Four years ago today at about seven in the evening, my best friend, Linda Bryce Russell Haber, died in NYU Hospital. The death notice in the New York Times announced her memorial service but it did not capture her spirit.
On the "jump page" here, as the newspapers call it, I'll add a few paragraphs that I read at her memorial. If you die in NYC, have your service where Linda's was held: The Fifteenth Street Meeting House, in the handful of most beautiful buildings in the city. Set on a park, all white interior with simple benches, in the spirit of The Society of Friends.
I met Linda when I was 15; she was a year younger but had skipped a grade. We were incoming sophomores at George School, the Quaker boarding school in Newtown, PA. Within weeks we were the best of friends. Then as can happen with friends, we had a 20-year hiatus, reconnecting five years before she died.
Cause of death: At 39, Linda survived an aortic dissection, the result of her having Marfan Syndrome, the genetic disease that strikes down seemingly healthy basketball players. Linda had the same physique as they -- tall, very long limbs, long fingers -- and she was a phenomenal athlete, the tennis player that no one, including the boys in our school, could beat. As she was recovering from the dissection, she developed kidney disease, also genetic, leading to a kidney transplant. Recovering from that--and while taking massive quantities of anti-rejection drugs--she developed endocarditis. Then, as she was just about out of the woods, the truly unexpected: her beloved, healthy, athletic, funny husband, David Haber, was diagnosed with glioblastoma, the brain tumor so difficult to survive. Linda died six months after David's diagnosis, suffering an aortic aneurysm while hoisting her oxygen tank into the car on her way to bring David home following one of his surgeries. David died eighteen months later.
When she died, her nephrologist called her "the bravest person I've ever known." More here...
Linda came close to dying several times, once two years before she actually did. I wrote a letter to her then, which I read in full at her memorial. Here are a few grafs (again newspaper-talk):
...You were an immediate icon in the school. Gorgeous, tall, athletic, brilliant, funny, and the younger sister of two alums, as well as the daughter of one. Quaker, from Sewickley, and perhaps the best tennis player George School had ever seen. You swore on the court, became angry at yourself with such vengeance that it scared your opponents. What if you became that angry at her? You had the largest vocabulary of anyone in the school, including the teachers. The most beautiful arches. Boys in line in adoration, M., chief among them. He so brilliant that no one could understand him — except you. You spoke French and Russian brilliantly, one of a handful of students whom Madame V nurtured (while I., her son, was in the line of boys). Cool. So Cool...
I don’t remember becoming best friends. I do know that we instantly were. We were the teenage friends that others our age wish they had had. No secrets. Nothing sacred. We laughed to tears before we could cry. Gossip. More gossip. Ideas, intellectualizing, hypothesizing, philosophizing, spiritualizing, psychoanalyzing ourselves, each other, and everyone else. Sharing our psychic powers. Sneaking to the woods to smoke even though it made us sick and dizzy. Traveling by train to Philadelphia, where we scarffed down eggs, sausage, and potatoes just a few blocks from the train station, and to New York, where we ate cream cheese omelettes by the dozens at Tant Mieux, and of course traveling to Pottstown. Suffering through our mutual ailments. Dissecting our past, present, and future boyfriends until they were dust. Finally sharing a room our senior year, an excruciating one for both of us...
Our legacy of laughter and pain reincarnated instantly three years, three months, and two days ago when I returned your phone call of the previous evening, my birthday. Just a few months earlier, your picture from junior year had fallen out of my carton of George School memories. I had tried to find you without luck the year before, calling all the Linda Russells in New Jersey. This time I wondered if I could conjure you up so I placed your picture on my bookcase and looked at it every day. Apparently my call got through...
Our phone calls of the last three years, enough to wrap around the earth a million times (whatever that means), but certainly enough to keep your darling, devoted David glued to his phone bill, have been our mutual mothering. Calling you is a singular joy — you always happy to hear from me, ready with incisive advice that I may not want to hear, penetrating inside problems, and revealing their core while I rush past. You grab me, make me stop, and really look. You understand. You know me. And I miss you terribly already, Linda.
