A Last Time for Everything
Chasing Ghosts on Michigan Avenue
On a recent summer afternoon, as I was walking the familiar streets of Chicago’s South Loop, I felt in the presence of ghosts.
With the rounding of each corner, the sight of each recognizable vista, flashbacks hit me. Fragments of past conversations, faces, moments came spontaneously into focus — memories demanding a place in the here and now.
Standing on the sidewalk outside the Blackstone hotel on East Balbo Drive, I found myself reliving a scene from seven years before: Me in that very spot, watching my sister Sheila climb into an Uber, the first leg of a journey that would take her away from Chicago — and a leg of the journey I knew was taking her from me forever.
A few hours later on that same summer evening, I took a seat at a front row table at the Blues club, Legends. I had come for Buddy Guy’s 87th birthday celebration, which I knew would be joyful, but I was bracing for the enormous void that would make the evening bittersweet.
Staring at the empty corner of the stage where Buddy’s longtime keyboard player Marty Sammon used to sit, images streamed from a projector in my mind. I could see Marty striding through the stage door in one of his dapper suits and fedoras, taking a seat before his instruments, running his hands over the keys as he scanned the room for familiar faces. I could see his face light up in a smile when he recognized me, his expressive eyes saying, “So good to see you!” Marty wasn’t physically in the room on that summer evening, but I saw him there anyway.
I’ve been coming to Chicago nearly every year since 2015, always for fun, always for live Blues. I’ve called it my “happy place.” And it was. It still is, but now when I’m there, the new experiences are infused with memories that haunt me. Sometimes it’s hard to know if I’m actually coming to make new memories — or coming to remember. Coming to chase ghosts. Sometimes, if I’m being honest with myself, I wonder if I’m coming in pursuit of my own ghost — retracing my steps through bygone years as a way of resurrecting the version of the woman I was before cancer.
Sheila was my Big Sister, my Soul Sister. We were like bookends. She was the first born of five, and I was the last. Both of us were lifelong free spirits. We were the outliers in our family that way. Fourteen years separated us. She was a child of the troubled 60s, and I grew up in Southern California in the freewheeling 80s, when the music was great and the kids were carefree. But our vastly different coming-of-age stories left no distance between us. When I look back on my childhood, she is at the center of the most magical moments, the moments when life crackled most with energy, joy was most profound, laughter most contagious.
We got each other. We cracked each other up. We enjoyed hours of effortless conversation every time we were together. We even shared a common destiny —breast cancer — though she didn’t live long enough to know that.
Ironically, cancer is what first brought us both to Chicago.
After she was diagnosed in 2009, my sister’s approach to treatment took many turns. First, there was surgery to remove half a lung, then the mastectomy. But Sheila, a nurse for 30 years, initially opted not to get chemotherapy, knowing from experience how it ravages a body. She tried everything else, reading up on alternative treatments, and traveling to Texas, Switzerland, Tijuana to give one thing a try, then another. Some things she tried seemed to work, for a time. But the cancer was aggressive, relentless, and eventually, inevitably, chemotherapy loomed as her only remaining option.
She started coming to Chicago regularly for treatment at a specialized cancer center, and in January 2015, when she was in her sixth triumphant year of survival, I met up with her there for a long weekend of fun and live music. And when she took me to her favorite place, Legends, it became my favorite place, too.
Every year in January, Buddy Guy takes a break from touring, and does a month of shows “at home” at his club, Legends. The space is small, and the stage is low and close to the audience, so if you’re sitting in the front row, you can interact a lot with the musicians. Buddy will sometimes tease you, or even get you to stand up and strum his guitar.
The diehard fans who come each January — from all over the States and abroad — are part of what we call the “Blues Family.” I’m one of those diehards who lines up before dawn on icy winter mornings to be among the first to get in when the club opens, usually around 11 a.m.
To the uninitiated, waiting in line five or six hours in sub-freezing temperatures might not sound like fun, but we diehards know that it is. It’s a party out there in line, like a big Blues Family reunion, everyone excited to reconnect year after year. We sip coffee as we tell stories about what shows we saw the past year, huddling in beach chairs under blankets, sharing hand and foot warmers to fight the sting of the chill.
