed my hands, practiced happy for the mirror, then rejoined the party.
****
Our mums-and-babies group would have “Mums’ Night Out” once a month, and one evening it was just three of us mums: Victoria, Beth and me. This was before the cancer.
I had just returned from a trip to South Carolina where we’d interred the ashes of my in-laws, who’d died weeks apart, like dominoes, two months earlier. It was stressful with my husband’s extended family: first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, cousins once removed, cousins twice removed. At one point, with a house full, and all the young cousins running around the house the way children do, the hostess, my late father-in-law’s first cousin, suddenly hooted that she’d forgotten all about the loaded handgun in the hall table upstairs.
At the airport, waiting for our flight home, I felt my compressed interior expanding in all directions. I could breathe again. The very next day was Mums’ Night Out. I bolted. Most of the mums couldn’t make it that day, so we three met at Spazzo, my all-time favourite restaurant, with its exuberant impressionistic décor and buzzy atmosphere.
Sitting at a window table, dark evening outside, my release from the funeral trip made me giddy. No talk of the funeral, just fun with friends. Victoria set the tone by taking a purple crayon from the jar provided and, with a grand flourish, she drew a sweeping curve right across the paper covering the table. Then using other colours, she designed all around the purple curve. Beth and I took up crayons too, but dabbled next to the master.
The restaurant wasn’t busy that Wednesday evening, and our waiter took very good care of us. Red wine and Retsina flowed. We talked and laughed and when our glasses were empty, we held them aloft, and our smiling waiter obliged. With the restaurant fairly quiet, we talked and talked. Victoria told us about vivid dreams that she believed were of earlier lives.
In one, she was an older woman swimming alone in a small lake surrounded by woods. Wearing a blue seersucker bathing suit, she was swimming a gentle breaststroke through quiet, dark water. I could see her in the soft yellow light of late afternoon, pushing ripples ahead as she glided through the glass-like surface. Next, she was lying alone in a small bed against the wall in a wooden cabin by the lake. The grey-haired woman in the bed was, by choice, quietly dying alone. Victoria wasn’t upset by the vision, but was very clear-eyed about not dying alone in this life.
It was one of those wonderful times with friends that you long remember, with just the right combination of the simple joy in being together, laughing and heartfelt conversation.
****
And then the cancer came. There was a reprieve after six months or so of treatment. Maybe it was gone. But after several months of crossed fingers and held breaths, it was back. And it couldn’t be stopped. We didn’t really know how things were going. The “official” reports were always put in the most hopeful terms. When she wanted to host an Easter party, bringing together her friends and their children, we didn’t know what to expect.
She died in early July. Her large network of women friends, the mums-and-babies group and her kids’ school group, came together, channelling our collective grief into funeral arrangements. I’d been coming each week to tend Victoria’s large garden, bringing my boys to play with her son, whose age fell between my two. These visits were timed for Victoria’s treatments, so we never saw her. Because I’d been gardening, I was asked to organize flowers with a school-group mom.
We asked everyone in our two groups to bring any flowers they could from their gardens, coming the day before the funeral to arrange them. The church had many large vases and we used every one. While my partner and I left to get more flowers, those staying behind started arranging.
Upon returning we heard an extraordinary story. Sandy told us that while the flower arrangers were working just inside the doors that opened directly into the sanctuary, a butterfly had come inside. After flitting about, it landed on one of the bouquets. Sandy had gently picked up the vase with the butterfly and walked slowly out through the big open doors, the others trailing her. Once outside, the butterfly took to its wings. They watched as it flew up, up and was gone to the sky.
It seemed that Victoria, the believer in reincarnation, had come to visit this grief-stricken group, who had in turn released her, free to fly away. Visiting in the form of a butterfly was exactly what she would do.
The church was closed up overnight with all those flowers, so that next day the air inside was magnificently perfumed. It was the sort of detail Victoria would appreciate.
****
A week after the funeral, Victoria’s husband held the clam bake Victoria had ordered some months before. She loved gathering people at the house, so it was not a bit surprising that she had arranged this. But walking through the same house, sitting at the same picnic table on the same deck, looking at the same garden, it didn’t feel the same. I was overwhelmed; Victoria no longer was here. She had flown away.