Wildflowers With Nat, 2

...the story...

A little over a year ago my friend called me. She had breast cancer and she was between treatments. She had been fighting the aggressive cancer for three years. She was young and strong and resolutely, determinedly, defiantly hopeful. Those of us who loved her read the science, checked out the medical prognosis, did our own research. Things did not look good. In fact, they looked really, really, really bad. But when we talked to her, she was so sure she would live, so determined to live, we believed her. At least I did. Until last spring.

Her doctor took her aside. He didn’t tell her he would die. What you say to people at that point in the disease affects the outcome. If you tell someone they are going to die—they often do, right on schedule. So he did not do that. He knew her rules. And he followed them.

He simply told her: “You are between chemo sessions. The next round of whatever we do (she was running out of options) is going to be hard. If there is somewhere you want to go, someone you want to see, something you have been dying to do, do it now.”

So she called me. She told me she wanted to go and see the desert wildflowers. She could have done anything. She was a world traveler who had lived in Japan and Thailand, and traveled to India, Nepal, China, Indonesia and Vietnam. She spoke fluent Japanese and restaurant Thai. She could have flown to Italy. Or gone to Hawaii. Or done a week of yoga with one of her gurus. Inside her, I think she knew this would be her last trip. Even if I didn’t.

So she drove down the five from San Francisco on her own in her beat up old Subaru with the fuzzy faux leopard skin on the seats—the same car we had driven cross country together in 20 years before. She threw in a sleeping bag, great music, bean sprouts, nuts, carrots and snacks for the road. In the passenger seat, like an old friend, rode a pair of oxygen tanks. And stashed in her suitcase was her growing collection of pills.

We decided to go to Joshua Tree. We had been on so many fantastic trips together. We met right out of college and we were two East-Coasters bewitched by the West. This was one of the joys we shared. The beauty of the West Coast—its forests, its oceans, its deserts and yes, its wacky, way out, unrestrained people.


Maybe we both loved being far away and free at last from our conservative, controlling, religious fathers. Maybe we both suffered from the hyperambitiousness of the East Coast and wanted to silence that part of ourselves in a place where it didn’t matter. I don’t know. She irritated most of my friends. But to me, she was a soulmate, a sister, and a fellow traveler on the road of life.

I booked the last room I could get in Twenty Nine Palms and we headed out into the desert. Me, my husband, my two small boys and my friend, Natalie. She rode in the front seat where she had room at her feet for her oxygen tanks.

She never acted like a patient. Not once. Our hotel was full of soldier’s families—those who were waiting by the base to see their loved ones who had a few days between deployments before heading back to Iraq. The rooms and desert gardens were full of new babies, grandparents and young brides, all waiting for their 48 hours of precious time with their loved ones before they headed back into war, perhaps for the last time. The air was thick with blind, positive energy—and we we part of this – we will have fun. We will pretend everything is normal. We will not admit that death is in the air. We will just savor the normal, drown ourselves in it, with Budweiser, Tecate, hotdogs and tacos.

Nat got all stories and felt their pain. She was a natural reporter, a born propagandist and a passionate political junkie who could not stop herself from lightly lecturing anyone she came across. Not even as the cancer consumed her body and took her breath away.

At night we went out into the desert and lay under the stars. During the day we hiked out to the big rocks and looked for the desert wild flowers among the Joshua trees. We climbed boulders and drew pictures of the flowers. She never complained. Ever. When she got tired she would pull out her oxygen tank and hooked herself up. She would roll down the window as we wound through the park and shout out imperiously, “Stop the car. Go faster. Slow down. Pull over here. ” It drove my husband crazy.

At one point she and I got out of the car and hiked out into a field of golden flowers. My boys were asleep and my husband stayed in the car with them. It was like an enchanted field in the middle of the desert. There were flowers there I had never seen before in my life. Magical flowers. Some of them had delicate blooms and would stand completely alone, with none other like them around. The sun was high in the sky, and the air was so bright it made us dizzy. We lay down in the field of flowers together, our heads on each other’s arms, our bodies cradled by the sandy soil. We were intoxicated, going under in a cloud of wildflower perfume, with yellow heads bobbing all around us. It was the way I think heaven will be. It was of life’s perfect moments, all the more precious because we knew it might not come again.

Then we got up and went back to the car full of snacks and diapers and sweaters and toys, where my husband and sleeping boys were waiting.

She documented the entire trip. She took pictures of the magical flowers and found their names. (They were extremely rare). For dinner, we ate burritos and drank margaritas surrounded by soldiers on leave who seemed like they were holding onto life as desperately as she was.

Four months later my friend died. Ours was the last trip big trip she ever took. I feel honored. She chose me, my boys, my family to be with. We opened up and let her in. But I also weep because I did not know. I did not know, as she did, deep inside her, that this trip would be her last. She got to pick what she still wanted to see of all the miracles on this earth, and she chose wildflowers, with me.

I no longer cry every day. To me she is an impish soul who lives on powerfully in my mind, and visits me frequently with wry comments and endless advice. When I signed up for Facebook a month ago—the last person in America to do so – she had set it up so she was my first friend, and so her picture with me was my profile picture. As she was in life, she is in death – slightly controlling, highly opinionated, always one step head of everyone else, believing she did everything better than you ever could.

She would not want me to mourn.

But the season is upon me again. The California poppies are out. The wildflowers are blooming. Spectacular colors are shooting up from California’s barren, desert soil. I see the flowers and I weep. But I also smile—because my friend knew their beauty. She knew they were the last great thing on earth she wanted to make sure she saw.