Beyond that College Backyard
Like so many, I lived in a house full of roommates in college, where we thought we knew everything and had all the answers. That core group of us came straight from our dorm floor of Schroeder 7South, to a house on campus. There were some random summer tenants and squatters, but mostly it was our posse from 7South. And we (mostly) got along great. But sometimes JR just got on my wrong side, and I on hers; okay fine, sometimes we pissed each other off. But we always got over it.
She lived across the hall from me in our sophomore dorm, Julie from Accounting. I discovered no one called her Julie, except our Accounting teacher. JR to everyone else, at the peak of “Who Shot JR?”-mania on television. She ‘got’ Accounting; I did not. She was whip-smart about business, so lots of eye-rolls directed my way as she explained the homework to me, telling me to focus on getting more right than wrong. People kept introducing us: she was from Pittsburgh; I was from Cleveland; come on people, maybe our hometowns were geographically close, but generations of sports rivalries are hard to overlook. She had a killer smile, was an enormous Steelers fan, knew all the boys on the 8th floor from reffing their football league, and had fierce and contagious energy. Stuff happened to her: she was the oldest of 11 children. A small plane crashed into her farm back home. Her dad got sick. Then, her dad died. We were all kind of stunned. She didn’t talk about it much; she came back from the funeral a little more driven, a little edgier, still vibrant but more focused. She got a part-time job at an investment firm, and bought business suits to wear to work.
Summer before junior year, we moved into our house we would occupy until after graduation. Some girls got their own rooms; the rest of us drew names to see who’d share a room. Much later I found out she rigged that, saying she and I would argue constantly if we roomed together. She’s right; we would have. It was college: we argued about stupid stuff, like who drank the last TAB soda, or used all the typing paper. She and some of our other roommates tossed velveeta cheese slices on the ceiling the weekend we moved in, boldly stating it would stay there til it fell down or til we moved out (she peeled it off the weekend we moved out, over two years later). She and I strung Christmas lights on the living room chandelier, draping them across to the mounted deer-head (complete with 8-point-antlers), and across the other way around the velvet Elvis painting, to celebrate the Brewers’ post-season run as decor for our baseball-themed parties that replaced midterm exam studies. We also strung speaker wire out her back bedroom window, and into mine, so that when we had yard parties we could prop her speakers in both bedroom windows and share our love of the Dead, Petty, and classic rock beyond the borders of our backyard.
I’ll say this: living with smart women raised the bar. We got good grades. We drank a lot of coffee, wrote papers late late at night, but we also were no strangers to the bars and parties that were part of the culture. To her credit, JR did not hate me when I fell at a Marquette Block Party and landed on her arm, spraining it. We missed most of Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows as we sat in the ER, while I silently wondered if she had insurance and if her arm was broken. Even with her arm in a sling, JR trounced me in our business classes; it all came easily to her — not surprising that with a head full of sports stats, she could do mental math with frightening speed and accuracy. Sometimes she was so frustrated with me, especially me letting my friends in to our house after bar-time through the back door adjacent to her room, harping on me to maybe think about people who had real jobs to get up and go to in the morning and couldn’t stay up all hours thank you very much. Most of us roommates made a crazy pact to go out each of the last 100 days of school. JR did, too, but not always with us. In the days before cell phones, we just met at the bar at 11pm. Sometimes she was there, sometimes not. Once when I was waiting for her, I played a competitive game of Gin with a guy at the bar. He struck me as someone she would like — smart, competitive, self-assured — so I introduced them. He and his buddies became fixtures at our house.
Graduation loomed. Plans became less dreamy and more firm. Some of our roommates were passing nursing boards and getting real-people job-offers. JR was looking the offers over, helping formulate follow-up questions. Grad school talk rolled into actually taking the GRE and sending out applications. On the morning of the last GRE test date, JR and I thought one of our other roommates who was scheduled to take the test must have got up early and left already, until mid-morning when she emerged from her room yelling at us for letting her oversleep. I was mortified she’d missed the exam; JR was unforgiving, ‘really, you can’t get yourself to a test — how are you going to get to a job?’ The guys who hung around started making plans, too. The dude from the Gin game was going to study animal therapy, one of his buddies was going to work in Alaska, another was going to travel Europe. And out of nowhere, JR was like, I’ll go to Alaska, AND Europe, before I start grad school. And she did. She had a plan of her own, then she added their plans onto it. We were each lucky to eke out ONE plan; she was a force who just said yes-yes-yes, I’ll do it ALL.
