Madeleine’s eyes dart back and forth as she tells me, “I heard on the radio today that 10,000 people turn 65 every day.” She pauses, as if to gather her thoughts, and says, “Or maybe it was every hour. That’s scary, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is,” I reply. “Thousands of us baby boomers crawling the Earth and lurking in corners, checking ourselves out in mirrors to make sure we haven’t acquired another wrinkle.” I light another cigarette and send smoke rings into the air. “We are a vain bunch, aren’t we? All the yoga and veganism and meditation won’t keep us from growing older, will it?”

I throw down a shot of whiskey and add, “I myself am trying to hasten the process. Might as well get on with it.”

Madeleine laughs. We have been listening to Rickie Lee Jones’ first album and trying to remember what it was like to be 25.

“We were ruthlessly arrogant and didn’t really know anything, but we thought we did, didn’t we?” Madeleine asks with a sigh, shifting to put the blanket around her shoulders—it’s turning dusk and the room is growing cold.

“I would so love to feel arrogant again,” I reply. “I wonder if it’s better to be really arrogant and ignorant, or know a lot and feel like you’re really, really stupid? I think I’d go for stupid and arrogant.”

Madeleine agrees with a vehement nod. Since her stroke six months ago, she has an air of fragility and uncertainty that moves me deeply, so that I often find myself tearful when I am around her. It is daunting to see the change in her spirit, which has become subdued and humble after the stroke—but she’s also softer, more tender, and at times even peaceful.

Madeleine was (and is) one of the brightest people I have ever known—she’d read everything, had traveled the world. I was often jealous of her impervious attitude regarding other people’s opinions of her. She was completely indifferent, riding high and noble on her own opinion of herself, which was steady and strong like the heartbeat of an athlete. A tall, large woman, she has the chiseled bone structure of an aristocratic.

Before her stroke, I had been estranged from Madeleine for three months, having told her that I never wanted to see her again. I don’t remember why and it doesn’t seem to matter much now. Then one day I got a call from her friend.

“It’s Dan,” he said. “Madeleine has had a stroke. She’s been in the hospital for three months and she needs to talk to you.”

I had first met Madeleine when we were both social workers. She worked in the Social Security office and I worked for the Department of Human Services, so we knew of each other without really having experience with one another. Our friendship really began when I moved into a little house on Forest Park Drive in Bearden. She lived past the cemetery in Westwood, in a two-story house that fascinated me. It was filled with books: art books, literary books, and, if you can imagine it, 16 boxes of books on gardening. I had not noticed a garden outside. Instead, there were rather large cherry trees, branches bowed to the ground with blossoms. Bright pink azaleas grew in the front yard, and red tulips sprouted proudly in a circle nearby. The grass had not been mowed in some time—it came almost to my waist.

“Do you garden?” I asked her, staring in wonderment at her boxes of gardening books.

“Not yet,” Madeleine said. “I have to read about it first.”

“Well, okay then,” I replied.

Reading was Madeleine’s life before the stroke. Since her stroke she has been unable to read at all. This is not as bad as it seems, for her habit of living her life through books was in many ways preventing her from experiencing it. Now she often sits outside basking in the sun—smelling the air, a rose, the earth—in a way she was unable to do before. She spends more time in conversation with real people now rather than with characters in novels. Before her stroke, one of her favorite sayings was, “Niceness is not something I value very highly.” Now she says she realizes how important other people are in her life.

Madeleine was a hoarder par excellence before her stroke, and as passionate a shopper as I am. Now, miraculously, she is letting go of everything and preparing to sell her house. She has become quite generous, giving me lush, beautiful fabrics I could never afford, a marble bodhisattva that I have cherished for years, a heirloom clock, and all of her expensive perfumes.

When I encourage her to keep her things for herself to enjoy, she will look at me and say, “Why? I can’t take this stuff where I’m going.” This makes me nervous. Where is she going? Arizona, Africa, Tahiti… heaven? Another dimension that we do not even know exists? The thought of Madeleine being in a place where I am not is inconceivable to me. I had always assumed we would grow old together, bitching and moaning till the end, fighting and making up, always somehow there for one another.

“I realize now how little things matter,” she says, pulling the shawl around her shoulders. “Also, if something should happen to me, I don’t want my son to be left with all this mess.”

“Are you talking about death?” I ask, aghast.

“Yes,” she says, looking out the window at the pale pink cherry blossoms.

It is not something we have ever talked about. The words hang in the air like the smoke from my endless cigarettes.

“Do you think about it often?” I ask. I myself have pondered it since the moment I was able to have a coherent thought.

“Not really,” she says. “What can you do about it?”

“You can fight,” I tell her, startled by the vehemence in my own voice.

After a few minutes, dusk steals over the room full of boxes and Madeleine’s decrepit cat cries mournfully in the corner, as if grieving over the departure of the sun’s light.

“What does death mean to you, Madeleine?”

“It just means the end of life. That’s it and that’s all.”

“I don’t know how you can live just thinking we go into the ground and vanish forever and ever. I think we go on and on and on in some form or another,” I say, taking her hand.

“Well, that’s just as likely as what I think happens,” she admits, and we sit in darkness until I finally get up and put on the third movement of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, staring out the window into the darkness as the violin plays its melancholy strains, like the sound of a soul weeping as it tries to rise from its own ashes yet fails again and again.

Donna Johnson

Donna Johnson describes herself as a person who thrives on breaking the rules other people have made while also creating rules for herself that do make sense. “My rules do not necessarily follow the law set out by the government and law-abiding citizens,” she says. “They follow an inner law, one unto myself, and when I attempt to go outside this, to conform, disaster follows.” Her stories are often about people who are not recognized by others, who may even seem invisible, but “they often have a great truth to share if one but listens.”