On Friendship

Ministerial Meditations

by The Rev. Connie Yost 

March 10, 2016

Jan and Me

On Friendship

My friend Jan recently gave me a birthday card, which perhaps doesn’t sound very remarkable except for two things:  1) it wasn’t my birthday and 2) she thanked me and said “I love you very much.”

I have known Jan for about 40 years, and though I moved away from Seattle where she continued to live, I tried to keep in touch with her when I came back to visit.  In the beginning of our friendship, I wasn’t aware that she had a neurological condition.  But over the years, she became progressively more unable to take care of herself.  For years, she lived in a little rented house near Seward Park.  She enjoyed cooking and gardening and her cat, Baby.  She had help that came in a few times a week.  Then she started to have falls, and surgeries, and a stroke.  On the phone one day she told me that she had had to move from the little house into an adult family home on Beacon Hill.  Though it was hard to give up the independence that she had had, the worst thing was that she couldn’t take Baby with her.  A cat person myself, I grieved for her.

Jan lived in that first adult family home for about 5 years, then was told she was moving one morning.  She never did know why.  The new adult family home was visually unappealing to me, located next to an auto repair shop with a dump of tires visible in the back yard.  But Jan became quite attached to the older woman who cared for her, and she had a large room to herself.  All seemed well for a couple of years until her caregiver went to the hospital for back surgery.  A new, younger couple took over as the caregivers.  Jan thought this was temporary until the older caregiver recovered enough to come back, but as the months went on it became clear that the younger couple was there to stay.