pamela

Pamela Voget.

This is her real name. Pamela Voget, age 20, daughter of Connie Voget and a father that I never really knew all that well, a brave, strong, quiet man I met for the first time today.

Pamela Voget was thirteen years old when she first came to our Dojo with her mother. "Dojo" is a term more commonly seen in association with martial arts studios; it means "training center," and this is what we -- the people of my faith -- call our version of church. To Christians, church is someplace to be visited once a week, a refresher, or a reminder. For us, the dojo is exactly what it sounds like, a place to train spiritually, to purify, to cleanse, with all the suffering and relief that comes with that. I don't remember what it's like to go to a regular church; I seem to remember activity happening only on Sundays, though it's quite possible that there are churches out there -- for all I know, all churches out there -- that are open during other days of the week. I don't know. The dojo, however, is open every day of the week. People come when they're sick, or depressed, or feeling at odds; sometimes they go away feeling better. Sometimes they go away feeling worse.

"Worse," though, is relative. Some of the people who come to the dojo come because they're suffering, physically or emotionally, and they want to know why. "Why me," or "why this," or "why not...." Knowing why is sometimes more important than feeling better.

Connie had breast cancer, or was in remission from breast cancer when she first came to the Dojo; I don't remember which. It was seven years ago, and I was living between college in New York and summers in Seattle. She was a small, pale woman, with deep shadows under her eyes; she looked like she'd been drawn in outlines with a pen too fine-tipped for shading. Her daughter, even then, was painfully thin, and pretty. I remember that she was pretty. When I first met her, she'd already been coming to the Dojo for a while. She knew the faces, knew the names, and had struck up friendships with the kids who always perform their little theatres in the hallways behind the altar room.

In the brief months I had between school years, I made friends with her as well. Not close friends. The age gap was bigger, or seemed bigger; I was twenty-one by then, and feeling the weight of years and responsibility. When we talked, we talked about silly things, girly things that I never talked about much with my own friends even when I was growing up, things that Pamela took seriously and clung to with both hands. Boys. Dances. Hair. Hats. She wanted to go to Paris and be an artist. She wanted to live the bohemian life.

Her tumor was something that we talked about unselfconsciously, with a bit of awkwardness on her side at first that rapidly gave way to something like relief. It would be a long time before she took the cancer seriously; at thirteen, it's hard to imagine death as having anything to do with the person in the mirror. Coming to the Dojo was something she did for her mother, not really understanding that coming to the Dojo was, for Connie, something she thought she was doing for her daughter.

In the years since we first met, Pamela went through several surgeries. The growth refused to stay docilely within bounds; she gradually lost the use of the right side of her body, and found it increasingly difficult to talk. The moody, earnest thirteen year old became a nervous, self-conscious seventeen year old. The possibility of death, never acknowledged, set her jaw and rounded her shoulders.

"I miss going to school," she told me once, with a sigh. Chemotherapy and surgery both had removed her from classes time and time again, until her parents had decided to pull her out entirely.

When she walked, she dragged her right leg behind her; she would have been easy to hear coming, except that she was too thin and light to make much noise as she moved.

She brightened whenever Masako told her stories about her boyfriends, the trouble she was having with them, or the things they did together. With that curious kindness that my sister knows, she would ask Pamela's advice. "What do you think I should do?" she'd ask. "Should I dump him? Or maybe I should give him another chance? Maybe you should meet him and tell me what you think." I took my cues from my younger sister and would share stories about college life, about being a musician and those philosophical questions that undergraduates seem to find so important about the world.

The brain tumor continued to eat away at her. Connie, who had originally come to the Dojo to find answers for her daughter, discovered she had also come for herself. She blamed God for everything, and fought a losing war. She kept coming to the Dojo anyway, and somewhere between one summer and the next, found the ability to accept the unacceptable. God and she were back on speaking terms.

Pamela went through several surgeries. Her illness had kept her from school enough that she wasn't able to graduate; she read the modern day equivalent of Sweet Valley High books and, discovering in them the dream life she'd never had a chance to lead, found them satisfying. A week before Christmas, my mother called me to tell me we would go visit Pamela while Masako and I were in town. She, like the others who are members of our Dojo, had been visiting Pamela daily.

"I don't think it'll be much longer," she said quietly. "She's not doing well."

On Christmas night, Pamela was admitted to the hospital.

If I've ever been in the Seattle Children's Hospital before, I've long since forgotten it; signs are posted low and in large letters, and the walls are painted with cheerful scenes out of children's books. The theme for the ground floor appeared to be "A Pothead's Safari." Two large statues of pink and grey zebras grazed in the lobby; a purple giraffe straddled air by the receptionist's desk.

"Third floor," the receptionist said when we checked in. She gave us directions to the elevator. "That's good that you're visiting her," she added. "She's been getting a lot of visitors. My computer's down and I know what room she's in, which all goes to show you."

