The Girls From Ames Part 15

Mrs. Walsh said she never went on a date after her husband died. She was too busy trying to raise five children on her own. She smiled at one memory of the weeks after Dr. Walsh's death. She was with a friend in her bedroom, trying to figure out how much the family would have to live on after factoring in Dr. Walsh's life insurance pay-out and any remaining proceeds from his dental practice.

"Oh my gosh," she said to her friend after she finished her calculations. "We're only going to have five hundred dollars a month. The mortgage is more than that!"

The women looked at each other. "I can't believe that son of a b.i.t.c.h would leave you with just five hundred dollars a month," her friend said.

Mrs. Walsh did some more figuring. She never was too good at math. Turned out, Dr. Walsh had made sure the family had $5,000 a month to live on. Because he sensed that he'd die young, like his father, he had made sure everything was in place.

When Sheila went to Chicago in January 1986 to work for a semester interning as a child life specialist at a hospital, her brother Mark didn't really know what that job was. Now that his son was receiving cancer treatment, he understood. Child life specialists offer emotional support, education and resources to families. They are trained to ease young patients' fears. They look out for their siblings. "When Charlie is going to have a procedure, something where they need him awake and they're going to hurt him, the child life specialist comes in with dolls or toys and distracts him. It helps. Sheila just loved kids, so I can really see her doing that."

Sheila loved the job and loved living in Chicago. Her family noticed a growing maturity about her. She was living in housing provided by the hospital, making new friends, and was also spending time with Bud Man, her old friend the Budweiser employee from Iowa. He was then living in Chicago.

Her family got the call that she had been in an accident early on a Sunday morning in March. It appeared she had fallen, they were told by someone at the hospital, and had suffered a subdural hematoma. That's a traumatic brain injury in which blood collects between the outer and middle layers of the covering of the brain. It is caused by the tearing of blood vessels. Sheila was in a coma, but she was stable and doctors believed she would recover.

Mrs. Walsh flew to Chicago, and when she got to the hospital, Sheila was in bed. There was no visible injury from the fall. She looked peaceful, like she was sleeping. Doctors said she still had brain activity.

"Has she said anything?" Mrs. Walsh asked a nurse.

"She spoke just once," the nurse said. "The only thing she has said was 'My dad is coming to get me.' "

The nurse didn't know anything about the family history, or that Sheila's father had died four years earlier. Sheila had arrived at the hospital unconscious.

Mrs. Walsh was stunned to hear what Sheila had said. But over time, the family has taken comfort in knowing those were Sheila's last words. "I believe our dad was coming to her to say it's OK, it's time to go," said Susan. "It helps us to think they are together."

Sheila lived for another two days, never regaining consciousness. By the end, when the family was told she had no brain activity and wouldn't recover, they decided to donate her organs. Sheila had never mentioned that she'd want to be an organ donor, but given who she was, how she loved people, and how she always had this urge to help others, well, it was clear to the family that she'd agree with their decision. Her liver went to a dentist's wife, which Mrs. Walsh felt was a fitting nod to her husband's profession. Liver transplants were often unsuccessful in the 1980s, however, and the woman didn't survive.

The family was told that Sheila's organs went to seven people, but they were given no names. They read in the newspaper about a woman who was a teacher in Iowa City and received a heart/lung transplant the day after Sheila died. They a.s.sume that Sheila was the donor. This woman also didn't survive long.

Someone received Sheila's corneas, and the family likes to think that the recipient is still living and enjoying the view. "Sheila had beautiful eyes," Susan said. "Really beautiful eyes."

After Susan arrived in Chicago on the Monday Sheila died, she and her mother tried to learn what had led to the accident. They talked to her friend Bud Man, who was understandably distraught. He said he and Sheila had been downtown in a bar, drinking. They had met some people there. Sheila and Bud Man got in a little argument and she said she was leaving.

The people she met in the bar invited her to go to a party at a two-story brownstone elsewhere in the city, and she left with them.

