Death of a Friend

Some weeks after the Denver School of the Arts memorial service for Patti Bippus, her daughter Stacia was in Denver for her annual training and flight test. The helicopter company she flies for in Alaska is headquartered here. Meg Schomp arranged for a few of us to meet Stacia for dinner out by her airport hotel.

Pat & Patti in Gunnison

A long drive on I-70 at stop-and-go rush hour to Tower Road, a foreign land, but Stacia was already there, munching chips and salsa after her simulator test, which left her stomach woozy. Eating helped. And she had a story to tell us.

Stacia heard her mother was in the hospital. “I wasn’t worried. We’d been there before. A few days in the hospital, she rallies and goes home. But when I arrived the doctor said, ‘Your mother isn’t leaving this time.’ I called everyone, told Mom, “Stosh is coming.” ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said, ‘it’ll be good to see my son.’ Stosh spoke at the DSA service. When he was done, he said simply, “I miss my Mom.”

Stacia listed everyone else who was coming, then hesitated. “So is Shirley,” she added. Shirley is Patti’s sister, and they have a prickly relationship. Stacia knew this was the reveal.

“Why is Shirley coming? Is it that bad?” Mom asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“I didn’t think it would be so soon,” Patti said calmly.

“Neither did I, Mom.”

Patti saved everything. Stacia wondered what was in the big plastic tubs she helped move from address to address over the years. Now she knows. One of them contained papers, letters, notes related to DSA. She sent a packet of that stuff to Meg Schomp for the DSA memorial. Meg, Leni and I sorted through it over bagels and coffee. In the packet were notes and cards I’d given to Patti over the years. One had a message printed on its cover: “Some people come into our lives and quietly go. Others stay for a while and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never the same.” I can’t believe I gave that to her: I’m not that kind of sentimental. But turns out to be true; her imprint is lasting.

One was a wrinkled square of paper “from the desk of Sra. Dubrava,” from my Spanish teaching years. It said the advice given by my principal that morning was: “Model lack of compliance respectfully.” I don’t remember the context, but what a judiciously rebellious instruction to give one’s faculty. I’m guessing it had to do with some silly rule related to standardized testing or some other nonsense we got from Downtown, impractical and liable to make life in the classroom more difficult than it needed to be.

Once the family arrived at the hospital, Patti said, “let’s order pizza,” one of her favorite indulgences. She laughed and joked with everyone. The girls from the coffee shop she visited every morning came to see her in the hospital. She was one of their favorite customers, always took time to hear how they were doing. The woman who cut her hair also came. “I’m not going to keep next month’s appointment,” Patti told her. In those last days of her life, it was the only time she almost cried.

Have the memorial service now, she told her family, while you’re all here in Alaska: no point in making you come back for it. She wanted to be cremated, had made her will, long ago asked her children to list things they wanted, made gifts to them.

Toward the end, she was in pain. They wanted to give her morphine. No, she said. I had a bad experience with that. When was that, Mom, Stacia asked. Oh, thirty years ago. Well, could we just try it again now. Patti consented reluctantly. As the morphine took effect, she was quiet for a while, finally resting. Then she started, in a low voice, “Sh-boom, sh-boom. Ya da, da da da da… Sh-boom sh-boom.”

Stacia, who is too young, was bewildered, but Shirley jumped in and sang it with her. “I know now,” Stacia told us. “I Googled it: The Crewcuts, 1954.” Doo Wop. Those boys knew how to harmonize.

Patti Bippus was present and calm and contented until the last four hours. And the last four hours she wasn’t really there any more, Stacia said. One shuddering breath and a long wait and then another, just when you thought there wouldn’t be another. Finally, there wasn’t another. Five days in the hospital and done.

Stacia called Patti’s therapist to let her know afterwards and the therapist said, “I can’t share with you what your mother and I talked about, but I can tell you she’d made her peace with dying.” A grace we all hope to achieve.

I admired this woman in life and admired as much the way she left it.

Life could be a dream, if I could take you up to paradise up above, sh-boom, sh-boom…

…Hello, hello again, and hopin’ we’ll meet again, boom sh-boom…life could be a dream, sweetheart.