My cell phone rang during the middle of the work day.
Like most desk jockeys who work from home now-a-days, I usually avoid personal calls during the height of my work day, and return them either when I take a break or before the start of the next business day. I may still be in my jammies at noon, swatting at my cat to get off my computer, and eating my cereal out of a box for lunch, but I am still on the clock and have to work. I also like what I do, so there’s that too.
The call came from a cellphone number that had an area code that I had not seen in awhile - a couple of years as a matter of fact. I found myself wondering who I knew that lived in that area code besides my Auntie Sylvia and my cousin Steve - both of whom have their own personalized ring tones on my phone. But I allowed the call to go to voicemail and waited until after I finished my Zoom call happy hour.
Turns out that the caller was a former co-worker from several jobs ago. She was calling about a mutual friend of ours.
“Jill (not her real name) has contracted Covid and is in the hospital on a ventilator.”
It took a few seconds for that news to sink in, but my mind was already on it, and memories of our past interactions - the three-day girls vacation at the Indiana Beach Resort in 2012, and 2013, and the hoot we all had at the Celebrate Your Life conferences flooded my consciousness.
[Here I have to bitch about the Celebrate Your Life (which I will shorten to the word “Celebrate”) conferences. Celebrate conferences were where all the new age publishing luminaries gathered in one place to promote their work, to teach the art of manifesting, aka The Secret, and sell stuff. Over the last few years, though, Celebrate has become an exclusive event that takes place in Sedona, Arizona and costs a lot more that a couple of hundred bucks to get in and is available only to those who have already mastered the art of manifesting apparently. Humm, I must have gotten better at manifesting because Sedona is no longer a dream for me to go to; is only a two hour drive from my house, but I have yet to manifest the money to manage to pay the $2,000 price tag just to get in - what?! so I can touch the hem of Deepak Chopra’s robe? Right?? Back to the blog post.]
I mention this because when I moved to Arizona, Jill threatened to visit me so that we, too, could go to Sedona and hit the vortices and the stargates, but those were in the days when we were still talking to each other … well, on Facebook anyway.
It was hard for me to visualize Jill on a ventilator. If there was anyone who I thought would get sick from Covid, it would be Jill’s husband - a long term smoker with a barrel chest to prove it. But no. His infection was over and done weeks before, but it was Jill who was on the ventilator.
A ventilator. I couldn’t believe it. Jill never got sick. Ever. She was always harping on me to not eat anything that was genetically modified lest I end up a fat version of the Fly. Jill who refused to buy pastuerized milk and would go to local farms to have her cream fresh from the dairy. Jill who had energy to burn, who worked like a horse (as if horses actually do any work now-a-days) and ran circles around the lot of us. What was worse is that she would brag about it. Yep she was one of the most braggadocious and competitive person I had ever met, even more than my 80 year old Aunt - not Auntie Sylvia who is a lot nicer - who lives in Itasca, Illinois.
Still, if Jill had anything to brag about it was usually because she had every right to do so. She actually read the books she said she was reading - unlike laggards like me who would skim the book and read only what mattered, what I already knew to be true, leaving the rest to the audio version to be completed at some undetermined date.
Jill was an expert knitter, and made the most beautiful handmade creations. Lovely baby blankets, fashionable sweaters - the kind and quality that could command a fair price in the marketplace because the quality was so good. And she would whip these things up in a weekend. Me, it’s been seven years and I’m still not done with the baby blanket I started knitting for my friend Nicole’s baby. Her son has started the second grade this year. I often joke with Nicole that the baby blanket will be done when her son goes off to college. Maybe.
As so many baby girl boomers who were old enough to have had taken home economics classes in grammar and high school, Jill also knew how to sew as well, and can, and jar, and decorate - you know all of these Martha Stewarty things that committed career girls like me could never come close to mastering in this, much less the next four lifetimes.