Mrs. Walsh and Susan went to look at the house and talked to people in the neighborhood who had heard about the incident. The story the neighbors told was this: Something happened at a party inside that house that made Sheila uncomfortable or upset. She got a little freaked out, the Walshes were told, felt she needed to get away and decided to go out on the balcony and then jump the short distance to the roof of the garage next door. She made it to the garage roof fine, but then she tried to climb onto the fence adjacent to it so she could get to the ground. She slipped and hit her head when she fell to the ground.

She was always kind of clumsy, Susan said, and it certainly didn't help that it was dark, about 2 A.M. on a Sat.u.r.day night, and that she'd been drinking.

When Mrs. Walsh and Susan stood by that fence, they could still see blood from where Sheila had hit her head. The police report was bare bones: A young woman slipped climbing off a fence, hit her head, and was taken to the hospital.

The Walshes were never able to find and talk to anyone who was actually inside that house that night. In their grief, they didn't really try too hard. It was hard even to concentrate on the specifics of the incident.

And so the mystery of what made Sheila leave that gathering-and by the balcony, not the front door-was never solved. Perhaps it wasn't as sinister as people might think, said Mark. "It wouldn't have taken much for her to go off. Someone might have just said something and she got upset." Susan's take: "I don't think she was being chased. I just think she realized she was in a situation she shouldn't be in and she was trying to leave."

Bud Man felt terribly guilty that he'd let Sheila leave him that night. The Walshes were understanding. They said Sheila could be impulsive. "Once Sheila made up her mind," said Mrs. Walsh, "there wasn't much you could do." The fall and the way her head hit the ground "was bad luck, basically," Susan added.

For years, the family found it hard to talk about the details of how Sheila died. That's why the Ames girls, and most everyone else in town, never really heard the full story.

Just as the Ames girls speculate about what Sheila might be up to now had she lived, her family has also thought through the same what-ifs.

"I'd have been worried about who she'd marry," said Mrs. Walsh. "She didn't always make the best choices." But as Mark sees it: "At the end of the day, she would have found the right guy and she'd be happily married with kids." Added Susan: "I like to think she'd be living here in Kansas City with us. Maybe it wouldn't have started out that way, but she'd come to be with us."

Whether she'd have built a career as a child life specialist, she'd surely be a great presence in the life of her ill nephew Charlie. The family described him as a boy who is s.p.u.n.ky, fun-loving, hardheaded and determined. He reminded them of Sheila.

At the North Carolina reunion, the girls are recalling their favorite experiences with Sheila.

One memory: During high school, Sheila drove this little beat-up yellowish/greenish car. At lunchtime, students were allowed to leave school and get something to eat, as long as they were back before the bell rang. They had exactly thirty-five minutes. So some of the girls would run out to Sheila's car, and she'd speed them over to Taco Time on the other side of the train tracks that cut through Ames. Lunch at Taco Time could be a great risk because if a long train happened to pa.s.s through, and they were stuck waiting behind the gate, they'd be late returning to school.

That's part of what made it exciting going out for lunch; they were at the mercy of traffic lights, pa.s.sing trains, the lines at Taco Time, Sheila's driving. "We'd be laughing so hard, trying to eat lunch as we raced down Lincoln Way," says Cathy. "It was a race against time, always!"

After talking about the fun times, the conversation turns to the fact that they didn't stay in touch with the Walshes after Sheila died. "They probably think we forgot about her and went on our way," says Karen. "They don't know how much she meant to us."

"We were twenty-two years old when she died," says Jenny. "It's not like we were fully functional adults. We thought we were so young and invincible, and when Sheila died, it was such a shock. We didn't have the life experiences that we have now, the sense of what's the right thing to do, how to deal with grief. It would be so different if one of us died now. We'd know how to respond. We'd have more understanding." Jenny says it's not an exaggeration to say she thinks of Sheila every day.

Each of the girls has her own specific memory of how she learned about Sheila's death, and of going (or not going) to the funeral.

