My friend just died. Actually, she didn’t just die, she passed away on December 11th of last year, but I just found out. My friend, Deborah, whom I met while I lived in Tokyo and she lived in Hong Kong, who had two of the most adorable terriers I ever had the pleasure to know, who spent her entire adult life trying to help people believe in their gifts, including me, is no longer here.
Among other things, I was her ghostwriter for a training and development column that appeared in The South Morning China Post, a newspaper in Hong Kong. She asked me to write it because she said I could express her heart, everything she was thinking and feeling. I was also her houseguest numerous times both in Hong Kong, where we would sit on her balcony and watch the junks parade downstream like bright blossoms, and in Arizona where she lived the last eight years.
The last time I visited Deborah in Scottsdale, she had moved from the very large house she had shared with her husband, who died an untimely death a few years ago from a heart attack he had while they were on a chartered bus in London going to a wedding. A year afterward, she sold the house and moved to the small apartment above the art gallery they owned. Eighteen months ago, I sat atop her kitchen counter as she showed me the bottles of pills she was taking for the cancer and the raw foods she only ate now in the fridge. I slept on an air mattress in her apartment and woke at 3 AM the second night to find almost all the air had leaked out of the mattress. Her two dogs were slumbering contentedly beside me.
The last year of her three year battle, she had gone to South Korea several times for stem cell treatment. It didn't help, but Deborah never lost her spirit.
She oozed a kind of wackiness mixed with a full and open heart. And, as a mutual friend said, she was everyone's sister. The last time I saw her we went to the Deepak Chopra lecture she had gotten us tickets to in Arizona. We arrived almost a half hour late because she hadn’t planned the timing well, kept getting lost on the highway, and then we had to grab a quick
bite before the lecture and were having too good a time talking over pizza and wine to make it to the lecture on time.
Deborah was 59 years old when she died. I have not lost many people in my life and knowing now that she occupies no space on the planet, not Wellsville, the small town in upstate New York where she grew up, not Hong Kong, where she lived for 18 years, not Marshall Way, where her art gallery still stands, the only one that sells Asian art in the midst of Scottsdale's western galleries, no Deborah exists nowhere anymore.
I have lost a friend and also one of my most fervent long-time supporters. Deborah believed in me so unselfishly and enthusiastically that she saw every possibility for me that I thought impossible. Now I truly know what it is when people say, "Live in the moment, live every day and live like today might be your last day." I am deeply sorry that I know this now, but I will try harder to do this because it is true, and it will honor Deborah's memory.
Deborah taught me a lot when she was here about living life with a full heart and going after your dream. It is also the gift she leaves me now, for while she exists nowhere, she seems to be everywhere I turn.