I Didn’t Know
by Barbara Krasner
I first met Martha in December 2002. She’d flown to New Jersey from Chicago for a business meeting. I must have reached out to her to ask about survival strategies with our boss. I picked her up at her hotel, and we went to Bridgewater Commons Mall.
We strolled around the jewelry counter at Macy’s, where I admired a pair of ruby and diamond earrings. She took out her credit card and said, “Happy Chanukah.” I glanced at the price tag: more than $4,000! I was flabbergasted. No one had ever been this generous, this financially free, with me, not even my parents. The sparkle of the rubies and diamonds mesmerized me. I tried to decline the offer, but my protests were futile. She could see I couldn’t resist.
She came with me to the launch party of my 2003 local history book, Kearny’s Immigrant Heritage, at my hometown’s leading Scottish restaurant, Argyle Fish and Chips. I cannot parallel park, so she just pushed me out of the car and parked it for me. At the event, she took on the role of roving photographer. She became like a sister. My family, especially my mother, liked her. I liked her, too.
I didn’t know her kindness could be even more expansive. After an intervention and my son’s removal to a wilderness program in the fall of 2004, she stayed with me to shop for new furniture and carpeting to repair the damage he had caused to our home. She paid for it. She knew I was wiped out when it came to money. But as I look back on it now, I wonder if she was giving money away because she knew her time was limited.
I came to know the full extent of her charity. She stayed with me in the hospital when I had parathyroid surgery in 2005. She told hospital staff she was my sister, and we did share a sibling kind of intimacy. She told me stories as I drifted in and out of consciousness in the ICU.
Once I was out of the woods, she forced me out of bed to walk around. Later. at home, she made me chicken soup from prepackaged chicken breast and bought me a stack of small square white plates and new blue checkerboard dish towels. The soup warmed my ravaged throat.
In 2005, she invited me to accompany her to a weekend at New York City’s St. Regis Hotel. Martha, it turned out, shared a name with a celebrity. The celebrity invited all women with that name to Manhattan to be in the audience for a show taping.
Martha had a penchant for introducing me to the good life: Morton’s Steak House, Ferragamo shoes, Fendi bags, the King Cole Bar, and a suite at the St. Regis. She introduced me to composers like Debussy and artists like those of the Hudson School.
We leisurely strolled the Frick Museum and FAO Schwarz. While she was touring the city with the Marthas, I visited other museums and galleries in a way someone from New Jersey hardly ever gets a chance to do. By the end of the day, she was tired and just wanted to stay in bed and read. Perhaps this, too, was a sign.
She also introduced me to the Canyon Ranch spa in western Massachusetts as her guest. We didn’t share in too many of the activities; we had different issues to explore. Maybe we were both broken, both trying to recover in our own ways.
Yet, I was beginning to learn we were quite different. In the business world, I found her judgments to be harsh and cold-blooded, not at all like the person I knew outside of work. I chose never to discuss business with her.
And then I noticed she began to back out of arrangements with me so she could be with others. She liked to party. During one of her trips to New Jersey, we had planned to go for a walk at this large park near my house and then go out for dinner. Living alone since my son left in 2004, I looked forward to this time with Martha. But she broke the date, and our appointment became a disappointment.
She opted instead to go out drinking with some guys who worked abroad. She reminded me that she had received her MBA from Thunderbird International and had majored in international business at Tulane. She had done her junior year abroad in Spain. It was clear she preferred to be with more lively people, and I didn’t drink.
The morning after, when the department gathered again in a meeting, Martha was completely hungover, sallow skin, gulping cup after cup of coffee, and blinking to keep her eyes open. She was a wreck. She had to give a presentation, but she chose to do so without her shoes. For someone who came across so strict and analytical at work, this behavior seemed bizarre.
I visited her in the spring of 2008. I remember that Martha had a cold and slept a lot. When we did venture out, we stayed local to Oak Park and Oak Brook. At Neiman Marcus, she bought me a black-white-and-blue St. John suit, a luxury brand I’d never heard of.
