Under different circumstances, I would have asked my wise friend Tally for advice on how to be a good friend to someone who is dying.
Since I began writing this blog, my beloved friend Dr. Tally Kritzman-Amir has reviewed most of the posts, suggesting wise edits and improvements. She appears in the book I wrote, Maqluba, as the perceptive and generous “Yael.” On May 14, 2022, she passed away at the age of 43.
June 2021
It started and ended with the cat. That ancient, ailing, undignified cat, that defecates outside the litterbox, that yowls day and night, that was never cute or cuddly, that Tally inherited from her acerbic ex-boyfriend, that Tally never really wanted.
Tally called me at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, as I was about to leave for a run.
“I’m in the hospital,” she said. “I think I have cancer.”
In two decades of friendship, we had talked through career angst, love, breakups, marriage, births, moves across the globe – but this conversation was uncharted. Weeks of abdominal discomfort. Sudden vomiting. A blood test. An MRI. The emergency room. An unconfirmed diagnosis. Her sister, an oncologist at an Israeli hospital, was already buying a plane ticket to the United States.
“I’ll come today,” I told her. We were living in North Carolina temporarily, a sabbatical from my partner’s university in Palestine. Tally had moved from Tel Aviv to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2017 and was looking for a permanent job in the United States. She and her husband Yoni were determined to protect their daughters from the Israeli government’s school curriculum, which teaches racism and ultra-nationalism, and the Israeli military’s mandatory conscription, which enforces them.
“Wait,” she said. “I haven’t told Yoni yet. I don’t know how to tell him.”
Two weeks earlier, I had sent her photos and videos from a visit to a progressive neighborhood in Philadelphia, a city where she had a job offer. She wanted the job but was reluctant to leave her beloved Cambridge. I sent her mock news-style videos from the locally-owned secondhand bookstore hosting a lecture by an LGBTQ community group, the co-op grocery specializing in vegan, organic, fair trade products and the lawn signs voicing support for reproductive rights, racial justice, and respect for science.
“It’s so liberal here, you could vomit,” I had filmed myself reassuring her. “You’ll love it.”
Now she told me she would have to decline the Philadelphia job offer, but it seemed too early to make that decision, because people can recover from cancer.
“My stomach is making weird sounds,” she complained. “It sounds like Condi yowling.”
“Whatever happened to Condi?” I asked. I had last seen the cat during a pre-Covid visit years ago.
“She’s still alive,” Tally said. “Fifteen years old. We joke that she’ll outlive all of us, but that seems less funny now.”
“It’s still kind of funny,” I said.
Yoni woke up, and Tally texted me to say she had told him. He refused my offer to fly there.
“It’s too early,” he said. “We don’t even have a confirmed diagnosis.”
But then we did have a confirmed diagnosis: Bile duct cancer. Stage 4. Advanced and metastasized. Inoperable. A rare cancer that settles quietly in the digestive system and causes symptoms only after it’s too late.
Four weeks later, they let me visit. Tally was perched on a seat built into the window of her living room, looking out onto their green lawn. Condi the cat lumbered into the room, checked her food bowl and cried. Orr, 10, and Shir, 6, topped off the food bowl with pellets and showered Condi with caresses. When they left the room, Tally said she had told the girls “seventy-five percent of it,” and that the hospital social worker had given her pamphlets to help explain cancer to children.
Tally spent long stretches of the days swallowed by pain. In the mornings, I was confined to the guest bedroom until Tally woke up, because the cat yowled if anyone came downstairs, and it was hard for Tally to sleep. When I went to the kitchen that first morning to make coffee, Condi meowed loudly, trying to rub her body against my legs.
“I still don’t like you,” I told her, and she yowled again and staggered unevenly back to her food bowl.
That cat will die soon, I thought. She’ll die, and Tally’s daughters will be inconsolable. They will mourn the loss of that cat, because they have no other place to put their grief, because the loss of their mother is too stupefying to feel, your mind can’t understand it, and what does it mean anyway to be told 75% of the fact that your mother will die? The girls will cry for that damn cat, because they can contain the grief over the cat, but neither they nor I can understand what it means for Tally to be immobilized in a window nook overlooking a green lawn, wondering if she’ll live to see the snow fall on it, knowing that she will never know what her daughters will look like as women.
December 2021
Then the sun came out from behind the clouds. We got Tally back. Her stupid doctors, with their stupid treatments, managed to bypass her blocked bile ducts with stents. Tally could eat. She didn’t have crippling abdominal pain. Her stupid doctors, with their stupid treatments, administered palliative chemotherapy that shrank the tumors. They gave her steroids and pain patches and anti-nausea medications and blood transfusions, striking a delicate balance between treatment and poison, protection and attack. Tally prepared to teach her law school class and played games with her daughters.
I knew the situation was good when she called to ask my help writing to members of Congress in Massachusetts.
“My employment authorization document is expiring,” she said. “I’ll lose my driver’s license, my job, and my health insurance.”
