We lazed in the sun on the deck, grateful for the soft breezes and idyll of the country. A fox trotted across the yard, then disappeared beyond the cottonwood trees.

During a break from our wide-ranging discussions and a little nap or two, I began reading a new book of poetry I’d brought along.

  “Hey, listen to this. It’s called ‘The Summer Day’ by Mary Oliver. We’re kind of living it today.”

I read aloud about the grasshopper “gazing around with her sad and complicated eyes” before she snaps her wings open and floats away. The poet describes how important it is to pay attention, to stroll through the fields, to be idle. She ends with two sentences that caught in my throat as I read them to Angela that summer day, lines I’ve quoted many times since:

When we departed for home the next afternoon, Angela wrote a beautiful note in our guestbook that referenced the poem. Her message was clear: Embrace your life and live it with meaning.

I’d first met Angela and her husband Finley on another bucolic afternoon seven years earlier, as a guest on their sailboat the Ursa Major. Finley, a hospital chaplain and a work colleague and good friend of my sister, Mimi, had invited her to join him and Angela for an afternoon on Lake Michigan. Mimi asked if she could bring me along, as I was taking a summer course in sailing at Northwestern. Although still very much a novice, I was eager to flex new-found sailing muscle with expert sailors. The afternoon was an exhilarating adventure, especially when I was allowed to take the helm.

What I hadn’t expected to emerge from that day on the lake was a deep and lasting friendship with both Angela and Finley. In the diffused sunlight of late afternoon, we dropped anchor and rocked awhile in the soft waves, laughing and sharing life stories over a glass of wine. I discovered that these were my kind of people.   

Angela had left behind a painful and abusive adolescence in New York to become an Episcopalian nun in her early twenties, teaching Navajo children on a reservation outside Tucson. After about ten years as a nun, when she had chafed enough under the rules and restrictions of a male-dominated religious hierarchy, she left and eventually founded her own lay religious order, the Worker Sisters of the Holy Spirit. Before moving to Chicago and embracing sailing, she and Finley had belonged to a motorcycle club in Kansas City, where fellow bikers christened her—a former nun on a motorcycle—“Flyin’ Angel.”  I loved both the image and the nickname.

That first afternoon on Lake Michigan, she spoke with passion about their work throughout the U.S. and in Haiti and about her commitment as a volunteer at a local battered women’s shelter. She loved working with kids. She was eager to learn more about my work as a hospice nurse.

This is clearly a woman of substance, I thought. Someone I want as a friend.

Throughout the fall, Angela and Finley invited me to be a regular on their weekend sailing excursions. Both were interested in my work in hospice and healthcare quality and safety ─ as well as in who I was as a person. Angela shared openly about her work with her lay order; but she never hinted, let alone pushed, for me to be a part of it. My own brand of unstructured spirituality was just fine with her.

The following year, as she was walking down the dock after a seemingly normal afternoon of sailing, Angela suddenly collapsed from a full cardiac arrest. I wasn’t there to witness this shocking event.  As soon as it was possible, I visited her in the intensive care unit, scarcely recognizing her under all the tubes and machinery. She was 50 years old, athletic, lean, and a non-smoking vegetarian ─ but unfortunately she also suffered from a silent hereditary cardiac disease. As a nurse, I knew that she faced a long, painful, and perhaps impossible climb back to normalcy and health. Her life had forever changed in that moment on the dock.

But climb she did, with grit and determination that awed me. After a septuple cardiac bypass and months in the intensive care unit, Angela returned home and embarked on an arduous regimen of cardiac rehabilitation. Although she was no longer able to sail across Lake Michigan, she eventually resumed more limited sailing and remained as spiritual director for the Worker Sisters. She was honest and forthright about her limitations, yet never allowed them to define her. Her health was fragile:  there were setbacks, medication adjustments, procedures, tests, and implants.

But her gratitude for each day was unflagging. “Who’d ever guessed I’d last this long?” she’d often muse, with amazement. “I’m truly blessed.”