Karla, who couldn't afford to fly in from Arizona, recalls that Jenny was mad at her for not coming. Meanwhile, Kelly and Diana recall driving together to the funeral from the University of Iowa in Iowa City. On the ride, they got into a heavy discussion about heaven and h.e.l.l. "I didn't have a strong sense of there being a heaven and Diana did," says Kelly, "and she was so angry at me. For more than an hour on the road, I don't think we even spoke."

Sheila leads the Ames girls.The girls who attended the funeral recall how they stood at the grave site after the memorial service. It was mid-March, but given Iowa's weather, it was still extremely cold. "When it was over, everyone left-the family, the adults-and we stood there," Sally says. "I remember it was a very powerful moment, just standing there. It must have been ten minutes. We didn't say anything."

As the girls talk about Sheila, a few of them hatch an idea. What if they pooled some money-they've got resources now that they didn't have when they were younger-and established a scholars.h.i.+p at Ames High in Sheila's memory? It could be given to a female student who was kind to everyone, who was well liked-someone who was a good friend to other girls.

The winner shouldn't be selected by teachers or administrators, the girls decide. "She ought to be nominated by her friends," Karen says.

The girls are completely enthusiastic about creating a Sheila Walsh Scholars.h.i.+p. They picture this new generation of Ames girls thinking about the qualities that define a good friend.

They say they'd love to meet the winner of the scholars.h.i.+p: what a terrific and giving girl she'd likely be. No doubt someone just like Sheila.

18.North of Forty

On the way back from dinner in Raleigh, the girls are traveling in two cars, one following the other. Suddenly, the first car makes an abrupt U-turn. Did they take a wrong turn? Did someone forget something back at the restaurant?

"What's going on?" Marilyn wonders in the second car.

A cell phone rings in car number two. A few of the girls in the first car, driven by Angela, are calling to say they have made a decision. They've spotted a s.e.xy lingerie store on the side of the highway and they're pulling into the parking lot. They want to look around. Maybe they'll find something fun.

There are a few groans in the second car. Some of the girls are tired. Some are just feeling their age. They have no great urge to go browsing in a lingerie store.

The two cars pull side by side into the store's parking lot and the girls talk to each other through open windows. Kelly, Diana and a few others say they're up for going in. But the rest aren't especially interested. The majority vote no.

"OK," says Angela. "We'll just go back to my house."The tobacco fi eld behind Angela's house, 2007 (left to right): Diana, Jane, Karen, Marilyn, Karla, Sally, Kelly, Jenny, Angela The cars drive away, and Kelly says something about "wet blankets" and "party p.o.o.pers." Even the girls who were intrigued by the idea of going inside this naughty store surrendered awfully easily. "You're big talkers," Kelly says, "with granny underwear in your suitcases."

The days of piling into cars and going to cornfield keggers feel long ago for these women. They can't picture themselves exactly in that same party-time, adventure-seeking frame of mind they had back in high school. Some of what's at play here is just maturity. A woman in her forties doesn't have the same sense of fun as a girl in her teens. But much of it, of course, is also the result of where life has taken them. The laughs still come in huge bursts. But in adulthood, there have been a lot of sobering moments, too-a lot of emotion-stirring places they've been together. Those images are often clearest in the girls' heads.

Two years after Christie died, for instance, Diana flew into Minnesota, and she and Kelly stayed at Karla's house on a night Bruce was out of town. Diana and Kelly slept in Christie's room, which had remained little changed from the day she last slept in it. Her doctors had allowed her to come home for her fourteenth birthday, so she could be with her family, and that was her final night in the bedroom.

Karla had preserved the room pretty much as it was; she hadn't rearranged anything. She told Kelly and Diana that there was no comfort in seeing that empty bedroom every day, but she couldn't bring herself to alter it.

Diana and Kelly didn't talk much about Christie in the bedroom that night. Each of them wondered if they'd feel Christie's presence, but they didn't articulate this. "I was both afraid and honored to be staying in her room," Kelly told Diana the next morning. "I guess I wanted Christie's spirit to visit me, to tell me she was OK."