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” I told her.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s not going to happen. They don’t know who they’re dealing with.”
And they didn’t. I drafted a letter to her Congressional representatives urging intervention to renew her employment authorization. She wrote back to say that we needed to say something about her cancer.
“For or against?” I asked, because we were back to jokes and cynicism, because she had come back from the pain.
“For them hurrying up before it’s too late,” she said.
I wrote, in her name, what she and I knew but had avoided saying out loud to each other: “There is no known cure for my condition, and my doctors have told me that my cancer is terminal. I am undergoing palliative chemotherapy in the hope of having as much time as possible with my daughters and husband.”
I wondered if it reassured her, to have it stated between us, to confirm that I knew. Or maybe it made her feel horrible, to read those words on the screen as we engaged in our otherwise familiar, years-long practice of sending drafts back and forth to each other over email: blog posts, job application letters, law review articles, and now a request for humanitarian intervention.
Tally was back. After a week in which she lobbied, networked and bulldozed her way through the bureaucracy, the U.S. immigration authorities agreed to issue Green Cards for herself and her family.
January 2022
Even as Tally was doing well, teaching a law school class and planning a seventh birthday party for Shir, there was a horrible kind of honesty about her prognosis.
“Orr said she’s worried about Condi dying,” Tally told me.
“It’s wonderful that Orr can express that,” I said.
“Yeah,” Tally said. “But the cat needs to die soon, on my watch.”
Condi jumped on the couch and tried to nuzzle Tally’s leg. Tally pushed her off the couch and told her frankly: “Nobody likes you.”
But that wasn’t true. Orr likes Condi. Orr loves her. And Condi needs to hurry up and die, because we don’t know how long Tally’s watch will last, and Tally wants to mother Orr through her mourning of that stupid cat, to help her daughter practice what it will feel like to grieve for Tally.
February 2022
“Hemoglobin is 6.5,” Tally texted. She was at the hospital for another round of chemotherapy. “The nurses are in shock from me. Molly almost cried again. They were actually holding my arms, making sure I didn’t fall, because I’m not supposed to be able to walk with that level of anemia.”
I had recently returned from a visit. I recalled the evening she sat at the kitchen counter, asked Yoni to bring her a bowl, and mashed sweet potatoes for latkes. Now I understood that the anemia had rendered her too weak to stand. She struggled to perform ordinary domestic tasks that had become precious. I put my hand on her shoulder then and asked how she felt.
“I want to cry,” she said, and her face was desperate. “I’m so tired.” But then Orr entered the kitchen, and Tally closed her eyes briefly and opened them. She declared that we were going to play a family game together, whether or not the girls wanted that. We sat on the floor, and Tally beat us mercilessly at the Israeli card game of Taki, boasting loudly of her prowess and daring us to a rematch.
Tally was fighting so hard. I forgot that she was actually very, very ill.
May 2022
Then she died, and I was at the airport again, this time for the funeral. I had last seen her six weeks earlier. As the end drew near, she hadn’t wanted visitors.
“Are you afraid?” I texted her last month, because she didn’t want to talk on the phone anymore either. She was receiving supplementary oxygen, and when emotions overwhelmed her, she literally couldn’t breathe.
“Yesterday when I laid down, I fantasized about it,” she replied. “That I would sleep and not wake up. I feel like it would be a huge relief for everyone, including me.”
Pain seared my heart, and I tried to practice the listening skills I had learned from her, to be present, to resist denying the other person’s feelings. Under other circumstances, I would have asked my friend Tally how to be a good friend to someone who is dying.
“It’s selfish,” I texted her. “We want to hold onto you.”
“There’s not much of me left,” she replied.
But even a little bit of Tally was precious, a firestorm of activity, determination, intention, and love. She made a video for the girls and Yoni, for afterward. She ordered necklaces with charms containing her name entwined with those of Orr and Shir. She downloaded her Facebook posts documenting the girls’ development. She wrote them letters.
“I’m so weak,” Tally wrote to me. “It’s so hard. I just want to disappear.”
And then she did. Her mother flew in from Tel Aviv, joining her sister. Tally had a final conversation with the girls. On Friday night, she wrote to tell me she was grateful for our friendship. My heart soared with love and splintered with pain.
“Will you let me know when you go to sleep?” I wrote.
“I took a sedative now,” she wrote. “Goodnight.”
“Sweet dreams, my love,” I wrote. And then I collapsed, sobbing, on my kitchen floor, and my partner held me close, and our children gathered around us and stared.
“You’re sad,” my son said, and he smiled his beautiful four-year old smile, the kind of smile that Tally would never again see on her own daughters’ beautiful, smooth round faces.
The morning after the funeral, Yoni asked a friend to take the cat to the veterinarian. Condi had developed some kind of mouth infection and had stopped cleaning herself, was tracking sand from her litter box throughout the house. Yoni began the shiva, the seven-day mourning period, and visitors filled the house. I asked him about Condi’s trip to the veterinarian.