After those adventures, she moved to Dallas for grad school, and a bonds-trading job at a huge investment banking firm. She made a lot of money very quickly. And when the market crashed a few years after we graduated, one of us asked her if she was financially okay. She said she had paper losses, and it was time to get out. And true to form, she did. She left it all. She took her earnings and bought a rental property at Breckenridge in Colorado. We all buzzed a little — what is JR thinking, what is she doing? Here’s what she was doing: she was living with no regrets. All the drive and focus we’d been witness to back in that college house were defining her. She had seen money come and money go, and she was living for the moment. She rented the house out in Breckenridge, and she herself became a rafting guide, a bartender, an EMT, a waitress, an avid outdoorswoman above the treeline in Colorado, living with no regrets.
And then, she found a lump.
Lymphoma, surgery, chemotherapy, surgery. She sent mass emails with updates. She used profits from the rental property to buy a tiny house in the town of Salida, her dream spot high up in the Colorado mountains. Maybe there was something to this living-with-no-regrets thing. And just as she rounded the corner, finished treatment, started recovering, put her kayak back in the water, and defined a new normal, I found a lump.
Dude, what the hell. That was her voicemail to me after I emailed her to tell her. All our minor differences along the way had made way for a mutual respect; we talked honestly about my awe of her drive and her desire for my calm, about our love of baseball, and the Dead, still. About whatever happened to McKenna and Christian and Tommy and Norris and Murphy and Chopper and Skip — the guys who were always at our college house. About how everything tastes like metal during chemo. About radiation burns, and loose clothing, and always wearing a hat. We went to the 40th birthday party of one of our roommates that summer that JR and I were both in treatment — she in the last rounds of radiation and me just beginning — and we both sat in the shade, out of energy, bone weary, thirsty but no taste buds, overweight due to steroids, and JR — who I thought I had differed with more than anyone else in that entire college house — turned to me and said “who the hell knew WE were the brave ones?”. And we clinked our beer bottles.
Eight years later, JR emailed us all: It’s back. Those seven letters spell out the great unsaid fear of every cancer survivor. And so we did what we knew how to do: all of us from that house with Christmas lights on the deer antlers and the velveeta on the ceiling flew out to Colorado. We shipped Wisconsin custard and brats out ahead of our arrival. And we ate and drank, and laughed, and drank some more, and JR went to bed and we continued to laugh and drink, and in the morning we went to the hot springs, and then we came back to Salida and did it all again. I was in grad school at the time, and was working on a lit review on Grief Counseling, while sipping prosecco and eating guacamole, at JR’s coffee table. The similarities to college were not lost on me in that, and neither was the fact that Irony is just as much a bitch as Karma. We wore scarves in solidarity of her hair loss due to this second trip around the chemo circle of hell. We sat by the river and watched kayakers put in for the first trips of the season, and JR talked about getting back on the water. When we left, she was sleeping, but we woke her up, in her robe, to take a group photo in her yard. It was a quiet drive back to the airport.
She rallied though. Of course she did. She came to our 25th college reunion a few months later. She vacationed with her family. She went back to work. This seemed okay, that perhaps she’d beaten it. And then, the plates shifted again. An email saying she’d left work with a headache, and became unresponsive, and the cancer was everywhere, and she was in hospice. Dude, what the hell. So we went to the hospice center in Colorado Springs. We brought pizza, we listened to “I Know You, Rider”, with her brothers and sisters and her mom and her dogs curled up to her on the bed. And after a few days, we left, and the next day, after that last hurrah of a subdued party, she left us all.
I sure did not know everything when I was 19, but I won big in the friendship department. Even when it was not perfect, we had this enormous shared history and mutual respect that actually transcended being nineteen. We were good for each other. The summer after JR died, we all got together in DC and did the National Race for the Cure, then afterwards we sat by the pool and had drinks for the cure. She and I didn’t know everything way back when, but we figured it out when we found ourselves being brave together: what’s important isn’t hairstyles or fitting in the cute jeans or having a big job in the big city or what was your final grade in Accounting anyway… What’s important is celebrating the home team, saying your dreams and fears out loud to someone who cares, showing the hell up, bringing ice cream, seats in the shade, favorite music turned up, and letting the dogs on the bed. We were the Hawley Girls, and we got that right.