On a different trip, Cathy and Sally slept in Christie's room when visiting Karla, and they had that same sense of wanting to feel a connection to her. The room was dominated by a large and lovely poster-sized photo of Christie with her best friend, Jessie. The poster, a gift from Jessie, hung over the bed and included the words "Friends Forever" in big type. And so the room spoke about both loss and friends.h.i.+p.

Karla confided in the other girls about her "sad time"-starting with the Christmas holidays and continuing through Christie's birthday on January 9 and the anniversary of her death, February 20. Karla explained how her family tried to remember Christie in upbeat ways. They had taken her to P. F. Chang's, a Chinese restaurant, for her last birthday. So Bruce, Karla, Ben and Jackie returned to the restaurant on the January 9 after Christie died. They had dinner and then went back to their house for homemade Funfetti cupcakes, which were Christie's favorite, just as they had on her birthday.

The Ames girls continued to be impressed and moved by how supportive Bruce was of their friend Karla. Karen couldn't get out of her mind the day of the funeral, when Jane held Bruce's hands and said to him, "This must be the hardest day of your life." Bruce paused, then responded, "No, the hardest day was the day Christie was diagnosed." In his answer, the girls felt as if they'd gotten a look into the depth of his pain and his love for Karla. The hardest day of his life had been ongoing.

The girls considered Bruce to be one of the most giving husbands they had ever observed, and that was well before Christie was sick. There was one gathering years earlier at Karla's house. Bruce volunteered to sack out on the family's boat with the kids for a couple of days so the Ames girls could have the full run of the house. Then he spent a day driving them all around in the boat-pointing out landmarks, making everyone lunch, getting them all drinks. "He's a one-in-a-million guy," Karen liked to say.

Bruce, while nursing his own grief, also knew to give Karla s.p.a.ce and time, and to support her as she struggled to find coping rituals. For a long while, Karla would touch Christie's ashes on the mantel before going to bed, just to say good night. She said she liked talking about Christie, but struggled to focus on "the happy years." Too many harder memories crowded things out. There were too many reminders around the house, on the street, around the community.

People would nonchalantly ask, "How many children do you have?" and Karla would usually say "three," and explain. To avoid questions, a few times she said, "two," and then felt too guilty afterward. "It's not fair to Christie not to mention her," she told the other girls.

The decision to move out of Minnesota crystallized for Karla when she was in bed one February morning, three years after Christie's death. It was President's Day, the kids had off from school and Bruce was at work. Their daughter Jackie crawled into bed with Karla and started talking about one of the horses that the family owned. They kept horses in a stable thirty-five minutes from their house. "Wouldn't it be great if I could wake up every morning and kiss my horse on the nose?" Jackie said to Karla. "I could just roll out of bed in my pajamas and go give a big kiss."

Bruce's family had land in Bozeman, Montana. His great-grandfather was the homesteader there in the late 1800s, and there was a barn right on the property. Karla figured the time had finally come: Why not just move there?

"Call your dad," Karla told Jackie. She dialed Bruce, he voted yes also, Ben did the same, and the decision was made. Yes, it would be painful to leave Christie's bedroom, and all those memories, good and bad, behind. But it could be the best thing for Karla, Bruce, Jackie and Ben. And the horse might just like being kissed first thing in the morning.

"Part of me can't imagine leaving Minnesota, and living in a place where people never knew Christie," Karla admitted to Marilyn and Sally one day when they came to visit. She told them of a bracelet Jackie wore with Christie's initials: CRB. Jackie had the bracelet on one day when she was at a medical appointment, and a woman working in the office asked, "What does CRB stand for?"

"It's for my sister," Jackie told her.

And the woman said, "Oh, yeah. That's right. You had a sister who died." The woman said nothing else, just moved on to the next item of business. "A lot of people are nervous or don't know what to say," Karla later told her friends. "But I really felt for Jackie in that moment. It's hard for kids, when people just gloss it over, when they don't really acknowledge her loss."

