Ellen, of All People

It’s not entirely the case that all my friends in Baltimore live within walking distance, but it’s close. Perhaps this is partly because Baltimore, with its narrow lots and shared interior walls and cohesive neighborhoods, is made for this kind of friendship. 

I am also made for this kind of friendship. I’m home all day, my significant other is a dachshund and none of my family live near enough to receive the fruits of my overproduction in the kitchen or to feed my cat when I’m out of town. My neighbors are very dear to me. 

This summer I am mourning a friendship formed in a more bustling phase of life, when I was a recently widowed single mom in Austin, Texas: the early 1990s. Ellen Ducote and I lived about a mile apart, and our sons were in the same class at the neighborhood elementary school. Her husband Lester told me the other day, on our way to the graveside service, that the first time he laid eyes on me, I was in my green Jeep Cherokee on the street in front of the school. He was just about to glide into a parking spot when I grabbed it, careening over from the wrong side of the street without even noticing him.

When he went home to report this egregious person to his wife, she immediately knew who he was talking about — that’s Marion! — and informed him that I was their new best friend.

Our fairly recently bereaved family was ripe and ready to bond with the Ducotes, a sweet, stable, law-abiding foursome with a small but almost magically welcoming home on the banks of Shoal Creek. Our older sons immediately became best friends, and the younger two were little enough that a boy and a girl could still play for hours, ride their bikes endlessly around the neighborhood. Lester took over soccer practice duty, and Ellen and I quickly bonded over the improvement made by red wine in our appreciation of the games.

There’s nothing like a friend who laughs at your jokes, and Ellen loved to laugh. We never got enough of retelling the antics of the crazed coach who screamed at our seven-year-old players that they were “f***ing p*ssies” or the frustrated entrepreneur neighbor who was always just moments from an invention that would take us all to the “next level.” So many favorite expressions! We would “coze up” with our families on a chilly winter evening, and responded to all types of frustration and outrage with shouts of “Good God almighty!” 

It was early in my writing career when we met and Ellen became a great supporter, second only to my mother. She listened to drafts, bought stacks of books, and also like my mother, another very private person who would never dream of publishing her inner thoughts, accepted becoming my subject matter with grace, even when I wrote about her losses. She would not be surprised to know that she is becoming a column in the Baltimore Fishbowl.

When I was putting together a eulogy for Ellen’s service last week, I found what I think is the first thing I wrote about her: a little article about the business she started with her friend Sally Cardwell in the 1990s, called Musical Chairs, where they redecorated people’s houses using their existing furniture and possessions. She was truly a genius at this. A paragraph from that piece: 

“Cardwell, a former stockbroker, and Ducote, once a personal shopper for Neiman-Marcus, came up with the idea for Musical Chairs after motherhood drew them away from their high-intensity careers. Suddenly the two friends found themselves spending an unprecedented amount of time hanging around their own and other people’s houses taking care of children. “I can’t quite explain it,” says Ducote. “We’d sit and look at the way the pictures were hung and the furniture was positioned and just be itching to roll up our sleeves and start hauling it around. Then one day Sally jump-started the thing by kicking me out of my house for a few hours. When I got back, she’d moved the sofa and tables, redone the walls and reorganized my shelves. It looked incredible. Everyone who saw it wanted us to do them, too.”

Reading this now, I couldn’t help but notice how Ellen is subtly pushing the credit over to Sally. So very Ellen. Her natural generosity and the warmth of her regard for her friends were a powerful combination. These qualities, along with her liveliness, spontaneity, emotional intelligence, elegant taste, and unusual, profound inner calm, embodied in her clear blue-eyed gaze, made her an incredible person to be friends with, and made that friendship an uncommonly deep connection. 

Her son Alex, also not a public speaking type person, spoke beautifully about this at the service, saying his mother had the most best friends of anyone he’s ever known. How did she come to have so many friends, asked a nurse during her last hospital stay. 

She said, “It takes a long time.” 

One terrible Saturday afternoon in 2008, Alex’s little sister Audrey, then a junior in high school and the captain of her golf team, was in a car wreck on a country road outside Austin. She was on her way with a group of friends to one of their birthday party; the birthday girl’s stepmother was driving. It was a stormy day and a curvy, undivided highway, and a woman driving in the opposite direction  lost control of her pickup. Her truck hydroplaned across the road into the car Audrey was riding in, killing her and another girl as well as the driver’s own 16-year old son. Everyone else involved was seriously injured.

