Mrs. Kayl and Me

 

Cathy and Julie

 We're pretty used to astonished looks. 

In fact, after 43 years of friendship, we're practically immune to all the jaw-dropping second takes. Julie Kayl is 4 ft. 11. So she says. I'd argue she hovers closer to 4 ft. 9. 

I'm 6 ft. 1. We've heard every "Mutt and Jeff" joke in the book.

On Saturday nights I take Julie to 5:30 Mass at Blessed Sacrament. Because she's virtually blind, she always takes my arm. I slow my long stride to match her tiny one, and we pick our painstaking way across the parking lot to the church doors. I say painstaking because Julie is never in a hurry. On the other hand, I'm chronically late. It's a rotten combination. Without any urgency at all, Julie chatters my ear off all the way from the car to the church, and I resist the desire to hoist her over my shoulder to hurry into Mass. 

Julie, in her rambling fashion, is always in the middle of a story. In fact, she's always in the middle of several stories. The trouble is she cannot recall a single name of anybody or anything.

"You know who I'm talking about," she says on our way into church. "Remember? She had two daughters - the oldest one graduated the year before Pat and I retired, and she always wore those crazy little hats?"

I'm utterly lost. "The daughter?" 

"No, no," Julie says, "the mother. Anyway, she stopped in that town with the great sandwich shop - what's the name of that place? You and John stopped there on your way to Colorado, remember? No? It doesn't matter. She was paying for gas when somebody jumped into her car and squealed away, and it turned out her elderly father was asleep in the back seat. Oh!" she gasps. "That reminds me. Last night I was sleeping and could swear somebody was standing over me. It's because I ate those tacos with hot sauce. What's the name of that sauce?" Her brow furrows in concentration.

All through Mass and even later at home, I'm distracted as if I've forgotten to do something vitally important. It's not until three in the morning, tossing and turning in bed, that I suddenly remember. What the heck happened to the old man in the back seat of the car?

Julie at GICC in 1977

I meet Julie for the first time when I am 22 years old and fresh out of college. It's my first day of teaching English at Grand Island Central Catholic, my alma mater, and Julie is the English department head. She's tiny and fairy-like with her beautiful long hair and elfin dress. But she observes me in a way that is deliberate and measured.

"How do you feel about teaching To Kill a Mockingbird?" she grills. Her voice is low and dignified and does not, I think, match her Tinker Bell appearance.

"It's my favorite book!" I say.

We smile at one another in instant accord, and a friendship is born. After a few months we're strolling down the long school hallway together every day for lunch in the faculty lounge. Julie, in order to elevate herself to a majestic 5 ft 2, always wears seven-inch platform shoes and must walk slowly in order not to fall off the sides of them. But I don't mind. So what if we have just 21 minutes to eat lunch? I'm spending every one of them with my best friend.

Julie's husband Pat, who was my own chemistry teacher at GICC, is the other half of the best friend equation. The following year when my mother dies of cancer, Julie and Pat gather me tenderly under their wing. I'm a regular visitor in their home and fall in love with Eric, their eight-year-old son, and baby John. Eventually Pat and Julie have another baby, an enchanting little girl called Andrea, and I meet John Howard, the new social studies teacher at Central Catholic. When we marry in 1984, Pat and Julie are very much part of our wedding. And when I give birth to our first son, Pat and Julie along with our good friends Hugh and Fran Brandon, the GICC principal and his wife, are godparents.

As if she is one of my sisters, I tell Julie everything - the latest gossip about the new speech teacher, the troubles I'm having with the rebellious sophomore. She always makes me laugh. Hysterically sometimes. Once she describes the way she feels compelled to give her 5-year-old John his first spanking ever. Julie can't bring herself to hurt a fly, but her little boy with his attention deficit disorder is turning the kindergarten class upside down.

"You need to understand, John," her voice trembles, "that you can't act this way in school." She pulls her sturdy boy over her lap, stifles a sob, and paddles him with her tiny hand. 

"What the..." John, deeply interested, strains to look over his shoulder. "What in the world is that?" he wonders aloud at the feather-like pats on his backside.

Another time Julie imitates Pat in his recliner snoring away every evening until the Kayl children, screaming and playing, wake him. Pat snorts awake and looks around wildly.