In Montana, where no one knew Christie, there might be even more glossing over, Karla said. Moving there could be hard for the family in ways they couldn't even fathom. And yet a strong part of Karla knew the decision to go was the right one for her and her family. And in her heart she knew: Christie would understand.

"After losing her," Karla said, "we've been learning not to wait until tomorrow to do anything."

In their forties, several of the other girls also opted to take an inventory of their lives and to embark on new journeys. Cathy made plans to cut back on her work as a makeup artist and to focus more on screenwriting. Marilyn thought she'd get into singing and acting in community theater, tapping back into talents she'd nurtured earlier in her life. Karen felt herself getting closer to a return to teaching, and that wasn't all that was new for her. As she liked to put it, jokingly: "If tomorrow's Monday, I'm starting a new diet!"

In middle age, the Ames girls' interests took turns they never would have predicted earlier in their lives. Angela, for instance, who had built a successful public relations business in North Carolina, decided to start a second business, Finality Events.

It would be a special-events planning company to help people create "unique life celebrations" to help them remember those who've died. She was motivated by the loss of her mother in 1995 and her brother in 1999, and by watching Karla cope with Christie's death in 2004. In the case of her mom and brother, especially, she felt they didn't get the life celebrations they deserved. "The minister who tried to talk my brother out of being gay ended up being twenty minutes late for the service," Angela told the other Ames girls. As a business model, she figured she was on to something: Baby boomers would want a memorable way to be remembered when they died.

Finality Events would help families identify the unique aspects of a loved one's life to commemorate. Her staffers would write a "life remembrance story" that would be more than an obit. She planned to market the service to people who may have turned away from organized religion. She hoped to get it started in 2009.

Meanwhile, Diana felt surprisingly fulfilled in her forties, and that included her decision to take the job at Starbucks. She had always admired her mom's career as a dietician, and she went to college knowing she would also have a serious career. She moved to Chicago to get the big-city experience she never had growing up in Ames, and she enjoyed being a CPA. But at age thirty-one she had her first daughter, and she soon experienced feelings she'd never antic.i.p.ated. She went back to her job, but spent the day worrying about her baby. After work, she'd drive eighty miles an hour to pick her up. She soon quit her job and was an at-home mother for thirteen years. "Marriage and family were never high on my list of priorities when I was in my twenties," she'd tell the others. "Isn't it funny how those two things are now the center of my life?"

As her three daughters got older, she was happy to find the job at Starbucks. The hours were good, there wasn't a lot of stress, and the fact that her whole family could get medical insurance through Starbucks was a major perk. Plus, most every customer came from a different line of work, which Diana found intriguing. "I see life beyond Mommydom," she told Kelly. "It's just the right job for right now."

Diana also started thinking more clearly about ways in which "giving back" could be a part of her daily life. As she put it: "Every little step you take in showing kindness, volunteering at school and church, listening to others and sharing a smile at Starbucks-I think that all helps the world."

She became more pa.s.sionate about the environment. She helped set up a recycling program at her Starbucks. She began driving a hybrid vehicle, a Prius. And she dreamed of someday living in a green house.

By their mid-forties, women know they're at a crossroads. They are still holding on to their younger selves, but they can also see their older selves pretty clearly.

"I'm proud of my gray hairs," Cathy tells the other girls gathered at Angela's. "Every four weeks, I say, 'I'm proud of you!' And then I cover them up."

"I certainly see my life divided into sections," Kelly says. "I was a daughter in my parents' home for two decades, until I graduated from college. Then I got married and was a wife and mother for twenty years. I think the next stage of my life involves loving people without necessarily living with them."

Middle-aged women also start to have a clear sense that their friends.h.i.+ps with other women likely will be the longest-lasting relations.h.i.+ps of their lives. There are about 12 million divorced women in the United States, a figure that has doubled since 1980. There are another 12 million widows, and as baby boomers pa.s.s on, that number is expected to rise sharply.

