A Friend For All Seasons
By: Julie Barrie Buchanan
December 3, 2022
A year ago today, I watched my dearest friend die. Pam’s three adult daughters and her husband moistened her dry lips with bourbon from their fingers to simulate her “bedtime bourbon” ritual. For a few hours after her move home from the hospital, a David Bowie playlist filled their living room, candles burned, and the rest of us -- her four siblings, their spouses and children, her mother, me -- encircled the temporarily installed hospital bed, talking quietly.
Unconscious, Pam made small, pained animal noises. From her liver failure, she was New York State license plate yellow. Her formerly robust legs were the size of a small arm. Her numerous body tattoos had deflated. Then, her faint breathing stopped, and she was gone.
The first time I met Pam was in September of 1987. I dragged boxes and my parents down a long gray hall to Wilder 410 at the University of Rochester. An oddly positioned silhouette stood in the doorway. As I yanked my belongings closer and her face came into view, she said: “Hi, I’m Pam. I’m stretching my butt.” She was bending left, hand on hip, body jutting sideways. Her eyes were two different colors (contacts, I’d later learn) as was her mullet-y hair: blonde at the roots and brown at the tips. She was to be my roommate.
Pam was the one suitemate I hadn’t called in July when U of R Residential Life sent a list of suitemates to my home in Washington, DC. I’d chatted with Emily from Chicago, Suellen from Cincinnati, and Lauren from Montclair, NJ. But I wasn’t sure what to make of this Pam person whose address was “Merwin Lake Road, Kinderhook, NY:” no number, just a street name. I couldn’t find Kinderhook on my New York State map. My city-girl-self hadn’t been sure what I’d say.
Pam said goodbye and rushed to volleyball practice as I dazedly entered our room. She’d been there a week for pre-season. I assessed the askew sheep comforter dangling from the top bunk, The Doors and The Who posters taped on cinderblock walls over her desk, the family photo of two parents and five siblings by her bed, the beer cans in the trash, and the mess of clothes and books on the floor. I wondered.
Later that day, I met fellow city-loving, fellow somewhat-Jewish, fellow private school grad suitemate, Lauren. She was setting up her single room in our suite to be tidy with matching decor. She had a bright and welcoming smile, and as we compared stories from high school, I knew that we’d be friends. About Pam, I was less sure.
In our first weeks of college as we all acclimated, our RA conducted hall meetings to introduce the members of our floor’s four suites. Pam began asking everyone a “question of the night” -- personal and often graphic inquiries. Despite my initial reservation (as a girl’s school grad I was sure I’d have the least interesting answers, and I was right), I came to look forward to the hilarity and fellowship of these exchanges. Lauren and I snorted with laughter at our new friend Pammy’s antics.
Pam was the id to our superegos. She yelled to us at top volume across campus. She dove head-first onto dining room trays to sled down hills. She declined Greek life because she was a “GDI” (god-damned individual) and refused to “try out for friends and pay to keep them.” Her party alter ego, “Sonya,” danced an expansive breast-stroke move, clearing space at many-a-gathering. She grabbed a frat boy’s butt at a party and pretended it was me. A year-round athlete -- playing volleyball and running indoor and outdoor track -- her spring-like muscles lofted her high above the earth. In a volleyball competition freshman year, she won a gift certificate for a tattoo at a Rochester body art parlor, beginning a lifelong love affair with ink.
My fondest memories of college all include Pam and Lauren: throwing darts in our common area; playing quarters with guys in the next-door suite; eating cookies from the care packages from Pam’s mom; saying we are going to study in bed, getting in pajamas, pulling up the covers, and sacking out immediately. I had never talked to anyone about the topics I shared with these friends -- dreams, sex, childhood traumas, insecurities, family secrets. Some college parties were fun, but it was the time we spent just-us or in smaller groups (like, with the cackle-laughing Walter across the hall who would become Mr. Pam) that are rooted in my memory.
Then we graduated. It was 1991, and we would be living apart for the first time in four years. Lauren drove cross-country to San Francisco and got a job. I returned to DC for law school. Pam and Walter stayed in Rochester, got married, started medical school, had three daughters, bought a house. Lauren and I stayed single for a time and traveled to meet Pam’s girls. We didn’t have cell phones or email, but we called and visited.