The elevator sported a brightly colored train, manned by a green dog and carrying an assortment of pastel bears and bunny rabbits wearing jerseys and pearl necklaces.

"I find this disturbing," Masako muttered, staring at the paintings with fascination. "This is all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong."

We were headed for the Fred Hutchinson cancer ward. A sign at the entryway warned people with colds and throat problems not to enter; my mother recognized Pamela's father speaking to family members in the lobby, and went to greet him. Masako and I looked around, drawn close to each other for comfort.

Each of the rooms had been poster painted with bright, colorful characters; recent additions in terms of decoration, since all of them had Christmas themes to them. A couple of the doors were open, and we glanced inside as we passed to see children -- toddlers, adolescents, nobody over the age of ten, at best -- in hospital beds or cradled in parental laps. "Merry Christmas, Tim!" one of the windows greeted in a big bubble out of a painted Santa mouth. We caught a glimpse of a room that had been lived in for a very long time, decorated with paintings and flowers and furniture brought from home for a bald little boy of about six.

Connie came out to greet us; if anything, she was paler and more fine-drawn than ever. We gave her a tape that we'd brought for Pamela, a collection of Garrison Kiellor reading his favorite stories.

"That's wonderful," she said, brightening a little. "Thank you. Pamela listens to Prairie Home Companion with us every Sunday. She'll love it."

With a gesture to us to follow her, she padded into her daughter's hospital room.

Mom hadn't warned us what to expect. Maybe she hadn't known, either, how quickly Pamela would deteriorate. She was a bump on the bed, a bundle of sticks kept together by skin and tubing; her face was turned away from us, towards a handsome young man who glanced up as we entered and kissed her cheek good-bye.

"See you in a bit, kiddo," he said, finishing off a conversation. There was very little room on the side of the bed where he was; he vacated it quickly, dropping a hand on Connie's shoulder as he passed.

"You can go on in and say hello to her," Connie said, going to the near side of the bed to lay her own hand on her daughter's shoulder. "Pamela, Yuhri and Masako are here to visit." Pamela didn't move.

It wasn't until we reached the far side of the bed that we realized that Pamela couldn't move. What was left of Pamela, of the girl we knew, was gone. Or worse still, wasn't gone perhaps, but was trapped inside a body that no longer had the capacity to move or speak or blink or even breathe on its own.

I felt my face freeze into the smile that had already spread on my face before I'd seen her face. For the first time, I realized that the bubbling, rasping sound that I'd been hearing since I'd entered the room was the tube that was in her lungs, removing fluid and forcing air into her. Her eyes were both partly open, the right lid drooping further than the other; neither of them tracked movement, or blinked. If it weren't for the beeping and whirling of the machines, we would have thought her already dead.

I have no idea what I said to her. Something trite, I think. Something stupid. Mom had wanted me to tell her a story when I saw her, something funny that would make her laugh. "You're a good storyteller," my sister had agreed, and I'd resolved to do exactly that, only to find out at the last moment that I'd lost my ability to do anything of the sort.

"Can she hear us?" my mother asked Connie across the room.

"I think so," Connie replied, hopefully. "She seems to enjoy having visitors. Sometimes her eyelid moves, or she squeezes her hand just a little bit. . ."

On the sill of a whiteboard next to the bed, someone had put up pictures of Pamela as a younger, healthier girl. One of them was a prom picture; she was wearing a white dress and flowers, smiling next to a handsome young man that I recognized from the visitor before us. She looked radiant: it was a beautiful illusion of the normal life that she'd always wanted.

The nurse came and kicked us out. "I have to do a procedure," she said, revoltingly upbeat. My sister, almost speechless, touched the back of Pamela's arm and we said good-bye.

We paused outside the door to hug Connie and try to offer her comfort that she didn't want, but needed. Behind us in the room, the smell of bile suddenly bit through the air, acrid and metallic; the rhythm of the earlier bubbling sound changed to a steady, harsh sucking.

"Thank you for coming," said Connie, bright-eyed. "We'll listen to the tape tonight."

We rode down the elevator, my mother still cheerful, my sister and I both subdued.

"It's wrong," Masako said at last, glaring at the green train conductor. "The colors are just . . . disturbing."

"I think it's fun," my mother said, and patted the head of a purple rabbit carrying a purse. "The next time I get sick, I want to come here."

Death isn't something that we're scared of, in my family; it's the dying that worries us. Death is our friend. Has been our friend. Just like he'll be to Pamela. We sat in the car, waiting to pull out of the parking lot, and my mother said wistfully, "It won't be too much longer, I think."

"No," said my sister.

"Today or tomorrow," I said.

I hoped.

The smell of bile clung to my clothes for the rest of the day.