The Ames girls certainly see the need for female friends.h.i.+ps when they consider their mothers' generation. Women over age sixty-five outnumber men in that age group three to two. By age eighty-five, there are only four men for every ten women. Karla's mom has been a widow since 1990. Marilyn's mom lost Dr. McCormack to Alzheimer's years before he died in 2004. Both Karla and Marilyn see that their mothers' bonds with female friends have been vital and sustaining through the years. If a woman doesn't want to burden her children with her emotional and companions.h.i.+p needs when she's older, it's vital to nurture female friends.h.i.+ps.

The Ames girls feel so lucky to have each other that they feel less pressure to make their other friends.h.i.+ps as deep as possible. The friends the Ames girls have made later in life, outside the group, often have been important to them, but there are limitations. "My husband asked me if I missed the friends.h.i.+p I had with Marilyn, that intense junior-high friends.h.i.+p," says Jane. "No, I don't have anyone in my life like that now. In junior high I so wanted a best friend. I don't need that now. I don't need someone else to make me whole. I have a family. I feel whole as a part of that.

"My friends back home are important, but I don't get to see them much. I joke with my close friend at work about our phone relations.h.i.+p. We talk on our way to and from work."

Kelly says that for a while she had what she calls a "bad friend," a woman who joined her when she went to nightclubs to listen to music and dance. They sometimes lived on the dark side-drinking too much, being too wild-and so they were "bad" together, Kelly says. The friends.h.i.+p ended over Kelly's disapproval of the woman's behavior and her inability to trust her. Her relations.h.i.+p with the woman left her all the more grateful for her bonds with her Ames friends.

Cathy says she got a midlife taste of the limits of friends.h.i.+p. She had been getting closer to a woman in Los Angeles; they'd spent a lot of time together, and Cathy was carving out time to be there for this woman. Then Cathy's mother died, and this woman never even acknowledged the loss. "Not a text message, not a call," says Cathy. Four months went by without the woman mentioning anything.

Cathy was hurt and angry. In therapy, she talked about how she should be grieving for her mom, but she was angry at this woman-"and angry at myself for believing that someone would show up for me when it turned out she wouldn't. I realized she would never be the kind of person who'd be there for you when you were down, even though all she had to do was say, 'I'm thinking of you. I'm here if you need me.' "

In therapy, and already in her forties, Cathy realized she was discovering something important. "The lesson was that this was about me. I was projecting on her what I needed her to be. I had to accept her limitations."

Cathy has continued her relations.h.i.+p with the woman, but sees her far less frequently. "I never said anything to her about how I felt," Cathy says. "I took it as my lesson."

And, obviously, this experience left her all the more grateful that she had the Ames girls in her life.

In their forties, the Ames girls have discovered reasons why their relations.h.i.+ps with each other often seem easier than some of their relations.h.i.+ps outside the group. Perhaps, they say, it is because over the years, they have come up with unspoken or barely acknowledged ground rules that seem to work.

They don't brag about their husbands' jobs or incomes.

They talk about their children's achievements, but not in a gloating way. They root for each other's kids, just as they root for each other.

They make every effort to be with each other for key events in their lives: weddings, serious illnesses, funerals.

If they have disagreements among themselves, if they have negative opinions about each other, if they have things that need to be hashed out, it all remains in the group. They don't go to their husbands with their complaints. They don't tell their friends outside the group.

One upside of being in their forties, the girls say, is that they feel like they've grown beyond a lot of things. They're beyond a cutthroat kind of ambition, they're far less compet.i.tive, they've lowered their expectations of others, and they're learning to find satisfaction in just living. They're seeing what feels good: something as easy as just being together, talking on Angela's porch.

19.The Game

It's getting late on the final night of the reunion, and Angela has a surprise activity for everyone. She invites them off the back porch and over to the area of her backyard where she has lit the logs on a large outdoor fire pit. Chairs have been arranged into a circle around the fire.

"Everyone get comfortable," Angela says. "It's time to answer a few questions."