Mall About Town

It’s turning into a busy upcoming weekend. On Sunday we will drive up to Philly to visit with Max’s brothers, and probably drive back the same day. Saturday is my niece’s college graduation ceremony here in DC and my brother phoned last night to invite us to come. (They tend to plan things at the last minute.) So it will be a hectic weekend by our standards. I’m jittery and I went to bed crying a little bit, which is normal for me, thinking about Sarah, and I also woke up crying a little bit. I’m not sure why. I was having one of my standard anxiety dreams in which I was trying to find a new apartment and lugging around old furniture.

I’ve been looking at retail websites since I got up, thinking about finding a new dress for Emmy’s graduation, and sussing out the best plan of attack for shopping. I will try to hit Montgomery Mall (the Mall About Town, as it was known in the 80’s) sometime before Saturday and find something I like. I do like shopping and getting new clothes although going to Montgomery Mall always makes me think of my friend Nahid (Leila’s mother) who died in 2014. I still miss her.

We met in Sarah’s ballet class and she had such a positive and warm energy. She made me laugh about so many things, and she and I loved to go to the Mall, shop, and have lunch at California Pizza Kitchen or the Food Court and take the girls to Build-a-Bear. Nahid loved to shop and she would gift Sarah with fashions that she said she just couldn’t resist buying for her because they were such a good bargain. She was so generous.

Her death was really unexpected. She had a mammogram and the radiologist said that a growth was benign and not to be concerned about it. Over the next months she lost a lot of weight and she was enjoying it because she could buy more fashionable clothes, but it was strange and in the back of my mind I heard alarm bells. She developed a cough and stomach pains and finally it was determined that she had Stage IV Breast Cancer that had advanced to her liver and lungs. She died about 8 weeks later. I think I saw her once or twice after she got her diagnosis and then of course I went to her funeral.

I feel good usually when I think about Nahid. I remember once at Sarah’s birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese, Nahid and Leila were pretty late showing up and I was a bit worried. Finally they arrived and Nahid told me she had gone to the wrong Chuck-E-Cheese and sat down at another kid’s birthday party for a while until she realized she didn’t know any of the kids or parents. She even helped herself to a slice of birthday cake. Finally she realized she was at the wrong venue and grabbed Leila and left. We laughed so hard. It was a classic Nahid story.

Maybe Nahid and Sarah are together, along with all the other dead people I’ve talked about. I can’t keep straight all the death scenarios I keep imagining.