In Stamford, CT for a summer job during law school, I didn’t feel well. My throat looked like it was closing (it was tonsillitis, I later learned). I called Pam, almost-doctor. She drove five hours to visit the next day (no easy feat with toddlers), and declared that I was fine. We went out, closed down the bars and then, unwilling for the night to end, sat and chatted on the curb outside my sterile corporate apartment. Looking up to the window, we realized that all summer I’d been giving my neighbors a peep show with the completely see-through blinds on my apartment window. We laughed until we almost peed, and I had the best night of my boring and lonely Stamford summer.
Back in DC and a few months into a new job, I invited friends -- including new work friends I was nervous to include -- to a Middle Eastern restaurant in Georgetown to celebrate my 29th birthday. Pam drove eight hours to join me. Within minutes, she had everyone sharing their most embarrassing memories, doing shots, and toasting a red-faced me.
Lauren and I traveled to Rochester several times a year to see Pam, Walter, and their young daughters for birthdays, recitals, or for no reason at all. Pam had more tattoos every time we visited, each imbued with meaning. Over the decades, once together, we connected as if no time had passed. We sang 80s music loudly and off-key while we shared everything in our lives: our career highs and lows, bad and good boyfriends (and eventual husbands for Lauren and me), our cumulative six amazing daughters, our imposter syndrome and other insecurities, our hopes for the future. We celebrated major and minor events: Passover seders, New Years Eves, births, baptisms, weddings, graduations, moving. We were there for sadness, too: miscarriages, deaths of family members, foundering jobs and relationships, divorce, injury, and illness.
As our careers advanced and we had more money, we traveled the world together. In 2001, Lauren moved to Switzerland. We met in England, New York, Iceland, Cape Cod, and the Berkshires for hiking, biking, drinking, eating, talking and laughing. Our communications mode changed with the times, too, long email chains giving way to texts giving way to WhatsApp messages.
Six years ago, Pam left a WhatsApp message we hated to hear. She’d had a sonogram after her mammogram, and the results were bad. It was breast cancer, and it was not caught early: we learned that lobular cancer is hard to detect in mammograms. She was scared but optimistic. It wasn’t in her back, her liver, or her brain, the places that breast cancer usually goes. She was going to continue to live, she said. And we believed.
What else can you believe about someone like Pam? Then in her late 40s, Pam was stronger than most twenty-somethings. After her diagnosis, she continued as the CMO of her hospital, having achieved great career success. She played advanced-level recreational volleyball, beating teams half her age. She continued to be a rock for her three daughters, Walter, her mom, her siblings, and us.
Three years ago during one of our Swiss hiking trips, Pam’s legs hurt badly. New scans when she returned home revealed bad news: stage four. The cancer had progressed all over her spine. While stoic and still physically the strongest woman I knew, Pam was afraid. She worried for her daughters and for Walter. She was in pain. For the first time, there were hikes she couldn’t hike and jumps she couldn’t jump. And as time passed, the cancer spread. Pam insisted that all our conversations couldn’t be about her cancer, and they weren’t. We laughed, gossiped, and did puzzles instead of hikes.
Our last visit was in October, 2021. She’d had a terrible and scary August but a new seemingly miraculous treatment was helping, and I went to Rochester to keep her company at appointments. She was thinner and more subdued, still her unique self, but quieter and deeper in her head.
Then came that terrible call from her youngest, my goddaughter, last December. “It’s time,” she said through tears. I gathered a bag, jumped in my car and drove to Rochester. The tears wouldn’t stop for days, and a year later, the pain still hasn’t. Losing Pam has been the worst tragedy of my life. Yet, I’m profoundly grateful to have had such a friend, a friend whose loss cuts so deeply.
A few months after Pam died, at age 52, I got my only tattoo. It’s a Celtic triquetra, symbol of three, for the friendship that Pam, Lauren and I have shared for 35 years. It lives on my upper left shoulder, where I can see it daily. Over the last year, when I choose to say yes to something I might have said no to, when I dance with abandon to 80s music, when I hear a super dirty joke, when I embarrass myself in public on purpose, I trace the triquetra -- thankful, forever, for my Pammy.
Julie Barrie Buchanan is a 55-year-old ex-lawyer currently working on her MFA in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC. She enjoys reading, writing, walking, knitting, and being with friends and family. There will always be a Pam-sized hole in her heart.
