[ READERS DIGEST ]Friends Interrupted

Friends Interrupted

True friends find their way back to each other through the trials of life.

By Jacquelyn Mitchard

FromReader's Digest
Phyllis Redman
 
Meeting of Minds

Listen as Mitchard talks with Senior Staff Editor Maureen Mackeyabout how the two friends met, how they maintained their friendship through some pivotal life events, and then endured a dramatic breach that ended up taking years to mend.

If you have that one friend, you're rich. That one friend is different from all the others, dear as they may be.

I met Jeanine on my first day of high school, more than 35 years ago, at the age of 13. Painfully shy, I had signed up for student council because I thought it might save me from wandering around a huge high school shamefully alone. It was still early in the day. I'd already lost my new green trench coat and couldn't remember which building my locker was in. Standing there in the office, miserable,I wanted to vanish into the paneling. 난 벽속으로 사라지고 싶었다.

I heard a girl's voice: "Do you have a lot of friends?"

When I saw her—tiny, delicate, with beautiful eyelashes—I smiled and answered, "Are you kidding? I'm the girl nobody knows."

"Well, I'm nobody," Jeanine said.

That was it. The two of us were instant friends. For the next six years, Jeanine and I spent hours on the phone each weekday and virtually every weekend night together. As boys came and went,we drowned our sorrows in tomato soup.우린 우리의 슬픔을 토마토 스프로 달랬다.In my mother's oldChevy시보레, we cruised the West Side of Chicago. We sat on Al Capone's grave one Halloween night. Lying onblankets담요 under the stars, we'd talk of our dreams,pouring our hearts out.우리 속내를 털어놓으며

Jeanine wanted to sing on the Broadway stage. I wanted to write a novel. "Why not two? Why not five?" she pressed me.

As high school progressed, I became a student council officer and made friends by the score. Jeanine?She preferred the sidelines. She was like the angel in my pocket.I never forsook her,난 그녀를 저버린적이 없었다. never excluded her. Other friends could not understand our devotion, because we seemed like such opposites. But we weren't.

Neither of us got much attention at home. Jeanine's parents worked long hours.Mine had other fish to fry, and those fish swam at the bottom of a highball glass.I don't think my parents ever attended a single high school event of mine, though my mother made sure I dressed well—she wanted me to be the prettiest girl (and the thinnest).

Jeanine and I remained asorority여학생클럽of two,and even college didn't intervene. 심지어 학교도 우릴 방해자지 못했다. Neither did Jeanine's early unplanned motherhood during our freshman year. After her daughter, Gemma, was born, Jeanine moved back home. My mother, I'm proud to say, offered them both love and support.

Unfortunately, Mama didn't get to play grandma for real. After she was diagnosed with brain cancer and given just a few months to live, I married a boy who was only a pal so she could see me in a wedding gown. When my marriage was quietlyannulled취소하다 폐기하다, I came home for good, finishing school and working as a waitress to help my younger brother get through high school.

Jeanine and I were together again, this time with a baby seat in the back of the car. We picked up where we left off, the Beach Boys on the radio as we cruised familiar routes.

More Than a Friend

Then, in my early 20s, I took a coveted job on aWisconsinnewspaper and had to start work every day at 5 a.m. Spent and challenged, I didn't get home often enough to see Jeanine through the terror she felt when her beloved father learned that he, too, had cancer. 난 지니를 보기위해 집에 자주 들를 수 없었다. 그녀가 가장 사랑했던 아버지가 암으로 돌아가셨을 때에도 And when he died, I was too new at my job to take time off for his funeral. The last words Jeanine spoke to me, for four years, were "You betrayed me."넌 날 배반했어.

I said thousands of words, through the crack under her apartment door, in letters, in cards,pleading with Jeanine to understand.지니가 이해해주길 애원하며 But she was stubborn and wouldn't forgive me.

When I married for real, Jeanine was not there. When my beloved firstborn son arrived, she wasn't there to be his godmother, as I was to Gemma. And when my second and third sons were born aftermy struggles with infertility, 내가 불임과 힘겹게 싸워 Jeanine wasn't there either.

But when cancer came to the door again, this time to claim my husband, Dan, Jeanine came, too,unbidden초청받지 않은.We didn't talk about the lapse in our friendship until much later. 우린 한참동안 우리 우정에 빗나감에 대해 얘기하지 않았다.Suffering through hellish grief, I was simply staggered by gratitude.커다란 슬픔에 고통스러워하며, 한편 고마운 마음에 동요하고 있었다.

I kept thinking, If Jeanine is with me, I can live through this. I can be okay. If Jeanine is holding me, helping me, I am home.

I would never let her go again.

We resumed our marathon phone sessions, dissecting jobs, life, her dates, my lack of them. When others called me foolish, she told me to go ahead, to write my first novel during the two years after Dan died instead of taking a real job. You can do this, she said. All I wanted was to show my sons thatno matter the size of the hole life drove through you, you still had permission to live large. 네 인생을 지나가는 고난의 크기가 문제가 아니며, 넌 여전히 크게 살아갈 권리가 있다고

In the end, my novel,The Deep End of the Ocean, became the first book ever chosen by Oprah's Book Club. Jeanine cheered—as she did two years later when I married my husband, Chris. And after Jeanine graduated from college with a degree in theater, I cheered for her as she became asought-after 인기있는voice and acting teacher, winning roles onstage and in commercials.

Before Jeanine even turned 40, her legs began to hurt. Deep into my aerobics period,I teased her:난 그녀를 놀려댔다. "It's because you're such a weenie."

She wouldn't work out, but she did stretch, try massage therapy and take vitamins. Then an e-mail from a friend broke the news that Jeanine had been too devastated to speak 그녀가 너무 아파서 말을 할수 없다는: She had multiple sclerosis. 그녀는 합병증을 겪었다.

MS eats away at the myelin coating surrounding the nerves and can disturb balance, vision and cognitive ability.People may end up using a wheelchair or remain mobile into their 90s. Although it affects more women than men, it typically affects women less seriously, so we didn't think it would be so bad. It was, though. Jeanine was diagnosed with primary progressive MS, a rare form characterized by an almost continuous worsening of the disease, without relapses or remissions.

Four years ago, I realized that my fierce, beloved friend, dedicated actress that she was, had never seen a Broadway show. Together we went—Jeanine pushing her walker, the two of us wearing our fanciestsequined skirts장식이된 치마-to see her favorite musical,Man of La Mancha. When Brian Stokes Mitchell sang of the impossible dream, the unbeatable foe, I had a brainstorm: I could use my small measure of new celebrity to raise money for something, and for someone. Jeanine had helped me craft the heroine of my sixth novel,The Breakdown Lane, a dancer who in oneharrowing year loses her husband and develops MS. 그녀의 남편을 잃고 MS를 겪는 I would donate a portion of the book's sales, and go from there.

Last spring, at an MS fund-raiser inWashington,D.C., I was about to sign books when I heard the old Bill Withers song "Lean on Me." I looked up. There on the screen, larger than life, was a photo of me with my head leaning on Jeanine's shoulder. The coordinator read a letter Jeanine had written: "Jackie was popular;I was the little caboose. 난 작은 승무원이에ㅛ But she chose me, included me, and when she learned I had MS, she jumped in to help me beat this disease. She's more than a friend. She's my heart."

That goes for me too. Jeanine has to lean on my arm when we walk. But I have to lean on her a hundred times a year,when I turn to her with problems no one else understands,내가 아무도 이해하지 못하는 문제들로 그녀에게 돌아갈 때 problems no one else can see me through.As she describes them, they're like locational humor: To get it, you had to be there.

She always was.