"I"M GONNA KICK YOUR ASS!" he growls ferociously to the empty air above him then immediately collapses into sleep again.

Pat, like Julie, has never laid a hand on any of his children, but Julie's dead-on imitation gets me every time.

Pat and Julie's son John with wife Darcy,
and grandchildren Balen, Ava and Edwin

It's good to laugh. We share some painfully dark days, too, and at times nearly sink under the heaviness of it all. Julie slowly loses her vision. It starts with a detached retina and evolves into Retinitis Pigmentosa which steals all her peripheral vision and renders her completely blind in dim light. Yet, she somehow manages to fake her way through the DMV vision test in order to keep her driver's license.

"I prayed hard for God to tell me whether the red flash was on the right or the left, and it worked," she says smugly.

I'm blunt in return. "You shouldn't be driving. You'll hurt somebody."

Then she becomes aloof like a Persian princess. "I swivel my head all the way around at every intersection. There's absolutely no danger," she says with haughty chilliness.

After a couple of close calls, however, even Julie becomes nervous and finally gives up driving. She must depend on Pat to take her everywhere. It's hard on her pride and especially difficult when her world becomes smaller and more confined with each passing year.

But we faithfully support each other - through the years of her diminishing vision, the births of our children, the loss of our parents, little Andrea's own vision issues, and Julie's frightening heart bypass surgery. During the weeks before my double mastectomy, I am comforted by her cheerful little presence across the school hall. When I suddenly sweat in cold fear at the thought of my impending operation, I have only to look across the hall at Julie giggling with her students to find my footing again. Just the sight of her reassuring little person always calms my fears.

The darkest time of our lives occurs in 1994 when Pat and Julie's son Eric, just 25, is killed instantly. On a Sunday afternoon, Julie calls. She can't speak right away, and I know something's very wrong.

"Eric's dead," she sobs.

John and I immediately rush to their house. John awkwardly throws his arms around Pat who stands very still in the living room with both hands shoved deeply in his pockets. I sit next to Julie on the couch and grip her hand thinking I must never let go. Julie weeps and shivers uncontrollably. None of us say anything. In that moment I fear my friend will never come back to me.

Pat and Julie with Eric, John, Andrea.
Last family picture before Eric's death.

But, thank God, she does.

"Eric sends me dimes," she tells me one day.

In a special cup, she keeps every dime she discovers - always when she's grieving for her lost boy. They appear in the shower, on the counter top, and even poised precariously on stair railings. One time Julie finds five of them at a time, and they are all, she confides joyfully, little messages from Eric.

Hardly able to conceal her excitement, she begins to tell the kids at school about her dimes.

"I don't think you should do that, Julie," I say uneasily.

"Why not?" she says, startled.

Because people might not understand. They might think you're crazy, I want to say.

They don't. Pat and Julie Kayl are Grand Island Central Catholic icons and universally loved. If Mrs. Kayl thinks her dead son is sending her dimes, then so be it.

Even after Eric dies and her vision deteriorates, Julie is still a vital presence in her classroom. She steers her students through Dante's Inferno, spends hours grading essays in spite of her tired eyes, chases kids down the hall for missing homework, and posts newspaper clippings of students' achievements that cover an entire wall of her classroom. Her kids adore her. 

I'm shocked the day she tells me she and Pat have decided to retire from teaching. 

Pat and Julie

"But," I sputter, "what does that mean? Just like that? This is the end? Will we even be friends any more?"

"No, today is the end of our friendship," she says with a straight face. "I'm never speaking to you again."

It's unthinkable. How can the school even exist without Pat and Julie?

As it turns out, Pat is having health issues. They're not serious at first, but John and I observe with deep concern his weight loss and pallor. Throughout the next few years, he's in and out of the hospital, and Julie is constantly with him. When he's diagnosed with lymphoma, she gives me the news with characteristic optimism.

"They can fix him. They can do all sorts of things for lymphoma," she says cheerfully.

John and I are not so sure. Pat is a shell of his former self and loses all zest and curiosity for life. We long to hear his high little laugh or see him gaze absentmindedly at some unseen world in the depths of his always-busy mind.

In December of that year, even Julie realizes that Pat's time is near. She spends every night sleeping on the little couch next to his hospital bed and calls her good children, John and Andrea, to come home. One day she phones to tell me that Pat, practically overnight, has become unresponsive. It's time to say goodbye, she says.

