Chapter Seven: She Was Red

Hope Endures in Zihuatanejo

I did not understand it at the time. That is the honest place to begin.

When Jeanette died, Brenda was still alive. Sick, yes. Altered, certainly. But alive — engaged with the world, engaged with her care, engaged with the slow, exhausting work of continuing to live while knowing the horizon had moved closer. None of us were speaking in conclusions yet. We were still speaking in days, appointments, phone calls, and the strange half-language of optimism that caregivers and patients develop together. Not denial. Something more disciplined than that.

Jeanette went first.

She did not announce that she was showing us anything. She didn’t frame her illness as instruction. She simply lived it the way she lived everything else — with clarity, humor, and an absence of pretense. She chose her own dresses. She chose her own timing. She chose when to enter the room and when to leave it. And when the time came, she chose how to face the end without turning it into theater for the rest of us.

Brenda watched all of that.

I watched her watching.

At the time, I thought the bond between them was simply companionship — two women sick at the same time, trading notes, trading strength, trading the small reassurances that only someone inside the same experience can give. I didn’t yet see that something else was happening. That Jeanette wasn’t just a friend. She was a demonstration.

When I wrote Jeanette’s eulogy, I believed I was writing it for the room. For her family. For our friends. For myself. I did not understand that I was also writing it for Brenda — and, eventually, for a version of myself I hadn’t met yet.

The movie reference mattered more than I knew.

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy doesn’t save Red. He leaves first. He escapes quietly, methodically, without spectacle. And instead of giving Red a speech, he leaves him hope — not as a concept, but as a place. A coordinate. A promise that freedom exists somewhere real, not just imagined.

Zihuatanejo.

Red stays behind. He has to. He serves his time. He lives inside the walls longer than he wants to, longer than feels fair. But he carries that hope with him — not loudly, not optimistically, but faithfully. And when the door finally opens, when parole comes, when fear loosens its grip just enough, Red chooses to go.

That is what I missed in real time.

Jeanette was Andy.

She went first. She showed what it looked like to face illness without surrendering yourself to it. She showed how to live truthfully right up to the edge without collapsing into despair or false courage. And then she left.

Brenda was still here.

Still inside the walls.

Still living with scans and treatments and calculations and the exhausting choreography of modern medicine. But she had seen something now. She had watched someone go ahead and not disappear. She had absorbed — quietly, without ever naming it — the understanding that this thing could be faced with dignity intact.

She was Red.

Hope did not arrive for her as comfort. It arrived as orientation.

I did not recognize it as hope at the time. I thought it was simply resolve. Or realism. Or grace. I thought it was her personality asserting itself against the circumstances. Only later did I understand that she was carrying something Jeanette had left behind — a way of being that did not require denial, but also did not require panic.

That is how hope actually works.

Not as rescue. Not as optimism. But as the quiet confidence that someone has already walked part of the path ahead of you and remained themselves while doing it.

Jeanette went before us to Zihuatanejo.

Brenda stayed behind longer. She did what Red did. She lived inside the walls with eyes open. She paid attention. She made choices. She carried hope without insisting on outcomes.

And I — I was neither Andy nor Red at that point. I was still just watching the movie, thinking I understood it, missing what it was really about.

Only later did I realize that some people don’t just die before you.

They go ahead and leave you directions.