Tangled up in Blues, Installment IV

Originally posted 2/7/08 at Age of Reason

Barbara....

......Barbara

......Barbara


I was about a year out of university, a newly licensed CPA working for KPMG's Denver office. Was sent out on a multi-office engagement to Portland Oregon for what turned out to be a 9 month engagement. We were put up in a hotel on the Willamette river, not far from the offices of our client.

Living in that hotel for so long, we all got rather well acquainted with the staff of the hotel. One of the regular waitresses was an ethereal-looking young woman with long blond hair and almost translucent skin. I soon learned her name was Barbara. Barbara was tall and almost anorexically thin. She certainly was not physically my usual type of woman. But as we spent so much time together, I discovered she was a very fascinating woman. She had had a very difficult life -- she was abandoned by her parents as a child, spent several years in foster care before being adopted by a nice Jewish family at age 10. Then as a young woman, she was violently raped by a customer at the bar where she was a bartender. But none of that was very significant compared to her status at the time I met her -- she had been diagnosed with terminal leukemia -- the chemo had a lot to do with her appearance.

I fell deeply in love with Barbara -- I was married at the time but would have willingly left Karen for Barbara -- had she given any encouragement to me to do so. Over the time we were in Portland, I watched he go through multiple rounds of chemo, get the shit knocked out of her, then fight back. Watching that was perhaps the hardest thing I have done. I had never had the experience of watching someone my own age dying in front of me.

We never did actually quite have a real romantic relationship -- we did spend a number of evenings out at Portland's best restaurants, clubs, etc but nothing beyond that ever happened.

I did help organize a blood drive for her (she needed massive blood transfusions following her chemo rounds) but she died shortly before we completed our assignment in Portland.