the maid and the cook wanted to call the doctor because they thought something had
happened to my father. On Sunday Hegbert made the announcement to his congregation,
his face a mask of anguish and fear, and he had to be helped back to his seat before he’d
even finished.
Everyone in the congregation stared in silent disbelief at the words they’d just heard,
as if they were waiting for a punch line to some horrible joke that none of them could
believe had been told. Then all at once, the wailing began.
We sat with Hegbert the day she told me, and Jamie patiently answered my questions.
She didn’t know how long she had left, she told me. No, there wasn’t anything the doctors
could do. It was a rare form of the disease, they’d said, one that didn’t respond to available
treatment. Yes, when the school year had started, she’d felt fine. It wasn’t until the last few
weeks that she’d started to feel its effects.
“That’s how it progresses,” she said. “You feel fine, and then, when your body can’t
keep fighting, you don’t.”
Stifling my tears, I couldn’t help but think about the play.
“But all those rehearsals … those long days … maybe you shouldn’t have—”
“Maybe,” she said, reaching for my hand and cutting me off. “Doing the play was the
thing that kept me healthy for so long.”
Later, she told me that seven months had passed since she’d been diagnosed. The
doctors had given her a year, maybe less.
These days it might have been different. These days they could have treated her.
These days Jamie would probably live. But this was happening forty years ago, and I
knew what that meant.
Only a miracle could save her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
This was the one question I hadn’t asked her, the one that I’d been thinking about. I
hadn’t slept that night, and my eyes were still swollen. I’d gone from shock to denial to
sadness to anger and back again, all night long, wishing it weren’t so and praying that the
whole thing had been some terrible nightmare.
We were in her living room the following day, the day that Hegbert had made the
announcement to the congregation. It was January 10, 1959.
Jamie didn’t look as depressed as I thought she would. But then again, she’d been
living with this for seven months already. She and Hegbert had been the only ones to
know, and neither of them had trusted even me. I was hurt by that and frightened at the
same time.
“I’d made a decision,” she explained to me, “that it would be better if I told no one,
and I asked my father to do the same. You saw how people were after the services today.
No one would even look me in the eye. If you had only a few months left to live, is that