Me, I kill silk plants, but Jill had an amazing talent to make anything grow, to the point where she was called into the practice manager’s office because she had way too many plants on her desk. Yeah, that seems petty to me too. There were days, when going to my old job felt like being in a bizarre version of Seinfeld Show hell, and this was the petty kind of bullshit that making working there as well as any other office hell. So yeah, I know, but with Jill’s plants you had to be careful around her desk because there were. that. many. plants.
Jill identified with the Pioneer Woman reality star, often decrying to anyone who would listen that it was she, and not Jill, who had a successful cable show. When I suggested to Jill that the reason why she didn’t have a cable show was because 1) she wasn’t an ambitious marketing executive who decided to blog about her life in Oklahoma and become a brand and continue share to millions about her so-called idyllic public life; and 2) Jill made different life choices that caused her life to be different. Jill had her own unique gifts to share with the world, and if it were true that the Universe really has your back, as it is said, there was enough room in the Univese for Jill to have her own show. But Jill would have none of my feeble attempts at encouragement and support. She looked at me like I killed a kitten, stuck her nose up at me, and said, “I’m the Pioneer Woman,” she said, “And that woman stole my show.”
On a ventilator. I just couldn’t believe it. Not Jill.
And yet, as a twerpy right wing pundit is fond of saying to snowflake sensistive fat GMO flies like me, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” And he’s right: they really don’t.
Like the time she and I drove to Itasca, Illinois - no; not to see my Aunt, but to go to a resort there where we were part of a conference on UFOs, and the 2012 Ascension held by conspiracry theorist extraordinaire David Wilcock. She spent the better part of that weekend complaining about how her daughter was disappointing her - not only by not marrying well, by not being married at all, goofing off at a job to the point where she got fired, and thus having to lose her house (in Whiting, Indiana - is that really such a loss? I found myself thinking), and not able to support the kid she had out of wedlock at the age of 16.
And on and on. Of course, I could not respond to any of this, and why should I? Sometimes people need to vent, I get that. But what made this situation cringe-worthy was that I was her daughter’s friend at the time. And all of this kvetching made me wonder what Jill was saying about me to her daughter? Could that be the real reason why her daughter no longer talks to me? Maybe it was because Jill really thought we were both losers in her heart, because we were too damaged and incompetent to carry the torch of 1950s (eh, more like 1850s) era femininity that only she herself bore so well? Possibly. It wouldn’t surprise me. But it has been my life experience to have people tell me that I’m a loser directly. So, I had to give Jill the benefit of the doubt in this instance.
Finally, when I had enough playing the sounding board I put my foot down and said, “If you’re that disappointed in your daughter what are you telling me for? Shouldn’t you be having this conversation with her, instead of me?” Jill looked at me archly, as if she were going to challenge me to a Hamilton era duel, and said, “Well, it’s not like you have any kids, so how would you know?”
Yep, Jill was pretty fucking mean, okay?
Our friendship did not end with that comment. Are you kidding? Jill and I came of age in a time and place where words were not considered to be violence, if only because people were more likely to be actually violent - just ask Steven Pinker. Besides, I considered Jill to be someone who came into my life to help me grow, get out of my comfort zone. She did that for me, and though it was a gift often disguised as a pile of horse shit, it was a gift none-the-less.
Like the time I was slaving on an essay I was writing for a contest for Real Simple magazine. “Let me see your essay when you’re done,” Jill commanded, and I was happy to comply. I had other people read the essay and they me good feedback, and all of it was constuctive, but positive. Jill spent five minutes marking up the hard copy with grammatical errors I never knew one could make in the English language. Mind you I was working on master’s degree in education at the time, and had received a CBRE scholarship to do so. It was humiliating to get my essay back with all of those red marks, along with the handwritten comment, “Let me know when you’re done with the final version.” Never mind that the copy I had given her was the final version. And yet, I thanked her for making me aware of all that I didn’t know about the English language. Even with the corrections the essay did not get published. I chose not to send it to Real Simple magazine after all.