Now that my son had graduated from his at-risk high school and was in his second semester of college, I was paying for his education from a fund I had set up. Before I knew it, the receipts totaled $5,000 for an Eileen Fisher ensemble, a St. John black dress and coat, which I wore to my mother’s funeral about a month later, spectator shoes, a diamond butterfly necklace — my mother loved butterflies — and another necklace with matching earrings.
I bought guidebooks of Warsaw and Poland for my upcoming trip. We had dinner at Morton’s and afterwards, in her back parlor, we watched 27 Dresses and Becoming Jane Austen.
She and her husband adopted a “whole food” diet, exercised, and rested a lot. I knew she had follow-up sessions with her oncologist, having undergone treatment for breast cancer before I met her. When I stayed at her house, I observed that it was fairly routine on weekends for Martha to get up at eleven, skip breakfast and lunch, nap in the afternoon — she called it a shnoozle — have dinner, read, and fall asleep by nine.
I, however, was up by seven and had to fend for myself in the kitchen, listening to the dogs whine. I didn’t associate Martha’s need for rest with illness. I assumed she was free and clear. She never talked about it. She was always so full of life. Except on weekends.
Meanwhile, my mother was not rallying from a failed gall bladder surgery. My mother’s death six weeks after surgery affected me so deeply that I decided to retire early in November that year. I languished for five months before accepting a temp job as a legal website writer, a far cry from my earnings as a director of marketing. I no longer had the funds to play in Manhattan, Chicago, or Canyon Ranch.
By the time I came once more to Chicago in the spring of 2012 to attend a writers’ conference, I had begun to teach at a local university and enter yet another career. In the interest of frugality, I decided to stay with Martha.
I took the local train to and from downtown. As the days passed, I grew increasingly uncomfortable at Martha’s. I wasn’t used to her husband being around. I said one evening, “I’m thinking about going back to school for my third master’s. The school where I’m teaching offers tuition remission to adjuncts if they want to pursue another advanced degree.”
Martha’s husband said, “Stop being a student. Move beyond that. Just keep teaching.”
Martha agreed. But anyone who knew me would know I’m a perpetual student. Martha and her husband clearly didn’t understand that I belonged on a university campus and not in a corporate complex. Something felt off. Things had been fine before during other visits when he was traveling on business as a management consultant. He had a new job and was now always around. But it could have been something else.
It took six months for Martha to mail me the books and journals I had picked up at the conference and left at her place. Communication between us came to a halt. Maybe her husband, who no longer traveled during the week, didn’t like me. Maybe she didn’t enjoy our time together. Maybe our friendship was just coming to a natural end. Or maybe her cancer had returned with a vengeance. If it had, she chose not to share the news with me.
I believe around this time she took early retirement. The decision surprised me, because she relished the corporate world. She had risen from senior marketing manager to director. But retirement could give her the time to indulge her passions for travel and adventure.
I probably read about this on Facebook. She didn’t have to worry about money, and she had no children, no tuitions to worry about, although I believe she contributed heavily to the education of a godson.
We were more or less estranged when I was diagnosed with Stage 1A cancer during the summer of 2014. I reached out to her. Surely, she was the one person who would understand. I left her a voice message. She never returned the call. It was around then that I unfriended her on Facebook.
A year later, she texted me Happy Birthday. Too little, too late. It was true that she tended to communicate in batches: months of nothing and then an hours-long phone call, but I needed more than that.
In the summer of 2019, while I was driving from New Jersey to Evanston, Illinois, for a two-week fellowship at Northwestern University, I left her a voice message. I would be passing Oak Park, where I believed she still lived, and could stop by for a visit.
She didn’t call back. Facebook informed me she had passed away in the previous year.
On Yom Kippur 2020, I lit a Yahrzeit candle for her. I whispered, “I’m so sorry for your loss. I didn’t know you were gone. I didn’t know you were suffering. I just didn’t know.”
Copyright © 2025 by Barbara Krasner