Our friendship deepened throughout the next decade. Finley and Angela often invited me for an afternoon of sailing in the summer or a weekend dinner and thoughtful conversation by the fire at their home in the winter. They saw me through the highs and lows of my own sometimes bumpy life: disappointing relationships, the painful loss of my parents within four months of each other, and my professional work in hospice, and later, in international health. We spoke often about what gave meaning to our lives. Angela and Finley encouraged me to stretch beyond my comfort zone, including tackling new opportunities to work in developing countries.

In 1997, I was selected as the team leader for a multi-year national hospital improvement project in Zambia, a challenging sub-Saharan country where I’d not previously traveled. Before my first trip there, Angela gave me a little Native American fiber talisman she’d blessed.

“Tuck it away in your luggage,” she said. “It’ll keep you safe from malaria and hippos.”

Despite the protective powers of my talisman, I found Zambia overwhelming. I witnessed emaciated and moaning AIDS patients dying on dirty blankets on the floors of hospital wards that had no beds for them. A newspaper article described one rural village so poor that families relied on cooked rats for protein. One whole generation of men had already been wiped away by the AIDS pandemic. Orphaned children begged alongside every road. In the capital city of Lusaka, vendors in open-air markets sold caskets next to jeans and Michael Jordan T-shirts.

Often the technical assistance work I was doing felt futile at actually tackling the crushing needs of health care in this impoverished country. In my emails and faxes back to friends and family, I agonized over how my meager contribution to improved health care in Zambia could truly have any sustained impact.

When I returned to Chicago after my first six weeks in Zambia, I found a card from Angela in my pile of snail mail: You have brought hope to a nation. Now I ask God to bring you personally a new hope that will refresh your weary spirit, renew your faith in humankind, and provide a quiet rest of your spirit and soul. We are here to listen. We love you.

In 2001, Angela and Finley made the difficult decision to depart the harsh winters of the North and relocated to a retirement community in the rolling green hills of eastern Tennessee. Since it was, sadly, a place with no easy access to sailing, they sold their beloved boat Ursa Major. Despite the geographic distance between us, we kept in touch often via cards, phone calls, emails—and most importantly, through our annual “Friendsgiving” weekend at my family’s vacation house.

There we spent countless hours lazing by a roaring fire, holding spirited Scrabble tournaments, cooking together, watching movies, and generally sharing our lives. Angela was fully a part of everything during those “Friendsgiving” gatherings and said often that the weekend was her favorite experience of the year. At each of those special gatherings we toasted another exceptional Friendsgiving together, silently wishing that it would not be our last.

Along the way, Angela and Finley not only rejoiced at my new relationship and eventual marriage to Rich, but also “adopted” him into their extended family. Finley, a retired minister, happily officiated at our wedding.

These two dear friends were always an enthusiastic audience for my travelogues, shared my passion for the global health work I was doing, and championed and cheered my interest in making a vital difference in the world. They understood at a deep level not only what it means to have a wild and precious life, but how to live it in a meaningful way. They wanted this for me.

Over the course of the next ten years, Angela’s cardiac health came to that dreaded point at which it was clear there were few remaining medical options. She wasn’t a candidate for a transplant. Amazingly, her chest pain and irregular heart beat responded to a continuous intravenous infusion of a cardiac medication that she wore in a little pack around her waist. However, it was clear that an irreversible change could happen at any moment. We all understood her frailty. She spoke openly and candidly about living within the long lens of death, and of her gratitude for each new day of life.

August 2012. Rich and I drove to Tennessee for what we knew might be our last visit with these two special friends. The four of us explored the rolling hills and backroads of rural Tennessee in our open convertible, Angela in the front seat with Rich. Her floppy red hat and sunglasses shielded her from the sun and a red bandana across her mouth and nose conserved her breath. “I’m having a blast!” she yelled into the wind.

