My dear friend Mike

0 comments | Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Last week, a wonderful man named Mike Andrews passed away. He was young, only 45, and had been suffering from ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, for the last four years. His wife Jana was holding his hand when he died. I hope he is at peace now, his rugged, powerful spirit freed from a body that had failed him.
Mike and Jana were my neighbors on Alexander Road in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I lived for six years. Raleigh is the place I still consider more like home than anywhere else I've lived, and Mike and Jana were two big reasons why this otherwise low-key southern American city felt so comfortable. I met them when I interviewed them for a transportation story. Both Sierra Club members and ardent environmentalists, they told me about the short-sightedness of building more major highways instead of public transportation. We ate pizza at Lilly's and, after the policy talk was over, I pelted them with so many personal questions that Mike was taken aback.
"I don't usually talk about that," he said when I, in a particularly undiplomatic and baldly stupid act, asked him about his divorce from his first wife. I had, after all, just met the guy.
"He doesn't," echoed Jana, looking as startled as Mike.
Still, he didn't shove me off and ignore me forever. Instead, we talked again and again, about Bob Mould and Texas and hiking the Linville Gorge and the beauty of the Outer Banks. I loved his sense of humor -- he had the most finely tuned sense of comic timing -- and his devotion to his two lovely, offbeat and grown-up children, Shane and Sarah. I envied him and Jana, both so compatible and full of optimism, but I did not linger on the jealousy. Instead, I was happy to know that love could be something both stable and precious, so incandescent that you marveled it, yet so real that you believed you could have it someday too.
Mike and Jana invited me to dinners and shows and camping trips, brought me Chilean bean stew (Mike's special recipe) when I was too tired to cook, and included me as family on Thanksgiving Day. Mike showed me how to kayak and anonymously mowed my lawn. Good-looking and funny, with a dynamic heart and an athletic sense of life, he was the perfect guy. I secretly wished there was a way to clone him so I, too, could have a handsome husband who kayaked and cooked and practiced environmentalism and told great jokes and said that I was beautiful, as I often heard him telling Jana.
****
The photo above was taken on Halloween 2002. Mike didn't know he was sick yet, and he had shown up to the party dressed as George Bush, complete with a scary plastic mask that so resembled our evil and dumb president. But the mask got too hot and when Mike took it off and wasn't costumed anymore, Jana came up with a plan to make him a "black-eyed pea." (See the black eye? See the P?) I came dressed as my Cretan grandfather, which nobody got, especially because, as Mike pointed out, my Cretan grandpa likely never wore a see-through blouse that showed off his leopard skin bra.
Touche.
A few months later, when we were on the remote Outer Banks island of Cape Lookout for a camping trip, Mike started noticing something was wrong with his speech. He thought the slurring had come from the copious drinking on the trip -- God knows, we all drank a lot and at least one of us, a real southern cowboy of a dude, had ended up shirtless and dancing around the campfire, singing "Beth" by Kiss at the top of his lungs -- but then he noticed that it persisted long after the flippy camping trip was over.
After numerous tests, doctors told him that he had ALS, or Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal neurogenerative disease that eventually atrophies the entire body. Those who have ALS remain very sound of mind, but they are trapped in their frozen bodies.
ALS trapped Mike, one of the most physically active people I have ever known, quickly. Within a couple of years, he was in a wheelchair and could not talk. He used a special computer program to type out his thoughts, which included both the serious (about his Sierra Club work, for instance) and the hilarious, such as his amusement over one of his daughter's boyfriends, who made art that consisted of drawing facial hair on tools (think a saw with a mustache and beard, for instance).
"Is he a fruitcake?" he typed the first year I visited Raleigh from my new and uncomfortable home in Greece.
I laughed. "Maybe he is the next big thing," I said.
"Whatever," he typed in response.
The last time I saw him, in early January of last year, we were recounting the fun wedding of our friends Dan and Andrea, who got married over New Year's in a fancy remodeled barn outside of Chapel Hill. Dan and Andrea were overwhelmed when Mike showed up with Jana, who wore a sexy red dress and looked, as Mike typed later, "really hot." Mike was in a wheelchair and he was clearly tired, but he wanted to come. Andrea, not an easily emotional person by any stretch of the imagination, teared up when she saw him.
"We're so happy you came," she told him, as Dan clasped his hand.
And later, he typed: "She looked beautiful. You tell Andrea that she looked beautiful."
I was on a nervous talking spree that last day I saw him, recounting a ridiculous two-CD audio travelogue my friend Alisa and I had made for him the previous year. We had spent a week traveling around Greece, recording everything from waterfalls to old ladies to Canadian tourists to ourselves singing Stevie Wonder songs. We called our microphone "the Mikeaphone" and we tried to invoke the sense of spontaneous fun that lit all our time together in Raleigh.
I missed North Carolina very much, but I also specifically longed for Mike and Jana, and what they represented -- the bond that only friends who truly love you can offer.
In my avalanched words, I tried to tell him so, but it was coming out incoherently. But he picked up on my sentiment, if not my warbled sentences.
"We miss you Joanna," Mike typed in his last message to me that day. "Come back home."
Surprising myself -- because I tried to act all happy around Mike when I saw him -- I started to weep and tried to cover it up by laughing, to mixed success. I had this strange and unsettling feeling that I would never see him again.
****
And I did not.
When I visited again in September, he was too weak to visit. And when Jana sent me an email last week telling me he was gone, I fell into the warmth of the past, not wanting to believe that Mike was dead. When I read his obituary in my old newspaper -- he and Jana were devoted readers -- and saw a particularly gorgeous photo of him in scuba gear, I started to smile then cracked into tears. It was 2 a.m. in Athens at the time, and I was sitting in my room, wishing so much that I could whip myself back in time to that camping trip on Cape Lookout, when we made scary jack-o-lanterns and laughed in glee with dear David the drunk cowboy, who eventually switched from Kiss to Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" in his free-form serenade.
Over the last few days, I've been thinking a lot about Mike. I made his Chilean bean stew, recalled the Nick Drake song "From the Morning" that I had dedicated to him and Jana when they got married on Ocracoke island in the Outer Banks, and remembered how I made him dance with me once at a party, much to his chagrin. ("Is this music?" he wondered as I played a truly ridiculous Greek techno song and flailed around like an epileptic cowgirl.)
And I remembered the evening in Ocracoke just before the wedding, when a group of us were eating grilled fish and white trash sushi (filled with something like fish sticks and potato chips), as Jana's best friend Roommate and Roommate's man Fritz, playing guitar, sang funny songs. Mike laughed so heartily and looked so handsome, a Robert Redford from Texas, and he would not take his eyes off Jana. She was tan and her hair was that golden blond of the outdoorswoman, her eyes glittering as she sang and laughed with Roommate.
Some days before, he had proposed to her at the home they shared on Alexander Road, dropping on one knee and holding a rose. Of course, she said yes.
"You're beautiful," he told her that night, and then again and again.
And you're beautiful, too, Mike. May you rest in peace.

Labels: Friends



KARMA

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