Tribute to a friend

My friend Shelley Wuellner died this past week. She was diagnosed last December with a malignant brain tumor, and the past seven months have flown but seem to have lasted forever.

There is no good cancer diagnosis, but the heart-wrenching situation of this one was particularly cruel: Shelley's brother was killed years ago in a hunting accident. Her father had died earlier, and for many of the years I knew Shelley, her mother Buffy lived in Montana, where Shelley grew up. Eventually, Buffy came to live in our town, spending her time with her daughter and her four grandchildren. Shelley was a loving and dutiful daughter, making sure that her mother found friends and a church, integrated well into our little town, and lived in a lovely home. When circumstances eventually dictated that Buffy live with assistance, Shelley took meals to her every day, because, among other things, Shelley was a wonderful cook, and her mother was happier eating the meals Shelley prepared for her.

Buffy experienced bad health over the past few years, and Dave and Shelley rarely left town for more than a few days at a time because of Buffy's decline. Around Thanksgiving last year, Buffy became ill, and then seemed to recover. However, something went wrong, and she was hospitalized, dying the day after Thanksgiving. We attended Buffy's funeral the next week, and then Shelley and her family left for a "whole family" vacation the next week. They went to Florida, and the report was that everyone had a wonderful time.

Only 12 days prior to Christmas, I was preparing for a difficult cantata and vespers service at my church. The music, though I loved playing it, was hard, and I had to practice. The vespers service went well, and I invited my mother and Don and our friends Kevin and Kim over after the service to have some chili. I received the phone call as I was drinking a glass of wine.

I saw that the caller was Dave, and thought that they might like to come for chili, too, if they were back home. They were not home, and he had something else to tell me. He had noticed, on the vacation, that something was not quite right with Shelley. Usually someone who remembers every number she ever saw or heard, she was becoming confused about airplane departure times for each of the children. She couldn't remember what day which child was leaving for home, and she had felt bad enough on the vacation to spend a whole day in bed. Later, Dave told us that he noticed that the left side of her face didn't look quite right, and while she was walking, he believed he saw her left foot kind of dragging. Obviously, he is quite a diagnostician, but I believe even he was unprepared for the eventual diagnosis: a malignant brain tumor deep in the right side of her frontal lobe, where no surgeon could touch it.

On the telephone, before he told me, he said that he was calling with bad news and asked if I were sitting down. I immediately thought that something was wrong with one of their children - children I had watched grow up. So I sat down, and he told me the news that to this day is stunning in its tragic finality. Two weeks after burying her mother, Shelley was told that her life was coming to an end.

Max and I decided to go to St. Louis to see them the next day, and so we went, hoping that something would be different by the time we got there. But such was not to be. She didn't really want us there, I believe, she herself not having fully come to terms with what she had been told. But that was all right with us, because we were there anyway. I saw her only briefly on that day, and that was the last time I got to see and hear her looking and sounding like Shelley.

I can't even remember how we originally met, but our first real contact was when she and Dave had a party to christen the kitchen that they had redesigned and rebuilt in their house down the street from where we now live. And food was a real connection with us. Our friendship was more a couples' friendship than a "girly-girl" friendship. She and I not only had the connection of food and cooking, we both understood and enjoyed numbers, as well as the fact that our husbands liked each other. We didn't have tea or go get our nails done or other things like that. We met over dinner or brownies and cocktails or wine and talked about what our families were doing and where we would like to go for our next vacation.

In fact, because we so loved food, we all decided to go to New Orleans for an eating vacation. We picked out restaurants and hotels and made reservations six months prior to the trip, but had really no other ideas in mind about what to do for entertainment. The food was enough.

Before that, though, Shelley and Dave had been great support for our infertility. Max and I wanted a baby, but a baby wasn't happening. Parents four times themselves, they gave us encouragement and a place to rant and rave when we were disappointed that I was not pregnant.

And so it is no surprise, that about ten days after we returned from New Orleans, a gorge-fest that took us to Commander's Palace, Pascal's Manale Restaurant, and Brightsen's, Max and I told them first that we would be decorating the small room in our apartment as a nursery. As Max always says, Emily was born nine months and five minutes after we checked into the Fairmont right on the edge of the French Quarter. And when my pregnancy became difficult and high-risk, I called Shelley before I called the doctor when I felt that something wasn't going quite right. Furthermore, Dave and Shelley were there when Emily was born, which was the same day their daughter turned six.

A year or so later, we moved to a house right down the street from Dave and Shelley, and I think we have worn out the sidewalk between the two houses. We have watched their son be the first to be married and now the first to announce that a grandchild is on the way, we will be there when their son Adam will marry Carrie this fall in Chicago, they were here when Emily graduated from high school, and next week, I will cook for Dave the birthday dinner I have made almost every year since the New Orleans trip: Pascal's Manale barbecued shrimp and chocolate pound cake. I add a salad every couple of years or so to make us feel as if we are eating healthy, because the shrimp dish is made with about two pounds of butter.

We have participated in a girls' birthday group and a couples' dinner club. When I hosted the dinner club and wanted a particular dish to be just perfect, I always asked Shelley to make it because she had incredible cooking skills, and I knew I could count on her.

I also enjoyed her tales of her very successful day trading. What a woman! Not only did she take a risk, she capitalized on it! I often felt like Fairchild, the driver in "Sabrina," finding out what good investments would be using her skills and information instead of being industrious on my own.

So this terrible thing has come to pass. The past seven months have been difficult, but the coming months will be difficult as well. I think of the beautiful wedding that will occur in October, and of the new baby who will be born in November, and my heart aches for Shelley, who will not be here to celebrate each event. I know these will be bittersweet times for her family, too, and I pray for their peace during these exciting times, times that will not be quite what they had hoped for or expected.

I also think of the simple fragility and irony of life, and am fearful and awed. I remember the opening line of a poem, although I cannot remember the name or author of the poem: "Oh, world! I cannot hold you close enough!" We talk about someone's being in a better place after that person has died and left this earth, but I find it so difficult to imagine something better than walking down the street for brownies, or waiting for two guests to arrive so that we can dig into butter-laden shrimp, or breaking open a bottle of cabernet and talking about what the kids are doing. My faith says that there is a better place, and I know cancer does not exist there, but I'm sure hoping that enjoying brownies, shrimp, and cabernet with friends does.

Thanks, Shelley, for being my friend, and for giving my life a little bit of you.