Over lunch at a little country diner, we discussed books, films, politics, and most solemnly, death. In her direct style, Angela told us that when her time came, she would be ready.

Back at their house that evening, Finley took me into their library and shared a watercolor painting he’d just finished ─ one that Angela had commissioned from him. It depicted a lone sailboat aimed for the horizon. “I’m sure you understand its meaning,” he said.   

As Rich and I prepared to depart for home in Chicago, the four of us talked about seeing each other again a few months later for a Thanksgiving gathering at the family vacation house.

“I’m gonna try to make it, darlin’.” Angela said. “I need the next thing to look forward to.”

“I love you, Flyin’ Angel,” I whispered as I hugged her goodbye.

Two months later, Angela developed acute chest pain and shortness of breath and was immediately hospitalized for treatment of fluid around her lungs. I understood the gravity of this complication. Her huge compassionate heart was rapidly failing. At the time, Rich and I were at a remote cottage in the Wisconsin woods, but I talked on the phone to Angela and Finley several times over the next three days. She told me that, together with her doctor, they had opted to make her status “Do Not Resuscitate” (DNR).

I offered to fly to Tennessee, but she demurred. “Not yet. But I love knowing you’d be there if we need you down the road.”

Her last call came while I was pulling into the Walmart parking lot five miles down the road from our cottage. “The doctors found fluid around my heart this morning,” she said. “They’re not sure what to do, so I guess we just wait and see.”

Understanding that this was a life-threatening development, I again broached the idea of flying to Tennessee the next morning.

“Not yet,” she said. ‘You enjoy the cottage and your time with Rich.”

We agreed that she could call me day or night, but for sure I would call her the next morning to check in. She said Finley was doing okay overall.

“I love you, Annie,” Angela gasped between labored breaths.

“Back atcha, Flyin’ Angel.” I cried all the way back to the cottage.

When I called the next morning, Finley answered her cell phone. “Things went downhill overnight. She’s no longer conscious and it’s not gonna be long now. They’re giving her morphine to keep her comfortable,” he told me.

She died a few hours later.

On one of my many trips to Zambia, Angela had emailed me this encouragement: Sometimes at sea a sailor has to make do with what one has and get through the storm with little or nothing.  I knew what she meant: Live your life fully, regardless of the storms you may face and in spite of what resources you might—or might not— have.

She’d done exactly that. Savvy sailor that she was, Angela knew that after years of navigating rocky medical seas, her own fragile sailboat would someday reach an endless horizon.

As she had taught me so well throughout our long friendship, Flyin’ Angel sailed into that final wind with courage and grace, her wild and precious life complete.

Carroll Gardens Story

by Sally Frances

  “An emotionally affecting story with excellent prose.” — Kirkus Reviews     It’s 1998 in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where the close-knit Italian-American community clings to its traditions. The week of Halloween a shocking discovery shatters the festivities, when the body of an unpopular neighbor is found on her balcony, disguised as a holiday witch. Helper, a beloved local handyman, becomes a suspect in the ensuing investigation. When his own nephew becomes one of the detectives on the case, long-held secrets and buried traumas are revealed. The complexities of justice and family loyalty are explored from three perspectives in this captivating story, while this special neighborhood is depicted with warmth and wit. “The beating heart of Carroll Gardens Story is its wonderful depiction of the Brooklyn neighbourhood, which Frances brings to vivid life through her authentic, quirky and complex characters… a powerful journey about the importance of acknowledging and speaking the truth before real healing can begin. May this be only the first of many more Sally Frances books to come!” — Ann Lambert, author of the Russell and Leduc Murder Mystery Series “Sally Frances writes with clarity and emotion, and each character has a distinctive voice. Readers who enjoy The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold will find Carroll Gardens Story similar in its exploration of trauma, healing, and the ripple effects of a mysterious death on a community, told through deeply personal perspectives.” — Carol Thompson for Readers’ Favorite Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore.

Find this and more in ArtsMart