DIANE, IT’S BEEN ONE YEAR

By David Curzon

1.

I went to China six weeks before you died.

Your voice was clear and adamant on the phone:

“Don’t worry and don’t cut the visit short.

We’ll meet at the treatment after you return.”

You liked a restaurant on the Cancer Center’s block.

I got there early, watched the door.   It was

a shock.  You hobbled with a walking-stick.

The cancer had crippled you while I was gone.

Your nature now contained this fitfulness.

I was glad to see you still had appetite.

And then we hesitantly walked along the street.

The radiation didn’t take much time.

In the elevator you held onto my arm.

You argued you could get home by yourself.

You’d catch the bus.  We took the cab I hailed.

The driver waited patiently as you painfully eased in.

The seat was soft and you managed to sink back.

You were heading for your haven and relaxed.

The traffic slowed to a stop, but started up again.

It was a comforting enclosure for us both.

And then your end.    A bed in a hospital.

You couldn’t move or speak.   Your limbic hours.

I looked into your eyes.  My last words were absurd:

“I wish that there was something I could say.”

The pupils of your eyes grew wider in response.

You were amused I couldn’t find a thought.

This riposte was your parting gift to me:

it gave a radiance as my ultimate sense of you.

And then the coma.   Your being was wheeled out

and driven in an ambulance back home

to those enduring days of breathing heavily

as your vital constitution contended on

while watched and washed by family and friends.

2.

When you were alive you were alive to things

like the resilience of the grass in Central Park

where Fay and I went yesterday to walk

on the first anniversary of your death

with all the audience, and the actors too,

from scene to scene, in one of Shakespeare’s plays,

as you and I had done in summers of our past,

and this year, acting in a Midsummer Dream,

an Oberon conjured his sleeping Queen:

                                Be as thou wast wont to be;

                             See as thou wast wont to see.

                                Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower

                                Hath such force and blessèd power.

Just over forty-one years ago, on 3 March 1975, Diane and I met. It was our first day working at the UN. Our class of guides was gathering in a conference room in the first basement of the Conference Building. As we sat and waited we could see each new member of the class arrive. I was there before Diane. When she entered the room, I just knew that we were going to be good friends. Don’t ask me how or why; it was a gut feeling.

And that did come to pass. She was my closest friend for the last forty years of her life.

We have always shared a worldview and our psychological makeup was similar. I’m sure that had something to do with it. Some of our interests overlapped and I think we introduced each other to new interests we came to share. Among those, I led Diane to meditation and the Landmark Curriculum for Living and she led me to tennis and yoga. 

But beyond all that, we shared a bond of understanding each other’s situations. I think we discussed just about everything in our lives, from personal history to whatever was going on at the moment. And we listened to each other. Everyone always talks about Diane’s wisdom (which seemed to come from the ages), her humility and her managerial skills, the excellent way in which she always met her responsibilities and took care of others. Those, of course, are all traits of hers I admired and benefitted from. 

But if there was one characteristic she had that I admired above all others it was her thirst for growth, for self-knowledge and self-improvement. Diane never stopped growing. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of our own growth. We just experience ourselves wherever we are at the moment as being normal and how it’s always been. Sometimes Diane lamented the fact that she hadn’t grown in certain areas. I hope I was able to point out to her how much she had grown. Having known her as an outsider, as someone who had come to her when she was already an adult, I could see her growth so clearly and would point it out to her when she had those low moments. She was also always able to make me see what an extraordinary life I’ve been leading when I would feel lost. 

Most of all though, I learned from our friendship just how deep friendship can be, and just how powerful love for a friend is. Friendship, in some ways, is less demanding than a romantic relationship, having fewer expectations. But, in its own way, the love to be found in friendship is no less powerful. 

I have had any number of romantic relationships and, of course, I had an enormous love for my brother, who died when he was 26 and for my Dad, who passed just a few years after that, and for my mother as well, who died more recently. But I can honestly say that I have loved Diane as much as I have ever loved anyone. 

Diane, I am carrying you in my heart every day of my life.

                                                                                                                                                     Fay

I met Diane when we arrived in Namibia for the preparations for the elections.  She and another colleague took the time to make sure that I was comfortable that night at the school and we have been acquaintancs since then.  Not that I saw her often but she was always warm and friendly.   I had no idea that she was ill and am sorry that I have only now found out that she has passed on.  Gone but always in our minds.   Joan Seymour