The weekend continued and we listened to David Wilcock talk about the UFOs and all of those conspiracies of a “guy that he knows but cannot reveal his identity.” It was right around the time he had released a book called “The Source Field Investigations.” And of course, this was a meeting of his select followers. Say what you will about David Wilcock, he is a good teacher, and the conference venue was lovely. That was the weekend I finally “got” the concept of non-duality, and the importance of the concept of the Ascension that was supposed to happen when the calendar turned to December 12, 2012.
Jill and I had heated discussions about the 2012 phenomenon. I was skeptical and felt that the date of December 12, 2012 wasn’t any more special than any other day. “And what if the Mayan calendar was wrong, or, what if we’re wrong about the Mayan calendar?” I pleaded. Jill wanted me to believe, as she did, and was bitterly disappointed that I didn’t think anything would happen. “We’re not going to ascend,” I stated flatly, “We will be trapped in our three dimentional bodies for the duration. Deal with it.”
Jill really believed that she was going ascend into the ethers on December 12, 2012, because gosh darn it she was working hard enough on herself and when the day came, and went, she took days off from work. Me, I was bummed, but not surprised.
Years later, as life would have it, I no longer had time for UFO conferences but had taken up social dancing and found a steady boyfriend. A number of us were laid off from the Seinfeld Show hell, and had to find our way in the capitalist multiverse. I had tried to do a career change, but it didn’t work, but Jill used the time to start a business, and moved to a less populated area with her husband where she flourished. I was invited to come out and visit, but after I learned that Jill had repeated everything I told her about how hard the lay off was on me emotionally and financially, to all of my former colleagues, I decided that it was as good as any to part ways - amicably and quietly, because I only knew too well the battle royale that would ensue if I had confronted her directly.
I always thought of Jill as my “frenemy” but this was just a cue to just let our relationship end. Though we stayed in touch through social media, I conveniently “forgot” to give her my forwarding addresses.
Then 2020 happened. Then Covid happened, and all of the sudden Jill started posting all of these posts how the pandemic was all a hoax and how wearing a mask was a violation of her civil liberties. After several years she instant messaged me and told me to take some red pills, like Neo in the Matrix and wake up to the horrors around me, and in that same conversation told me that though I had managed to get a master’s degree in education, and become an alum of the University of Chicago, I was part of the Illuminati, and part of the problem. I replied “I am not a member of the Illuminati, Jill, but I do have access to the Regenstein library and a thousand years’ worth of books that are in hermetically sealed vaults deep in the earth. Maybe we should have lunch at Medici’s when I am back in Chicago, and then I’ll take you for a tour.” In short, I blew her off and she got pissed off at me, firing all kinds of shitty posts about mask nazis and her so-called know-nothing educated friends. It all seemed so unhinged, so ridiculous; but I knew better than to engage. So I unfriended Jill on social media and lived in relative peace on Facebook, that is, until I got that second phone call from our mutual friend.
“Jill passed away last night,” she said, “I thought you should know.” Then our mutual friend added, “She died for what she believed in, and in spite of the differences we had, I respect her for it.” “Not like she respected either or any of us,” I nearly said, but I held my tongue. Yet, at the same time, I had to admit that that much. I am sure the health personnel at the hospital where she died felt the way I did. Yeah it is also hard for me to admit here and now, and it makes me a supreme asshole I know, but it is true. But that’s how I felt. I had an uncontrolable urge to call Jill on the phone and tell her that she wasn’t allowed to die without me having the opportunity to lecture her about how wrong she was about Covid.
After my call with our mutual friend ended, I took a stroll at the empty walking track at the local recreation center in our complex. In the distance I could hear the coyotes yelp in chorus as the sun gently set in the distance and dusk turned to dark. The wind picked up and I could smell the faint scent of burning mesquite in the air. And then, I felt a strange peaceful gratitude wash over me, as if I had been relieved of a great burden.
I had felt sad that the differences grew too great for us to bridge them in this life; had she lived - survived this, I would have showed her where the real location of the stargate is in at South Mountain so she didn’t have to get the information from some stupid idiot on a UFO show on cable.
Maybe in spirit she’s already there and perhaps one day I’ll join her when it’s my time to go.