by Lindsay Nielsen

Were you dying as I passed the Lake Harriet bench where we always met? As I breathed in the morning air colored by the sunrise, were you exhaling your last? Were you already gone when I woke during the night realizing I needed to drop a note off at your house? Because even though you weren’t feeling well enough to talk, I wanted to let you know one more time how much I admired you, how permanently your quiet presence had become part of my heart. Maybe you’ve gone to a place where you still have some form of consciousness, some kind of ability to watch your children grow and have children of their own. I hope by the end you came to understand how much you affected the world by your very being.

I was late for one of our last walks. I pulled out my phone and sent Astrid a text: “Are you in the wind yet?”

When I didn’t hear right back, I assumed she was already on her way, so I grabbed my jacket and ran for the door, stopping only to pocket a treat for her miniature schnauzer, Willie. As I approached the lake, I caught sight of her beautiful silver hair before seeing the whole of her. Astrid’s hair was one of the ways to pick her out of a crowd.

Our walk that day was like all our other walks. I vibrated, the way I do when I’m overscheduled. Astrid moved deliberately, the way she always did. Not deliberate in the way a person does when trying to be who she isn’t, but gracefully deliberate—as if she was the slightest bit more aware than the rest of us of stepping through time and space.

As we made our way around the lake we talked about writing, searching for adequate words to describe the sounds of the wind and the leaves as they danced together. Beautiful wording was more Astrid’s forte than mine. And then, as often happened, we settled into stories of relationships stalked by mortality.

Astrid battled ovarian cancer for over a decade. As long as I knew her she was in some sort of chemotherapy. She often gave those of us in her writing group the impression that the worst of her treatments were past. She made us believe that her hope for a longer life was natural, not painfully constructed. Astrid was positive even when she was in a terrible mess of trouble. Almost every note during Astrid’s absences included a reassurance that something was, or would be, better. And because in all our years together, Astrid never posed her battle against cancer as a reason for not doing the work of the group, we gladly conspired in her optimism. Even days before her death, her note said she hoped to be back in group by the end of the week.

Our writing group at the Loft formed four years ago with an idea for a book that would include ten women’s stories of life-changing events. Although Showing Up Naked remains unpublished, our writing lives and friendships thrived. Writing memoir collectively has been an intimate experience as we’ve shaped our stories from thoughts and feelings sometimes not even yet revealed to family and friends. Those sentences ultimately deemed too personal were deleted after discussion, as if they never existed. But they had been written, and read, and remembered by the women in the room.

I always looked forward to reading Astrid’s work. Her prose was poetic. Each sensuous sentence was exquisitely crafted, her images carefully chosen so they fit together to create the world she was exploring. It was a rare occasion that she sent out a piece without replacing it with a more polished version a day later, and another the day after that. I always imagined Astrid not being able to sleep while thinking about a sentence that wasn’t quite right, or resorting images to find one that worked just a bit better.

Astrid would say that her life was stabilized (and at times destabilized) by having grown up on two continents. With Norwegian parents, Astrid learned to speak Norwegian before English. She wrote, “Being fluent in two languages isn’t really possible. There’s always something—a small nuance, a goofy inflection or a puzzled look that gives you away.”

Of course she was right. When you grow up in two places, you are always a bit apart from both, and her multiculturalism was part of how we recognized her—across a room and across the page. For Astrid, I think both her bicontinentalism and her illness gave her the ability to deconstruct the familiar in a way that allowed the rest of us a fresh look at our own experiences.

When I see a fat bumblebee I remember a piece Astrid wrote about a family picnic, and when I see uncompleted buildings I think of how she identified with them:

“With ongoing treatments for ovarian cancer, my breast reconstruction is still ‘in process.’ It’s unlikely the final touches will ever take place. I can’t help but compare my perfectly fine, but unfinished breasts to the incomplete, upscale condominium projects that run out of financing, standing nearly finished and empty.”

I never realized how much of Astrid’s writing had to do with mortality. Maybe not noticing was my way of denying that we would lose Astrid. Addressing her diagnosis Astrid wrote:

“Halfway into our visit, Marie (genetic counselor) pulled out a scrap of white paper and with her pen, began drawing clusters of circles, a simple illustration of how cancer mutations divide and multiply. Something about the starkness of the drawing that looked like the formula to a child’s arithmetic problem, made my stomach lurch. There it was, an undeniable statement in black and white. Simple outlines of the industrious way cancer cells, plodding and methodical, operate like little worker ants going about the job they’re programmed to do. As Marie leaned towards us and continued to scribble, I begged her to put the paper away. I couldn’t handle reality in such plain terms.”

Astrid wrote a lot about the BRCA gene and how the gene helped earlier generations of women survive the plague. But then as so often happens in life, there were other ramifications. In later generations, the gene has been responsible for a group of aggressive cancers. There are proverbs in most cultures that predict bad things being nestled inside good things that are folded within bad things that are atop good things that are . . . Astrid, her children, and any future generations may not have existed had her ancestors been born without this gene. Astrid incorporated these contradictions into her ability to appreciate the moments for all they were, good and bad.

On most levels Astrid would hate that I am so sad about our loss of her. She wouldn’t want me to dwell on her absence. She would gently suggest that I haven’t yet been able to disentangle her life from her death. She would want me to think about livelier things, like our walks, about the years of sharing our work, of coffees (me) and teas (Astrid) spent sharing losses, successes, and most important, the process in between. While she wouldn’t want me to be sad, I know she’d understand. And she would find something positive and life affirming in my sorrow. Because that’s who she was. Astrid’s condolences to a member of our writing group who lost a family member have stayed with me: “. . . but it seems we’re never really ‘ready’ for someone’s death.”

I can’t imagine all the ways Astrid’s husband and children are experiencing her absence. I know that we look at the chair she always tucked her long legs into at the Loft, and miss her terribly.

Yet, I still hear her voice encouraging me when I’m struggling, or more honestly, when I’m avoiding a particularly difficult piece of writing, like this one. “Keep with it, Lindsay, you’ll find your voice.” And this morning as I ran around the lake before sunrise, basked in the clarity of Orion’s Belt, the leaves rustled and my sense of Astrid was so tangible that I had the answer to the question, “Are you in the wind?”

Astrid E. Slungaard Age 53, died July 21 at home in Minneapolis of ovarian cancer. Survived by husband, Craig Olson; son, Per and daughter, Kari; brothers, Arne (Donna Meier) and Rolv (Priscilla Wyeth); 9 nieces and nephews. Born in La Crosse, WI to Norwegian immigrant parents Rolv and Elisabeth, she attended Carleton College (B.A.) and University of Wisconsin (M.S. Library Science). She was a paralegal, librarian, translator, published writer and poet and a compassionate, vibrant wife, mother, sister, and aunt with a close circle of very dedicated and caring friends. . . . Memorials suggested to the Astrid E. Slungaard Tuition Fund, which will support Per and Kari’s college funds, c/o Craig Olson, 4405 Colfax Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55419. (Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 15, 2010)

Lindsay Nielsen, in addition to being a member of a phenomenal writing group at the Loft, is an author, psychotherapist, and public speaker. She has just completed a memoir titled In the Company of Everyday Heroes: An Amputee’s Triumphant Run through Love, Loss and World Records, and has previously been published in multiple anthologies and magazines. She can be reached through her website lindsaynielsen.com or by e-mail at lanielsen@mindspring.com.