When the club finally opens, we come in from the cold and settle into our favorite tables spread out over the famous checkerboard floor. The party goes on all day, with bands playing until Buddy takes the stage, usually around 9 p.m. When the music wraps around midnight, some of the diehards head off to an afterparty, others head back to their hotel to crash, and one or two of the most ardent fans sometimes go outside to line up again the night before the next day’s show, parking their beach chairs along the wall, or parking their cars nearby so they can run the heater to thaw out and sleep a bit during the night, if they need to.
It was 26 degrees when we diehards lined up outside the club before dawn on January 22, 2016. Sheila was weak from the treatment she was now getting back home in Seattle to attack the metastases advancing throughout her body. But she had flown to Chicago in the dead of winter anyway, determined not to miss the fun. She tried joining us in line that morning but didn’t last long in the extreme cold, which made it difficult for her to breathe. The one-block walk from the Blackstone hotel had exhausted her. After just a few minutes, she slowly walked back to the room and spent the rest of the day in bed.
When the club doors opened, I and a couple of Sheila’s closest Blues buddies got a table in the third row and saved a seat for her. Larry, a tall, gruff former Marine, kept an eye on the door all day, looking out for Sheila. He and I were mindful of the same thing, though we left our thoughts unspoken: This would be Sheila’s last time at Legends, if she made it at all.
One of the early evening acoustic acts was local Chicago musician Anthony Moser, who — as if reading our minds — introduced an original song called Last Time for Everything. And when the chorus came, my tears quietly began to flow.
~There’s a last time for everything
~Yeah, there’s a last time for everything
~Everybody knows someone who won’t be coming round
~And we never know when parting what might be your final sound
I lay my head on the table and silently sobbed, releasing years of bottled-up anticipatory grief the music was prying loose from my soul.
About an hour later, my sister walked through the door.
She was bundled up in a coat, with a beanie over her bald head, her face swollen with that look all terminal cancer patients eventually have. She sat at the table and turned her chair to face the stage. She was in my line of sight all night, and as the music started up with Buddy’s opening act, I could see her face transformed by her indomitable smile, the music lifting her spirit up to a place somewhere high above her exhaustion. She was in her Heaven on Earth, now feeling no pain. I watched her all night, tears continuing to quietly roll down my cheeks. This was the last time. The last time she would ever be in this place. The last time I would ever see her in Chicago.
The last time I saw Marty was different. Because I didn’t know it was the last.
Heading home from a work trip to Central America in August 2022, I was inspired at the last minute to change my travel plans, adding a stop in Florida before flying back to DC, so I could catch the Buddy Guy show in St. Augustine. A friend in the band put me on the guest list with a backstage pass, and I watched the show from the side of the stage, just a few feet from where Marty sat at his keyboard, bathed in a halo of stage lighting.
Marty was always the center of the music for me at Buddy’s shows. Buddy is the star, and the rest of the band are all phenomenally talented, but what captivated me most, what my eyes and mind were always drawn to, was Marty. Not just for his keyboard solos, which were amazing, but for his whole presence, his aura and energy, the mesmerizing way his fingers flew up and down the keys. Those of us who knew him knew that sometimes he was smiling and playing through his own personal pain. For me, Marty was always the epicenter of the musical magic.
After the St. Augustine show, Marty and I shared a hug and a laugh, and I walked away — already looking forward to the next time.
A couple months later, I was sitting in my bed with my computer on my lap, watching a new Facebook video of Marty playing a piano gig at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans. It was the night before his 45th birthday. The gig was billed the “James Booker Session,” in honor of the famed New Orleans piano player who used to play at “the Leaf.” In 1983, Booker — one of Marty’s musical heroes — had tragically died a lonely death in New Orleans at age 43, due to complications from years of substance abuse.
The Facebook video captured Marty joking with the audience and telling them how much he loved being in New Orleans. “This place will make you happier than you’ve ever been in your life,” he said between songs, “I love this city!”
I was smiling to myself, happy for Marty as I watched him play a Professor Longhair tune, when a text message flashed over my phone. As Marty’s video played on, I picked up my phone and read the short message from one of his bandmates: “Marty died today in New Orleans.”
The birthday gig at the Maple Leaf had been Marty’s last.
Two weeks later, I joined hundreds of people gathered in a park in Blue Island, Illinois, just south of Chicago, to give Marty a musical send-off —a New Orleans-style Second Line memorial parade in his honor. Draped in colorful carnival beads, shaking maracas and tambourines, we danced and marched our way around the park, with Marty’s good friend Rick King leading the way with a brass and percussion rendition of the New Orleans standard When the Saints Come Marching In. For me, it was a religious experience, the way music and the outpouring of love transformed grief into joy, enabling us to somehow authentically feel both opposing emotions at once as we smiled through our tears.
