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I found myself calling her several times a day. Sometimes I had news. "I have estrogen receptors!" I yelled once from a pay phone. That was good news because it made the cancer more treatable. But sometimes I had no news, nothing to say. I just wanted to hear her calm, soft voice.

She came with me to all my appointments that first week, tape recording the sessions in case I missed something, handing me paper cups of tea, keeping me fortified with cartons of yogurt. She insisted I go for a second opinion and arranged everything for me, making appointments with the doctors in Seattle who had treated her four years before. She took two days out of her life to come with me, to drive the five hours up and back the freeway and stay in a motel, to sit with me in waiting rooms and exam rooms and consulting rooms, and when it was all over, to celebrate my "excellent prognosis" with something big and gooey from the bakery.

Then, as quickly as she had come into my life, she left it. She was in charge of a two-week camping trip for her daughter's school. She had to go. By the time she came back, I had weathered a few storms on my own. My surgery was over, and so was the initial shock. I was less needy. I was more myself. She sensed that immediately and slipped back into her life, her children, her husband, her work, her own set of friends.

I saw Nancy a few times after that, and for a while we spoke weekly on the phone. "Just checking in," she would say. Then the phone calls, both hers and mine, grew less frequent and finally all but stopped, and she went back to being what she was before, a person I occasionally saw around town.

The thing about temporary friendships is that you don't have the chance to repay the debt. I think of those five women who have met for dinner for the past 27 years and all the opportunities they have had to pay back each other's kindnesses, to trade places, weak and strong, needy and needed, over the years. Nancy and I don't have that history nor are we likely to have that future.

Once, in the thick of our friendship, I despaired aloud over never being able to adequately thank her. That's when she told me about Janet, who came from nowhere to pull her through the three worst weeks of her life. "The way it works is this: You are how I'm repaying Janet," she said.

So it is that temporary friendships outlast us, repeating themselves serially, rhythmically, as each of us steps up when we are needed. We temporary friends are shamelessly intimate. Our connection is white hot, too hot to last. But it is also too essential not to pass on. I know how I will thank Nancy.
salon.com | Oct. 19, 1999

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