It was a lot to ask of Verna, who’d recently lost her father and was wrestling with her own grief. But she was a true friend, a compassionate person. She phoned my office one day in May to relay the details of a visit.
“I combed her hair,” she said.
That Suzanne needed to have her hair combed should have told me everything, but I’d walled myself off from the truth. Some part of me still insisted this wasn’t happening. I held on to the idea that Suzanne’s health would turn around, even as the evidence against it stacked up.
It was Angela, finally, who called me in June and got right to the point. “If you’re going to come, Miche,” she said, “you’d better get to it.”
By then, Suzanne had been moved to a hospital. She was too weak to talk, slipping in and out of consciousness. There was nothing left to feed my denial. I hung up the phone and bought a plane ticket. I flew east, caught a taxi to the hospital, took the elevator to the right floor, walked the hallway to her room, and found her there, lying in bed as Angela and her cousin watched over her, everyone silent. Suzanne’s mother, it turned out, had died just a few days earlier, and now Suzanne was in a coma. Angela made room for me to perch on the side of her bed.
I stared hard at Suzanne, at her perfect heart-shaped face and reddish-brown skin, feeling comforted somehow by the youthful smoothness of her cheeks and the girlish curve in her lips. She seemed oddly undiminished by the illness. Her dark hair was still lustrous and long; someone had put it in two ropy braids that reached almost to her waist. Her track runner’s legs lay hidden beneath the blankets. She looked young, like a sweet, beautiful twenty-six-year-old who was maybe in the middle of a nap.
I regretted not coming earlier. I regretted the many times, over the course of our seesawing friendship, that I’d insisted she was making a wrong move, when possibly she’d been doing it right. I was suddenly glad for all the times she’d ignored my advice. I was glad that she hadn’t overworked herself to get some fancy business school degree. That she’d gone off for a lost weekend with a semi-famous pop star, just for fun. I was happy that she’d made it to the Taj Mahal to watch the sunrise with her mom. Suzanne had lived in ways that I had not.
That day, I held her limp hand and watched as her breathing grew ragged, as eventually there were long pauses between her inhales. At some point, the nurse gave us a knowing nod. It was happening. Suzanne was leaving. My mind went dark. I had no deep thoughts. I had no revelations about life or loss. If anything, I was mad.
To say that it was unfair that Suzanne got sick and died at twenty-six seems too simple a thing. But it was a fact, as cold and ugly as they come. What I was thinking as I finally left her body in that hospital room was this: She’s gone and I’m still here. Outside in the hallway, there were people wandering in hospital gowns who were far older and sicker looking than Suzanne, and they were still here. I would take a packed flight back to Chicago, drive along a busy highway, ride an elevator up to my office. I’d see all these people looking happy in their cars, walking the sidewalk in their summer clothes, sitting idly in cafés, and working at their desks, all of them oblivious to what happened to Suzanne—apparently unaware that they, too, could die at any moment. It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
10
That summer, I started keeping a journal. I bought myself a clothbound black book with purple flowers on the cover and kept it next to my bed. I took it with me when I went on business trips for Sidley & Austin. I was not a daily writer, or even a weekly writer: I picked up a pen only when I had the time and energy to sort through my jumbled feelings. I’d write a few entries in a single week and then lay the journal down for a month or sometimes more. I was not, by nature, especially introspective. The whole exercise of recording one’s thoughts was new to me—a habit I’d picked up in part, I suppose, from Barack, who viewed writing as therapeutic and clarifying and had kept journals on and off over the years.
He’d come back to Chicago over his summer break from Harvard, this time skipping the sublet and moving directly into my apartment on Euclid Avenue. This meant not only that we were learning, in a real way, how to cohabit as a couple but also that Barack got to know my family in a more intimate way. He’d talk sports with my dad as he headed out for a shift at the water plant. He sometimes helped my mother carry her groceries in from the garage. It was a good feeling. Craig had already assessed Barack’s character in the most thorough and revealing way he could—by including him in a high-octane weekend basketball game with a bunch of his buddies, most of them former college players. He’d done this, actually, at my request. Craig’s opinion of Barack mattered to me, and my brother knew how to read people, especially in the context of a game. Barack had passed the test. He was smooth on the floor, my brother said, and knew when to make the right pass, but he also wasn’t afraid to shoot when he was open. “He’s no ball hog,” Craig said. “But he’s got guts.”
Barack had accepted a summer-associate job with a downtown firm whose offices were close to Sidley’s, but his time in Chicago was short. He’d been elected president of the Harvard Law Review for the coming academic year, which meant he’d be responsible for turning out eight issues of about three hundred pages each and would need to get back to Cambridge early in order to get started. The competition to lead the Review was ferocious every year, involving rigorous vetting and a vote by eighty student editors. Being picked for the position was an enormous achievement for anyone. It turned out that Barack was also the first African American in the publication’s 103-year history to be selected—a milestone so huge that it had been written up in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of Barack, smiling in a scarf and winter coat.
My boyfriend, in other words, was a big deal. He could have landed any number of fat-salaried law firm jobs at that point, but instead he was thinking about practicing civil rights law once he got his degree, even if it would then take twice as long to pay off his student loans. Practically everyone he knew was urging him to follow the lead of many previous Review editors and apply for what would be a shoo-in clerkship with the Supreme Court. But Barack wasn’t interested. He wanted to live in Chicago. He had ideas for writing a book about race in America and planned, he said, to find work that aligned with his values, which most likely meant he wouldn’t end up in corporate law. He steered himself with a certainty I found astounding.
All this inborn confidence was admirable, of course, but honestly, try living with it. For me, coexisting with Barack’s strong sense of purpose—sleeping in the same bed with it, sitting at the breakfast table with it—was something to which I had to adjust, not because he flaunted it, exactly, but because it was so alive. In the presence of his certainty, his notion that he could make some sort of difference in the world, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit lost by comparison. His sense of purpose seemed like an unwitting challenge to my own.
Hence the journal. On the very first page, in careful handwriting, I spelled out my reasons for starting it:
One, I feel very confused about where I want my life to go. What kind of person do I want to be? How do I want to contribute to the world?