Anne Lamott - Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace

T he worst possible thing you can do when youre down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you.

First of all, friends like this may not even think of themselves as dying, although they clearly are, according to recent scans and gentle doctors reports. But no, they see themselves as fully alive. They are living and doing as much as they can, as well as they can, for as long as they can.

They ruin your multitasking high, the bath of agitation, rumination, and judgment you wallow in, without the decency to come out and just say anything. They bust you by being grateful for the day, while you are obsessed with how thin your lashes have become and how wide your bottom.

My friend Barbara had already been living with Lou Gehrigs disease for two years on the spring morning of our Muir Woods hike. She had done and tried everything to stem the tide of deterioration, and you would think, upon seeing her with a fancy four-wheeled walker, needing an iPad-based computer voice named Kate to speak for her, that the disease was having its way. And this would be true, except that besides having ALS, Barbara had her breathtaking mind, a joyously bottomless thirst for nature, and Susie.

Susie, her girlfriend of thirty years, gave her an unfair advantage over the rest of us. We could all be great, if we had Susie. We could be heroes.

Barbara was the executive director of Breast Cancer Action, the bad girls of breast cancer, a grassroots advocacy group with a distinctly bad attitude toward the pink-ribbon approach. Susie was her ballast, and I had spoken at a number of their galas and fund-raisers over the years. Barbara and Susie were about the same height, with very short dark hair. They looked like your smartest cousins, with the beauty of friendly, intelligent engagement and good nature.

Barbaras face was set now, almost as a mask, like something the wind is blowing hard against, and shed lost a lot of weight, so you could see the shape of her animal, and bones and branches and humanity. Yet she still had a smile that got you every time, not a flash of high-wattage white teeth, but the beauty of low-watt, the light that comes in through the bottom branches; sweet, peaceful, wry.

We set off. She was our lead duck, our cycling leaderthe only person on wheels sussing up what lay before us at the trailhead, watching the path carefully because her life depended on it. Susie walked ever so slightly behind. I walked behind, in the slipstream.

Even on the path that leads through these woods, you feel the wildness. The trees are so huge that they shut you up. They are like mythical horse flanks and elephant skinsexuding such life and energy that their stillness makes you suspect theyre playing Red Light, Green Light.

The three of us had lunch in town two months earlier, before the feeding tube, before Kate. Barbara used the walker, which looked like a tall, compact shopping cart, but moved at a normal pace. She still ate with a fork, not a feeding tube, and spoke, although so softly that sometimes I had to turn to Susie for translation. Barbara talked about her wellness blog, her need for supplemental nutrition. Breath, nutrition, voice; breath, nutrition, voice. (She posted a list on her blog from time to time, of all the things she could still do, most recently enjoy the hummingbirds; sleep with my sweetie. Speak out for people with breast cancer.)

Now she is silent. When she wants to talk, she can type words on her iPad that Kate will then speak with efficient warmth. Or she can rest in silence. She knows that even this diminished function and doability will be taken one day at a time. When you are on the knifes edgewhen nobody knows exactly what is going to happen next, only that it will be worseyou take in today. So here we were, at the trailhead, for a cold days walk.

Im a fast walker, because my dad had long legs and I learned to keep up, but today a walk with Barbara was like Mother May I? May I take a thousand baby steps? Barbara seemed by her look of concentration to align herself with all the particles here in the looming woods, so she could be as present and equal as possible. She couldnt bother with saying anything unimportant, because she had to type it first. This relieved all of us from making crazy chatter.