Jackie Danicki

Our friend Nancy Rommelmann has a beautiful, funny post about Miss Seipp, who left us one year ago today.

I called Cathy. She told me, she’d found out really as a fluke: she had asthma, and had not been able to shake a cough, and the doctor had decided to do a chest x-ray, which he looked at and then, promptly walked her down the hall to oncology. I do recall Cathy telling me, “The doctor said, if the surgery takes 30 minutes, it means he couldn’t get it. If it takes an hour, he could.”

Cathy said that when she came out of the anesthesia, she’d asked the nurse, “How long did it take?”

“Forty-five minutes,” the nurse told her.

“Which you can imagine, was very frustrating.” This was Cathy, the day after surgery, in her hospital bed, surrounded by her family. I’d walked into the room holding a poundcake, whereupon Cathy said, “That’s so kind of you, and Nancy, do you remember my mother?”

Picture this scene: a room full of shellshocked people who know the surgeon could not get the cancer; that the prognosis is bad. And Cathy, making introductions, making sure the older folks have seats, sending someone down the hall for ice. Her composure was surreal. I think of it often, especially when I am being a weakling. I think of Hillary walking in with the gift of a peignoir, so that Cathy might look beautiful as she convelesced, and Cathy — still covered in mecurichrome or whatever that yellow stuff is they paint on you during surgery — holding it up to her chest, commenting on how pretty it was, and how thoughtful.

Cathy kept up her composure for several years, through extreme physical pain and while trying to cope with the prospect of leaving her beloved daughter alone in this world.

But Cathy was no saint, and her composure did start to disintegrate in her last days. She could be ratty with people, easily exasperated and snappish. I delighted in this to some degree, as I eagerly listened and laughed as Cathy related stories of people who weren’t following Cathy’s Rules (as Nancy called them - rules against gum chewing, against wearing t-shirts with words on them, against leaving voicemail messages on a cell phone instead of the landline - and so on). Cathy did hilarious impersonations of the whiny voices people used, and there was no bigger infraction of Cathy’s Rules than that of whining.

I can’t say I ever heard Cathy whine, even during the worst pain. I did see her cry in frustration with her own degeneration, at dropping a plate of cookies on the floor and making a tiny mess. Even from that she quickly recovered. Why would I imagine she would never recover from the cancer itself?

As fed up as Cathy could get with those around her, she could also show great tolerance. The nurse who came most days to help her drain her lung was there one day, blathering on with a righteous tone matched only by her ignorance, about how rent prices should be fixed by the government. Cathy, a landlord of several properties, patiently and in a soft voice responded with reasonable questions and points of fact. The nurse grew increasingly irate. I was in the kitchen, listening to this while I made Cathy’s lunch, fighting the urge to go into the living room and play bad cop. I was surprised Cathy didn’t mention her own method of rent setting:

I have, let’s see, three rental units now, and when I have a vacancy I always set the rent a couple hundred dollars or so below market. My theory is that way I can choose the best tenant from the many who apply. Most landlords set the rent as high as they think they can possibly get (even if they imagine they’re setting it at a bargain market rate), then grab whoever is willing to pay the big bucks.

But I think that’s foolish, because a tenant who will pay the highest rate, rather than frugally searching for a deal, is someone who doesn’t make the smartest financial decisions. Someone who doesn’t make the smartest financial decisions is more likely to run into financial trouble generally, and therefore more likely to have problems paying the rent on time, or at all. And that is someone I do not want for a tenant. It’s just another version of that old story: The Poor Pay More.

Anyway, this theory has worked for me so far, because in my 18 years of landlording I’ve never missed even one month’s rent. In fact, only two or three times in all these years has any tenant been even a few days late, and then always with apologies and an explanation.

After the nurse left, I told Cathy that I had no idea how she could stand to be so kind to someone so unhinged. She shrugged, then said, “The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I have been right to set my rents so low. After all, do I owe more to my tenants than I do to my family?” She was clearly thinking of what she’d leave behind for her young daughter, and I could see her thinking about whether or not she had been wrong all these years. This was rather disconcerting to me; Cathy’s catchphrase, after all, was “You know I’m right.” That she could get value even from her nurse railing against her, a captive audience, was classic Cathy.

But still, she didn’t whine.

Filed under: Life