She’ll die, and Tally’s daughters will be inconsolable. “I still don’t like you,” I told her, and she yowled again and staggered unevenly back to her food bowl. When I went to the kitchen that first morning to make coffee, Condi meowed loudly, trying to rub her body against my legs. In the mornings, I was confined to the guest bedroom until Tally woke up, because the cat yowled if anyone came downstairs, and it was hard for Tally to sleep. Tally spent long stretches of the days swallowed by pain. When they left the room, Tally said she had told the girls “seventy-five percent of it,” and that the hospital social worker had given her pamphlets to help explain cancer to children. Orr, 10, and Shir, 6, topped off the food bowl with pellets and showered Condi with caresses. Condi the cat lumbered into the room, checked her food bowl and cried. Tally was perched on a seat built into the window of her living room, looking out onto their green lawn. A rare cancer that settles quietly in the digestive system and causes symptoms only after it’s too late.įour weeks later, they let me visit. “We don’t even have a confirmed diagnosis.”īut then we did have a confirmed diagnosis: Bile duct cancer. Yoni woke up, and Tally texted me to say she had told him. We joke that she’ll outlive all of us, but that seems less funny now.” I had last seen the cat during a pre-Covid visit years ago. “My stomach is making weird sounds,” she complained.
Now she told me she would have to decline the Philadelphia job offer, but it seemed too early to make that decision, because people can recover from cancer. “It’s so liberal here, you could vomit,” I had filmed myself reassuring her. I sent her mock news-style videos from the locally-owned secondhand bookstore hosting a lecture by an LGBTQ community group, the co-op grocery specializing in vegan, organic, fair trade products and the lawn signs voicing support for reproductive rights, racial justice, and respect for science. She wanted the job but was reluctant to leave her beloved Cambridge. Two weeks earlier, I had sent her photos and videos from a visit to a progressive neighborhood in Philadelphia, a city where she had a job offer. She and her husband Yoni were determined to protect their daughters from the Israeli government’s school curriculum, which teaches racism and ultra-nationalism, and the Israeli military’s mandatory conscription, which enforces them. Tally had moved from Tel Aviv to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2017 and was looking for a permanent job in the United States. We were living in North Carolina temporarily, a sabbatical from my partner’s university in Palestine.
Her sister, an oncologist at an Israeli hospital, was already buying a plane ticket to the United States. In two decades of friendship, we had talked through career angst, love, breakups, marriage, births, moves across the globe – but this conversation was uncharted. Tally called me at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, as I was about to leave for a run. That ancient, ailing, undignified cat, that defecates outside the litterbox, that yowls day and night, that was never cute or cuddly, that Tally inherited from her acerbic ex-boyfriend, that Tally never really wanted. She appears in the book I wrote, Maqluba, as the perceptive and generous “Yael.” On May 14, 2022, she passed away at the age of 43. Tally Kritzman-Amir has reviewed most of the posts, suggesting wise edits and improvements. Since I began writing this blog, my beloved friend Dr.
#In loving memory note how to#
Under different circumstances, I would have asked my wise friend Tally for advice on how to be a good friend to someone who is dying.
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