It was dark. We had cooked lamb chops, “good lamb chops” that she had gotten from somewhere like Central Market. We cooked them on the giant, beautiful, expensive Viking range in Tina’s kitchen. Tina was out of town so she was staying in the big house and I went to stay with her. We cooked the lamb chops, 3 minutes per side and then two to finish them off, and I think we made a salad but I don’t remember. We drank light French red wine out of tiny beautiful glasses and I think it was our last dinner together.

I helped her up the stairs; she was sleeping in Tina’s room on the second floor of the old house. You had to walk up a tight, tourney staircase, so I walked her up and spent time with her in the bathroom as she got ready to go to bed. She washed her face and put lotion on her hands and brushed her teeth. She was so tiny; tinier then than she had ever been before. No hair but still that beautiful, beautiful face, that beautiful beautiful spirit that shone through everyday. I got her into bed; all the sheets were white, the walls were white, everything in that room was very light and I think she really loved sleeping in there.

The day we shaved her head, it was in that room, too; I think she had some sort of connection with that space. With how high it was above the ground, with how open and airy it was. She always loved a light-filled space. I looked in her eyes as I was sitting in bed with her. I could see the light of the lamp reflected in her eyes, and there were tiny white plates suspended in the black centers of her eyes. They almost looked like those glints of light that teenagers put in their sketches of characters when they’re first learning how to draw cartoons: these tiny points of light that are supposed to tell the viewer that their eyes are twinkling. But in this case her eyes weren’t twinkling, those little plates were matte, deep, solid somehow: they collected the light. I hadn’t noticed them before and took a while to stare at them and try to figure out what they might be.

After she went to sleep I went back downstairs and called Vonda and told her that Maryann’s eyes looked strange: that there was something floating in them. At the time I thought maybe it could be something to do with medication or cancer, I just wasn’t sure. All I knew was that there were tiny plates floating in her eyes. Later, I learned that those tiny plates were ammonia crystals floating in her eyes, teaching us that her liver was failing very quickly. She had been on chemo for so long, at that point almost 16 years, that the chemo had changed her liver from the sponge it’s supposed to be to something resembling a rock; nothing passed through, nothing was filtered out, and so the ammonia that builds up in our bodies naturally, everyday over time, had begun to build up in her body and was reflecting through her eyes.

Today I’ve been reflecting on my own current illness which also has some liver markers going on. I’ve been really thinking about Maryann and that time when her liver stopped working. Maryann is in my thoughts all the time right now; I am convinced she is around me a lot and sometimes I feel her here just watching me and taking a gaze and seeing what’s going on. But this time is different. I feel like she’s just out of reach, but she’s trying to tell me something but I don’t know what it is.

As I lay here on my bed having a day that feels like a setback, after watching a rainstorm, I’m just curious about everything. What am I supposed to learn? When I think about my dear friend Maryann, I miss her so much, but she’s right here. It’s so strange and hard to figure out.

If I could ask her and she could answer I would say what are you trying to tell me Maryann?