Issue: 0402

About five years ago I met Annie. Annie lived in an apartment complex about 3 miles from my home, and I would stay with her during her weekends: Sunday and Monday. Neither of us is much into politics or gossip, so we did keep pretty much to ourselves when I was there.

A few weeks after we started seeing each other, Annie and I discovered that we both really love thunderstorms. It’s the drama and the charge in the air that gets us glued to a window or standing on a porch, and when a ‘good one’ rolled in, we were both drawn to the parking lot to get a better view. As we were walking toward the chain link fence that surrounded the lot, I had a sudden inspiration that it’d be a rush if lightning were to actually hit the fence. Seconds later it did, Annie and I were far enough away to be very safe, but the blinding light and deafening thunder were a big surprise.

As we were climbing down from having jumped onto each other’s arms, I heard a laugh from somewhere in the building behind us. We turned to look, and we got a friendly wave from a second floor balcony. We waived back.

A few months later, Annie and I were having a rare conversation with some other tenants about a guy we thought suspicious, and a large woman in comfortable shoes and a ball cap ambled over to our little group. This woman stood with her eyes half open, yawning and excusing herself, and listening quietly. She said her name was Karen.

Over the next couple of years we got to know Karen better. She’d been a Dispatch Supervisor for EMS in New York, grown up in New York, and moved to New Mexico to be near her brother Pat and his wife Carol Ann. ‘Course, I had a hard time resisting conversations with another soul who’d managed to escape from New York, Karen and Annie and I could talk for hours about everything, anything, and whatever was left out in the main conversations. And we did.

We’d go up to the second floor apartment (from which she’d laughed at us during the storm) to just say ‘Hi’ and end up dragging ourselves away at some small hour of the morning. Our heads would be reeling and our bodies wondering what the hell we were thinking because we’d have sat around for hours on end. No topic was left alone, any opinion unsaid.

I’d never met anyone that I’d disagreed with so much, but whose company I enjoyed like Karen’s. One of the bigger issues on which we had decidedly different perspectives was practical jokes: I’d accidentally left my car window open in the rain before I was supposed to pick Annie up somewhere, and Karen thought I should have a towel to put on the seat. My idea was that it’d be pretty funny to let Annie hop into a wet seat (we were just going back to the apartment after all). I left on my errand with a fluffy towel over the puddle, courtesy of Karen.

Karen had a clerical job which was a welcome relief from the madness of EMT dispatching, where you are by definition a memorable part of someone’s worst day. The job didn’t pay nearly as well as New York, but the positive side was that it didn’t come home with her either. Karen was set firmly on ‘Cruise Control’, and she was always first on line for the premiere of Harry Potter Movies: she’d take the day off to make sure she was there.

One day Karen found out that her clerical job was going away. I don’t know exactly where it went, but away it flew. It took several months until, one day, Karen asked Annie and I to dinner to celebrate her new job. Karen was going to be a Deputy at the County Jail&ellipsis;???!!!?

After a few months of living the local version of ‘sitting on Cool Hand Luke’, Karen was feeling crummy and went to the doctor for the first time in @ 20 years. In short order she found out that she had cancer, and that it had already metastasized. Suddenly, it was obvious as could be that, had she not taken the Jail job, Karen would have been entirely without medical coverage. The Universe has some neat tricks up its sleeve.

When she wasn’t working or watching Harry, Karen was a Reiki Therapist and donated her time to a program that did Reiki for cancer survivors and their families. She did this with Pat and Carol Ann, and she loved being able to help people in this special way, and as a team member with her family.

Karen was also an empath, and she had an interesting way of communicating information from The Universe to the people who needed the info: she just dumped it into the conversation. She had absolutely no awareness when she’d tell you what you needed to know, so if you asked her to clarify or explain Karen would look at you like you were nuts. I think that when it’s important we’ve all had messages reach us from ‘nowhere’ (if I think I’m in trouble someone will always say to me “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself”. Usually it’s a stranger holding a door for me or passing me on a sidewalk). Karen just did this while other discussions were taking place. It always cracked me up.

I’ll always remember Karen’s face when, about a year ago, she had a problem with a loud neighbor on the third floor, and she respectfully asked him to turn off his SUPER BASS. The guy got so angry he showered her balcony with cat turds from his balcony. When that didn’t work he hung from the railing by his toes and sprayed her place with a fire extinguisher. Oddly, he was seen doing this by a dozen or so people who somehow thought something didn’t look right.

After a few months, Karen became concerned that she’d not be able to afford all the medications she needed and keep a roof over her head. Apparently her plan didn’t cover one medication that helped the most but also cost the most. Annie and I reassured her that she could live with us if she needed to, and that seemed to give her a measure of peace.

Three days before she died, Karen had called here to make sure that she’d have a place to live, and we’d again promised her that the spare room was hers. As Annie and I were starting to figure out the storage situation for the ‘extra’ stuff in that room, her sister in law called to say that she’d been taken to the hospital.

I hadn’t heard the name of the hospital, so Annie and I wandered the streets of Albuquerque, going from hospital to hospital looking for our friend. We finally found her at a place we’d been assured she hadn’t gone to, and we were able to stay with her until she was too tired to talk. She was gone the next day. We miss her.

Rox