Dawn Was Here
By Susan Law Corpany

Editor’s note:  Our recent interview with LDS novelist Susan Law Corpany received such an overwhelming response that we knew you would want to hear from her on a regular basis.  Her columns will appear here on Tuesdays, every other week.

I first met Dawn when we were both in the hospital at the same time. I was new in the ward and didn’t know very many people yet and was suffering from severe morning sickness.  When the bishop came to visit me, he mentioned that another member of the ward was also in the hospital and told me her name.  Having nothing better to do while I was being rehydrated, I rang up her room and introduced myself, and found a very talkative kindred spirit.  We talked nearly every day, comparing procedures and nurses.  By the time they released the both of us, we were good friends.

A few years later, I was her Relief Society president visiting her in the hospital after a below-the-knee amputation due to complications from her diabetes.  She matter-of-factly told me that the gangrene was still spreading and that she was going to die soon.  Without warning she lifted her gown and showed me the results of her surgery.  “Wanna see my leg?” While I was still reeling from that, she asked.  “Do you wanna talk at my funeral?”  She said it as if she was asking me to join her for lunch.

“There are lots of people in the ward who know you better than I do who could do a better job.”

“I want you.”

One of the things on my “list” is that if I die when I am elderly, I don’t want an “old lady” funeral where someone talks about how willingly I took my medications and how I always waited my turn for shuffleboard.  I told her, “I’ve only known you when you were sick. We met in the hospital.  I don’t know anything about your life when you weren’t sick.”

She laughed.  “I barely remember that myself.  I’ve had health problems for the greater part of my life.”

My visits with her became “research” for my talk, but she wasn’t very cooperative as I tried to get her to talk about her life.  “Everyone knows me the way they know me.  I don’t need anybody saying a bunch of flowery stuff about me.”

“Well, I have to say something.  What do you want me to say then?”

“It’ll come to you.”

“Are you going to help me write it from the great beyond?”

“I might.”

“Well good, because you’re not being much help here.”

She laughed.  “I figure I can probably do more good for my family from the next life than what I can do here now, too.”

She approached death calmly and told me I was the one who was most willing to talk to her about it, so we talked about it.  She told me of her daughter, Diana, who had died at the age of twelve, and of how glorious their reunion was going to be. 

We pondered the question of whether people somehow knew when their time was about to be up, even those who were taken in accidents.  She told me how right before her daughter died, a man had asked her if she had lived all her life in Salt Lake City, and she had answered, “Not yet.” 

I told her how in the couple of months before my husband Paul died, he had decided to take me around to visit some of his friends.  Every Sunday we picked a different old friend to go visit.  It never seemed strange to me that we were only visiting his friends and not mine, not until those same people filtered past his casket and each told me how much that last visit had meant to them.  I realized that he had been going around telling his friends goodbye, unaware that that was what he was doing.               

After she died, I talked with her husband and children, searching for stories that would define the woman I had come to know.  Her husband told me how once early in their marriage, he had decided to bring home a different kind of flower to his wife every day for a week.  On the last day of the week, he had run out of ideas, and instead of flowers he arrived home with a large tumbleweed he had found in his travels.  He said that she removed the flowers from the day before and put the tumbleweed in the center of the dining room table, just as she had done with each offering of flowers.  There, I knew, was the story that summed up my friend Dawn.  She had enjoyed the flowers, but when necessary she also cleared her table and made room for the tumbleweeds of life. 

She was not immune to feelings of depression and self-pity in the midst of her struggles, but she never had the attitude that she had expected a problem-free life.  When the challenges came, she set out the tumbleweed and accepted the presence of her problems as the new reality of her life, and then went on with the business of life, dealing with each new challenge the best she could. 

The inspiration for my talk came a little at a time.  The Sunday before her funeral, the words of a familiar hymn conjured up a picture of a person passing from this life to the next.

I shared that verse as part of my talk at her funeral, and every time I sing it I picture my friend leaving behind a body ravaged by illness and going on to a glorious reunion and a life full of flowers rather than tumbleweeds.

The day before her funeral, some words spray-painted on a cement wall gave me additional inspiration.  I added something more to my talk.  “Dawn told me that you all know her the way you know her and that she didn’t want me saying a bunch of flowery stuff about her.   Yesterday I passed by a wall where someone had spray-painted the words ‘Bill was here.’  I realized that if you live a good life, try your best to raise good kids, be a good friend, and a loving spouse, you won’t ever have to get out a can of spray paint and tell the world that you were here. 

‘Dawn was here.’  The evidence is all around us — her husband, children and grandchildren, her friends, all in attendance today.  Each of you will remember her, as she said, in your own way.”

I hadn’t wanted to speak at her funeral, any more than I’d wanted to see her leg.

But she was right. 

It came to me.