Ten years after I moved away from Austin and left the mommy track Ellen and I shared, I got a half-dozen emails and calls in the first hours after the wreck. I was with my sons, visiting my mother in New Jersey, and I was thankful to have them beside me to spend a late night together, reminiscing, looking at pictures of Audrey on her Facebook  page and feeling helpless. Of all the teenage deaths that involve drinking or drugs or suicide or some sort of dangerous behavior, these occurred under the most wholesome and ordinary circumstances, in the middle of the day, in cars driven by two moms. Audrey was with a gaggle of golf friends who participated in the Christian athlete’s association at her school, one of the most down-to-earth, solid, funny girls you could ever meet. The apple of her parents’ eyes, she gave them hardly a moment of worry.

As Ellen said when I first reached her on the phone, her voice full of sorrow and wonder, “Audrey, of all people.”

Audrey, of all people. It almost seems like fate itself got confused, like the network returned to the wrong show after the commercial. The story makes no sense at all.

At the time of Audrey’s death, Ellen was living with Type 1 diabetes and a breast cancer diagnosis, so when the very worst thing that can ever happen to a person happened to her, she already knew better than most how little control we have over our lives. More than anyone else I know, Ellen had a gift for acceptance and living in the now. She certainly needed them. She became a living picture of the fact that no matter what happens, it is still possible to live with grace and appreciate pleasure. In the years after Audrey’s death, Ellen showed all of us that you could hold the bad thing inside you and still make room for the good things, even very small ones, like a beautiful bird in your backyard or a sip of fine tequila or a laugh with a friend — maybe all three at once. 

And then, unbelievably enough, the other worst thing that can ever happen to a person happened to her. 

Last spring, after exhausting other treatment possibilities for the breast cancer that had resurfaced as bone cancer, Ellen was offered an experimental chemotherapy drug that within a couple of weeks, caused nerve damage so severe she was essentially paralyzed from the neck down. She could not stand up or walk or feed herself or brush her teeth or — I could go on, but the list is too long. She had one working index finger that she could sometimes use with the phone. The doctors had not mentioned this as a possible outcome; they must not have known. 

This complete, irreparable debility went on for almost five months, during which I went down twice to visit and to try to help. It was a humbling experience. 

Very few other people, if any, would have been able to be present with friends and family in the way Ellen was  during this time. Even when she could literally do nothing but listen to us and laugh with us and taste the food we brought her and let us feel her love, when she could do no more than just be there with Lester, whose caretaking was the essence of what it means to be truly married, she did exactly that up to the very end. She went far past the finish line, all the way to her little granddaughter’s fourth birthday, at which point the well of peace and dignity and kindness inside her was finally down its last drop. We let her go; she let us go. 

Ellen, of all people.

One other thing I loved that Alex said at the funeral: that his mom was the most graceful host of all time. She had just the right dish, platter, cup, napkin, placemat for any occasion.  Her cupboard held several different types of excellent glasses to hold the specialty of the house, the long-running, ever-evolving Lesterita.

This summer, I bustled around her kitchen and she sat at the table overlooking the backyard in her wheelchair, sipping a tiny Lesterita through a straw. I was making mango salsa to go with grilled halibut. I knew she would eat about two bites, and  I knew she would act like it was the greatest thing she ever tasted. This was our way of keeping things going, and it did work for a while. She reminded me that she wanted me to take something home with me, anything I liked. I hesitated to ask, but I had been admiring her set of measuring spoons and cups for many years. I knew their provenance: she and Audrey found them in McKinney, Texas, a Dallas suburb, at an art festival, I think. They are silver, the spoons are heart-shaped, decorated with x’s and o’s for kisses and hugs, and the stems are whimsical angels. Audrey loved angels. I used them this summer to make a rather unsuccessful chocolate cake inspired by our viewing of the movie Chocolat — of course Ellen insisted it was tasty — and went on to insist I put them in my suitcase. You will use them, she said.

Yes. I would, and I do. They hang on the wall of my kitchen in Baltimore in a graduated row, the way Ellen had them on her pegboard in Austin, and I use them all the time, the small beautiful things that light our troubled way.