From the park, we streamed into the historic Lyric Theater, and the music went on for hours, as dozens of musicians from all over Chicago and beyond performed a memorial concert for Marty. I’d heard many of the musicians before, many of the songs before, but I’d never heard music so infused with love.
At one point, Marty’s good friend Anthony Moser took the stage, and I braced for the beautiful words I knew I was about to hear: ~There’s a last time for everything.
A few months after seeing Sheila in Chicago, I flew out to Seattle to see my sister for what I knew would be the very last time. I was walking down a forest path toward the hospital, trying to find the words I would need to say good-bye. It was four-mile walk from my Airbnb, and I was grateful for the time the walk gave me to collect my thoughts. It was just days before what would be another last: Sheila’s last birthday. Her 62nd. And as I walked along in a light rain, I was searching for an answer to the question, How do you wish a dying woman a happy birthday?
And almost at the very moment I asked, inspiration struck. I paused on the trail to send a message to one of my sister’s dearest musician friends in Ireland, Tom Sweeney, an Irish balladeer. I asked if as a birthday gift, a parting gift, he would write her a song. Moments later, I stopped again to read Tom’s reply.
When, a little while later, I walked into the hospital room that had been my sister’s home for months, she beamed. I hadn’t told her I was coming, and the sight of me was a complete surprise.
I settled into one of the stuffed chairs in her room and pulled out the bottle of wine I’d smuggled into the hospital. We spent hours in conversation, just as we always did. We talked about family and Blues friends. We laughed. We reminisced. We slipped right into that effortless connection we had known all our lives.
As the wine bottle grew empty and the time grew short, I knew I would soon have to find those final perfect words still eluding me. At about nine o’clock, when I knew my sister was getting tired, I stood up to face the finale.
I leaned over her bed, bringing my face close to hers, cradling her face gently with my hands. She stared into my eyes with a burning intensity, as if memorizing me. I returned the gaze, and we said almost everything we needed to say with our eyes alone. Through my tears, I managed to say a few words.
Thank you.
Thank you for everything.
I absolutely loved being your sister.
It was so great.
I was all so great.
I said everything I felt, everything I wanted and needed to say — except the words still unspeakable for me: good-bye.
For a few moments longer, we embraced one last time, told each other we loved each other one last time, and then I pulled myself away, smiled at her from the doorway, looked at her precious face one last time, and turned to walk down the hall toward the elevator.
A few days later, Tom sent me the birthday song he’d recorded, and I gathered together photographs from Sheila’s amazing life of travel and adventure to make a video to go with it. There were shots of the two of us on safari in Africa, shots of her with friends in Ireland, Germany, the Caribbean. And there were shots from Chicago, from Legends.
The song and video were our last gift to Sheila — our way of using the language of music to simultaneously say happy birthday and good-bye. Playing the video over and over as she lay in her hospital bed, she felt the love coming her way from around the world, and she was happy on her birthday.
A little over a month later, Sheila was gone.
Exactly a year after that, I was diagnosed with cancer.
And, just as all cancer patients must, I grieved the “former” life that was instantly taken from me — the carefree phase of my life when I took for granted my days, my health, my strength, my relative youth.
In the months that followed, I endured the agonies of treatment by looking forward to getting through it all, to reaching “the other side.” Because I didn’t yet understand that with cancer there is no other side. There is no going back after a diagnosis. You can’t be the same person you once were, though you try. Your body is too different. Your mind too changed. You are too acutely aware of your mortality. And everything you do feels different because the world looks different to you now.
You go on, determined to keep living, to keep loving life, to keep building new memories. And you do. But the joy you feel has a different hue, because amid the fun you make you frequently find yourself forced to swat away a persistent, nagging, unwelcome thought: What if this is the last time?
So beautiful Ruthie, and really hits home for me. I too, lost a a sister to cancer at only 35 years old, and lost several dear friends unexpectedly, and I can remember so clearly thinking about that “last time” I saw them. Wishing I had said something more or hugged them a little tighter and a little longer. I didn’t know any of this about you. Thank you so much for sharing this beautiful story.
What a beautiful essay, Ruth. Am in awe of your grasp of life and love and writing about it all! ❣️