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My dive buddy, Carol, is floating 50 feet under the surface of the sea. We glance at each other every few minutes, keeping track. We have been diving off a little island called Southwest Caye, 35 miles from the coast of southern Belize, for several days. She and I swim quietly through the warm water, over sandy plains and coral boulders. We see sharks and garden eels and blue parrot fish motoring madly against the current.
Like astronauts, good scuba divers are weightless and can take any posture. Carol likes to stand as she might in a museum, hands folded, gazing into the crevices of the coral reef. Right now, I'm hanging upside down, peeking under a ledge.
After several minutes, I look up and see that Carol is making one of her favorite faces: pursed lips, hands on hips in pretend exasperation. She catches my eye and shakes her finger.
I get the message: "Pay attention." She does not mean the fish.
Carol and I have been diving together for six years. She's a natural, as she is with most physical activities, and a few times a year, we take off for distant shores. But three years ago, in the same week she was elected to be the first woman judge in her rural western Oregon county, Carol was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer.
We've made four dive trips since then, and on each outing, Carol has more bluntly asked me to watch out for her. For the first time in our long friendship, we are both saying out loud that we need to attend to each other—something we've always done but never really acknowledged.
Before the trip to Southwest Caye, with her fatigue worsening, Carol said, "I can't imagine getting on an airplane right now." She was in the middle of a chemotherapy cycle. I reminded her that I was starting to come down with a cold. An old shoulder injury and a strained ligament in one of my knees were also bothering me. "We'll just adjust as we go," I said. "But I'm getting too old for these red-eye flights, that's for sure."
"Enough with that talk of age already," she answered.
Carol is 53; I am 51. We met in college when she was 18 and I was 16 and dealing with sudden independence. A self-possessed woman with a head of thick, curly hair and a wry sense of humor, she intimidated me. That she felt shy and unsure of herself, she says now, makes me laugh out loud. Neither of us recalls clearly how we became friends. While I was rearing children, Carol worked on fishing boats. While I was writing books, she went to law school and started a solo practice in criminal defense. But even when we were living in different states and saw little of each other, Carol felt inevitably a part of my life.
She has always had the endurance of a sled dog, a comparison she would find flattering. (Carol considers dogs to be better creatures than most humans.) As long as I've known her, she's seemed durable, a person of stamina. She's hiked and camped and kayaked, often alone. Once, when we were camping together in Oregon's Strawberry Mountain Wilderness, she told me she had never been afraid; she wasn't sure what that felt like.
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