We shared social occasions, phone calls, irreverences, and tequila. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but we carried on knowing each other’s opinion was predictable, inevitable and acceptable.
Days after Pat Matsukis died, a man stopped me and said he had just heard about it. Now, Pat and this man never, ever, got along. Their spats were legendary – high pep perspectives dappled with safety worries for both.
The man put his arms around me and said he knew how tacky he’d been to Pat and claimed it was mutual. He started sobbing, eyes squeezed, tears running down his face, his body shaking like a Datsun. “I loved her,” he said. “No one will ever believe that, but I did. She affected me. She taught me that no matter our differences, I really could talk to her. Well, shout. But we communicated. She didn’t back down. She was one of a kind.”
In August 2001, Pat and I flew to New York City. We had different agendas and two days to get them done. Pat had a painting that needed appraising, and a friend scored my access to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. I wanted to see the handwritten notes and poems of Herbert Huncke, the man who coined the phrase “Beat Generation.”
Pat and I had our off hours planned, and they included a $13.50 elevator ride to the top of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. We laughed that grass was growing between cracks in the concrete slab walkways 1,300 ft. above ground. Then we saw birds flying over and figured it out.
We cried a month later when the building crashed.
Pat died in November, and last Saturday was her Celebration of Life. There were many people, several testimonies, and dancing that made budding trees sway.
That same Thanksgiving week that Pat died, another friend did the same thing. She and I had taken a trip to Wyoming, where we rented a cabin right after Labor Day, so it was quiet. We bought beer, chips and beef jerky at a convenience store, and sat around a campfire for two nights.
Another time we went to Puerto Vallarta where we laughed so hard we fell off a pier while eating dinner.
We glide from grief to gratitude when we remember people as they were when we saw them rather than dwelling on their not being around anymore. We miss them because they were part of our many days. We thought about them even when they weren’t right there in front of us. Many of us in town had soul recognition with both.
Both women died of cancer. Both knew their transition was coming and they were as different in death as they were in life. One was surrounded by friends, the other didn’t tell anyone she was even sick. When she died, she left instructions to be cremated, her ashes thrown in the trash, no obit, no service.
Both filled their life with adventure and delirium, neither regretted who they were or what they had done. I knew each of them for more than 40 years and don’t even know if they knew each other than by name. Both were suspicious of anyone who called a meeting. One of them roared her energy, the other murmured hers.
Both grew up in Illinois, and Illinois has lost them, too.
Both believed that what other people thought of them was none of their business. And both carried on.