The good ones
On her immaculately made guest room bed, my mom has an embroidered pillow that was given to her by one of her best friends, Janet. It reads: “A good friend is like a good bra: hard to find, close to your heart and very supportive.”
I would add that the same is true for good neighbors. Fortunately, my family has always hit the jackpot in the fantastic-neighbor department. When we moved back to Spokane in 2008, I was absolutely set on buying an older home—a charming fixer-upper, a house with a story, a delightfully dilapidated domicile of domesticity. And we got it: a 1920 Craftsman bungalow that was last updated in what appeared to be 1968. It was tucked into the cutest little neighborhood you’ve ever seen, with house after house nestled right next to each other on tiny postage-stamp-sized lots.
A year after we moved in, the neighbors to our left moved out, and as I’m typing this I’m just now wondering if those two events were related. But anyway, there we sat, our little family of five waiting with bated breath to see who would move in next to us. This kind of thing can go south very quickly, and we were anxious as to whether our new neighbors would find our boisterous young family delightful or irritating. True to form, on the day that moving vans pulled in next door, four-year-old George took it upon himself to head over and wander through the open door as the movers brought in all of our new neighbors’ furniture.
“Oh no,” I groaned to myself. “What a welcome. They’re going to be annoyed with us right off the bat.”
It wasn’t long after we’d retrieved George that I heard a boisterous laugh coming from the front lawn. I headed outside, and it was there that I first met Sarah Werkman, the wife, mother and heartbeat of the family that was to become our new neighbors.
Sarah, her husband, Russell, and their two boys, Isaac and Xander, had recently moved from New York so Russell could take a job as an administrator at a private school in Spokane. Truth be told, I was a little nervous about how we would relate. They seemed so different from us: older kids vs. younger kids. East Coast vs. West Coast. Ivy League vs. state school. Liberal vs. conservative.
It took about two seconds to allay my fears. The Werkmans turned out to be the warmest, most genuine people you could ever know. Their boys were polite and kind to our children. Russell was attentive and showed genuinely interest in everyone. Sarah was warm and inclusive. Over the seven years we lived next to each other, we traded sugar, eggs and the countless plates of cookies. We babysat each others kids, hamsters and dogs. Sarah taught our son how to garden, and I held onto their house key so their boys could get inside if they accidentally locked themselves out after school.
One day, Sarah knocked on my back door with a coat in her arms.
“The button fell off my coat today,” she said. “Any chance you could fix it?”
“Sarah, you have a master’s degree. How do you not know how to sew on a button?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” she laughed good-naturedly. “I just don’t!”
On the night that I went into labor with one of my babies, Sarah could see me through the kitchen window as I paced back and forth in agony while waiting to leave for the hospital. She later told me that she had been ready to come over at a moment’s notice to tend our other kids if my mom didn’t get there in time.
That’s Sarah: selfless, loving, unassuming, joyful.
One of the hardest things about our move out to the country almost five years ago was leaving the Werkmans. We had them over to our new house a few times so we could catch up on each others’ lives, and then a couple years ago, they moved away as well, back to the East Coast.
“Someday we’ll get to Maine to visit you!” I texted Sarah a few months ago.
“Yes! It will happen!” she replied.
Last month, Sarah was diagnosed with stage four metastatic pancreatic cancer. It’s a sucker punch that came out of nowhere, and now her entire world has shifted. As she wrote in her online journal, “One day I was watching the Super Bowl, and the next day I had cancer.”
Sarah doesn’t like the metaphor of “fighting cancer,” so I won’t use it here, but needless to say, she and her family are on a rough and unsure road. I wish I could walk across the driveway to bring them some cookies, or at least keep loving watch from our kitchen window.
Good neighbor, good woman. Why does it always happen to the good ones?