Rest in Peace, Dear Friend

CAROLYN COLES VANDENBERG

1954 - 2019

Before she married, she was Carolyn Coles, daughter of a railroad engineer and a nurse, sister to two brothers and being a daddy’s girl, maybe a tiny bit spoiled. She was tall, athletic, and the first person I knew with curly hair—not the cascading lazy kind but the tight up against the scalp kind—hair that I envied, being someone with the straight as a pin kind. She had the best posture of anyone I knew. She strode rather than walked in such a purposeful way, as if she always knew where she was going and always knew she would get there. As part of a great smile, she had small perfectly aligned white teeth and a voice to match, pillow soft and caring.

We were high school chums and later became roomies while going to different colleges. I remember her father came to my house and helped move my furniture in his Ford El Camino. We parked my bed in her room which we also shared with her Siamese cat named Schultz. (I have to confess I didn’t like this cat who liked to take a crap in the room off the kitchen, always while we were eating.)

She was the only person I knew who used a wind up alarm clock. Before lights out, I remember her checking the time and winding it up, metallic scrape by metallic scrape by metallic scrape. When she graduated from nursing school, I remember how professional she looked in her white nurse’s cap, uniform, and stockings. She seemed so settled in her life when I was still stuck In free wheeling self discovery.

When she got married, I was in her wedding. She looked radiant in a white gown with lots of lace and seed pearls. I remember wearing a large floppy straw hat, a long dress with an empire waist and eating prime rib. Their photographer, a newly returned GI from South Korea with an interest in photography and a friend of the groom, would later become my future husband. Not long after their wedding, Carolyn and her husband packed up a U-Haul on a beautiful September afternoon and moved to Colorado.

The next summer that same photographer now my boyfriend and I drove across the country to visit them in Longmont. They were renting a small two-story white house with a view of the Rockies from their living room window and a train track that ran down the middle of their street. Theirs along with the other houses had a nice green lawn that ended at a ditch beside the tracks. Otherwise the street was perfectly normal. She kept a garden and drank raw cow’s milk. I seem to remember eating toast served with her strawberry preserves. The week we visited, the fair was going on and several cows got loose. We heard grunts and shouting and looked out the window to see a couple of big Holsteins barrel past followed by several men. At a local honky tonk, she introduced us to Flaming Blue Jesuses, shots of something that the waitress set on fire before bringing to the table. She loved living in Colorado.

The next year she and her husband had a baby. When they came back to Michigan to show their baby off, Carolyn was clearly smitten. She loved everything about being a mom while I was still childless at the time and didn’t understand her transformation. Later I hoped I could be a mom like that, so totally selfless and giving and loving. She loved it so much, she went on to have three more sons. I don’t think I ever saw her so happy as she was just being a mom.

In the intervening years when she and I were both busy living our lives and raising kids, we wrote back and forth. Carolyn’s letters were always fat with many pages. She had large beautiful handwriting and wrote on white lined paper, the kind you tore off from a tablet. One summer I received a big envelope in the mail from her, containing all my letters from years gone by. She had kept them and returned them to me because she thought it would be fun for me to read snapshots of my life.

When her kids got older, she went back to school and studied CAD drawing—she always was artistic—and worked in the profession for a period until she was laid off. She worked in a medical testing lab next and retired from there not long before her death.

In her last years, she took a good deal of joy from riding her horse. His name was Chief and she boarded him at a nearby stable. She rode with a group of riding friends as often as she could. When she could no longer ride, she liked to spend time with Chief at the stable just hanging out.

She died in hospice care of cancer several days after Christmas where she was surrounded by the sons she loved so much. To have them all there was everything she wanted in this world.