In the hospital, I kiss Pat's forehead and let go of my old teacher and faithful friend. Julie and John and Andrea stand in a solemn, quiet little group. Two days later, only the three of them will huddle close to Pat's bed as his ventilator is removed. He takes three short breaths and leaves them forever.

All of us who know Julie fear she won't survive without Pat. Her son John is in the military, and he and his family are stationed in Kansas City and frequently move - even overseas sometimes. Andrea is a college professor in Nevada. As protective and loving as they are, Julie's children cannot be with her all the time. She can't drive, can barely see, and is now almost always on her own. 

Pat and Julie with daughter Andrea

One day, a few months after Pat's death, she explains to me how she plans to mow her half acre of grass.

"You are not mowing the lawn! Julie!" I scold, "You can't see anything!"

Immediately, her eyes glaze over with that frosty chill. The Persian Princess has come to visit.

"I'm perfectly capable of mowing the lawn," she says with cool dignity.

Julie, in fact, is capable of pretty much everything. She orders her groceries and medicine online, takes the little bus for senior citizens to go to appointments, does her own taxes, works tirelessly in her beloved garden, and always is grateful for her good neighbors who appear unbidden to shovel the walk or invite her over for an occasional meal. Only rarely does she ask them for help and only when her limited vision makes a task difficult.

"Marilyn?" she calls her neighbor one day this last summer. "Can you come to your window for a minute? Are you there? Oh good. I'm standing in my yard - do you see me? Would you mind guiding me to the sprinkler head? It's somewhere to the right of me."

She's still my bright, cheerful, quirky best friend, and she assures me she's never depressed. Over the moon with delight, she spends almost the entire last spring and summer with her wonderful Andrea who comes home to Grand Island during Covid. John and his family contact her regularly, and she's always keenly aware and comforted to think she will be reunited with Eric and Pat one day. In the meantime, she and I are able to see each other frequently. 

Pat and Julie just a few
weeks before Pat's death.

Sadly, just a couple of weeks ago, we travel to Omaha together to bury our good friend Fran Brandon. John and I ask for a day from school and take Julie and one of our other very best Central Catholic friends, retired Activities Director Howard Schumann, along with us.

It's a small funeral, due to Covid, and we're all in masks. Nevertheless, we're so grateful to be with Hugh, our former much loved boss, and his kids and grandkids. After the funeral, we eat lunch outside with all the Brandons and tell stories from the old glory days at Central Catholic. I am missing our beautiful Fran very much. She should be with us, I think, laughing and sharing old times.

On the way home in the car, I think about our lost friends - first Pat and now Fran. Once, 40 years ago, we were all young and consumed with our small children and wildly enthusiastic about playing our favorite Saturday night Trivial Pursuit game at the Brandons. Now, I reflect sadly, we're attending each other's funerals.

Julie, sitting next to me in the back seat, suddenly claps her hands gleefully like a small, delighted child.

"I can't wait to see Fran again!" she squeals joyfully.

It's so completely different from my own train of thought that I laugh out loud, but John and Howard in the front seat are uncomfortably silent.

"I must have misunderstood," Howard says later after we drop Julie off. "Julie's not looking forward to dying, is she?" He glances back at me with troubled concern.

Yes, I say. Yes, she is.

Nobody is like Julie Kayl. No one's as funny, as quirky, as remarkable or as remotely courageous as my very tiny, very unusual friend. I could never do without her. But she assures me I will never have to.

"If I die before you, I'll think of some sort of sign to let you know I'm still around. What shall it be," she ponders, tapping her long fingernails. "Shall I make it something to do with flashing lights? Oh no," she frowns. "I think that's what I promised my sister Colleen. Oh! That reminds me. Did I tell you she's coming to Iowa with me for my eye doctor appointment? We might stop at that - what's it called? The Amish settlement?  You remember because you went there, too. Pat loved a restaurant there. The corned beef hash was all he could talk about..."

And she's off, like a bee darting from one flower to another. It's impossible to keep up with her train of thought or remember half her stories. But really, I don't have to remember much.

I only have to remember that Julie Kayl is my best friend and that she always makes me happy.

That's enough.