Five Years After — Memories of Jean

Jean Lewis leaving Wood Street to go to a meeting of the Heritage Rose Foundation

    My neighbor Anne, a seamstress, saw me in front of the house last week and came over to talk.  "The Stitches show was in Santa Clara last week," she said.  "Six years ago Jean went with me and we had a great time, and afterwards we said we'd do it again next year.  But then ... ."  We hugged, and said a few words about what a wonderful person Jean was; and how much she would have loved to see the progress on the park they've started building at the end of Wood St.

    Happens to me a lot, people volunteering their memories of Jean.  And there are reminders around the house everywhere I look.  The picture above is on the fridge.  One Sunday she was rushing off to a Heritage Rose Foundation meeting, and I insisted that she pause on the front porch for a picture.  It was so typical, it had to be immortalized: the quiet hurry; the inevitable cup of coffee; the quirky elegance of the bouquet in a backpack; her sociable purpose, preserving the beauties of an ailing planet.

    Other memories seem to jump out of hiding.  I could be searching for a recent email from someone, and find correspondence with Jean instead.  Like this one, Jean writing to a friend in September 2012, after the NovoCure treatment on which we'd pinned our hopes had failed, and the tumor and crossed the corpus callosum into her left hemisphere.  She apologizes for not communicating enough, then acknowledges the bad news.  And, before finding kind words to say about her medical caregivers — she gets excited about her next garden project, which she envisions improving her spirits and her health.

I've got to get better about keeping up my blog!  Yes, I'm very disappointed; just yesterday for the first time I finally thought maybe I won't make it, but I still hope I can find a way... [She worries how I'll cope without her]  As therapy for myself, I'm planning a huge garden project that sounds like fun, to me, anyway, and should get me back in shape and keep me occupied happily for a while: "paving" the entire back yard--not with cement, but pervious, reused materials.  I wi'll also dig a trench to the back to make a rain garden to help the stormwater percolate into the ground.  Figured I'd try to use all recycled materials and dig out the soil down a few inches, filling in with decomposed granite or sand.  I got a couple of mosaic books, typical of my recent experiences, I accidentally got two books--both are good, though---just more ideas.  I think it will be fun, and one of my close friends from Ann Arbor offered to come out to visit and help with this project, and just hang out with me, so that should be fun, and is certainly something good for me to look forward to!  UCSF did not offer much in the way of options, but we spent some time with one of their social workers today (She's great!) so I, at least, feel better now.

    Certainly that deserves an award for calm courage and bright spirit in the face of life threatening illness.  

    Postscript. The rain garden Jean planned is in place, with one change.  Instead of all the water percolating into the ground, some of it is stored to irrigate the orchard during the dry months.  I had forgotten about the mosaic, but there's a good place for it around the bird bath.