“Condi has a heart problem, but the vet says she can live with it for a while,” he said. Yoni smiled his crooked smile, the smile that Tally fell in love with more than a decade ago, except that now the rest of his face was stricken with pain and shock. “Now you decide which of that is good news and which is bad news,” he joked.
I smiled back and felt my love for Tally surging toward him and Orr and Shir. He and their daughters had taken their first steps on a journey through hell, but they were strong and beloved, and they would survive. I hid my face and left the room, my body racked with pain and anger and guilt, because the rest of us get to keep living, but Tally does not.
I’m so sorry
Thank you.
Umm forat
So sorry, my thoughts are with you, Yoni and the girls may their sorrow be short – lived
As heart rending as the story may be it was equally beautiful and loving
Intertwining condi’s life with tally’s mortality drew out her loving cynical nature
A more special send off of a friend isn’t easily found you are an amazing writer and apparently an amazing friend
Good luck
Eddie
Thank you, Eddie. She was just wonderful 🙂
What a moving story. Thank you for sharing it with us. Like all your readers who love you and your family from afar, I am so sad about Tally’s death. Your memories of such a friend will bless your life as long as you live.
Thank you, Tom.
I have been reading wonderful things about her since she passed away. May her soul be bound in the bundle of life and may her family and you her friend, never know more sorrow.
Thank you, Hilla.
After many minutes I decided to leave the page blank. A jumble of feelings cannot put in words.
Thank you, Gunther.
I’m so terribly sorry for all of you who love Tally, especially her little girls. Thank you for giving us a chance to get to know her.
Thank you, Susan. Hope you are well.
This is beautiful- I knew her professionally but this personal reflection makes her loss so much greater.
Thank you, Shana.
כמה עצוב. אין מלים.
חיבוקים, יקירה!
תודה, דנה.
As someone who has gotten to know you only through your posts, I was greatly moved by your report of the tragic loss of your dear friend. My sincere condolences to you and her family.
Richard Cramer in Chapel Hill
Thank you, Richard.
Thank you Sari for sharing this disturbing and penetrating personal note of your intimate and loving support of Tally. This helps us mourn the loss.
Thank you, Kenneth.
You make Tali feel so alive in the recounting of her death
Thank you, Jennifer.
Thank you for sharing this journey with your dear friend. I know it will help others facing similar sad farewells. Without ever having met your friend, you have brought her so vividly to my home – and shown what a lovely, caring person she has been. I feel deeply for her husband & children, for you and for all those whose lives she touched & who cared about her.
Have you ever read any of Rabindraneth Tagore’s writing? This quote from him might have some meaning for you:
Death is not extinguishing the light ;
It is putting out the candle because the dawn has come.
Thank you. That quote is beautiful. Moving. Thank you for sharing it with me.
Sari,
This is so beautifully written and so heartbreaking. Thanks for writing it.
Itamar
Thank you, Itamar. She treasured you and was so proud of you.
What a beautiful tribute to your friend. Honest in every way including your love for her. I am so sorry for the pain you are feeling from her loss. I trust that the memories of your friendship and continuing to feel her presence will sustain you through this time of grief.
Thank you, Valerie.
I recently lost a good friend also to cancer, She left three grown daughters and grandchildren. I accompanied her on her journey from her diagnosis with pancreatic cancer that had metastisized to her death a few months later. Your blog descibed my experiences exactly and I thank you for that. May you know no more pain and suffering.
Thank you, Susan. And I’m sorry for your loss.
May her memory be a blessing ❤️
Thank you, Safiyyah.
Not often does my vision blur at the end of reading such moving , vivid and loving works. May the winds of good fortune be always at your back.
Thank you, Igor.
This is a beautiful account of a beautiful person. Thank you.
Thank you, Michael. She got such support from supporting you in your journey.
I don’t personally know either of you other than r by your wonderful journal. My eyes filled with tears as I read of your dear friend’s final journey. She was far too young and had so much ahead of her. My heart is heavy for you and for her family.
Thank you, Jan, for the kind words.
מי ייתן שתהיו שלוים
מי ייתן שתהיו משוחררים
מי יתן שתהיו חופשיים
מי ייתן שתהיו מאושרים
תודה, עופרית.
Sari, I’m so very sorry about the loss of your dear friend. I remember you speaking about her often and with so much love. What a loss.
Thank you, Olivia.
Thank you for this beautiful tribute. Heartbreaking…
May her memory continue to be a blessing.
Thank you, Hilary.
A mystery beyond comprehension. Always has been, always will be. At this place in time, words are strangely hollow. But not our being. Throughout the cosmos, never give up, never give in.
Sandy Rinaldi, Arkansas, US Army veteran 1971 to 1974, today 18 AUG 22
Wonderful blog you have here but I was curious if you knew of any message boards that cover the same topics
talked about here? I’d really like to be a part of community where I can get
comments from other experienced people that share
the same interest. If you have any recommendations, please let
me know. Bless you!