For Michelle’s sake, I suddenly found myself hoping the series would go the distance, seven games, but the Warriors were by far the better team, and it seemed likely to end as soon as the following night. Brandon told me I was welcome to come up and watch what was likely to be the last game with them. I initially said I would but thought better of it; I was hesitant to be in the way of precious family time.
Instead, I reached out to Michelle’s friends, knowing that her children, arriving from points west, north, and south, would be preoccupied with their mother. Ernestine Miller. Lori Hamamoto. A few others. They—we—all were in shock, wondering how her doctors could have missed a mass in her lung and helpless to do anything but hope there would still be time to see her.
Several days later, after Michelle had been admitted to Stamford Hospital, I knocked on the door to her room and walked in. It was midafternoon. She was sitting up in bed. Only one other person was with her, a young woman by her side. I hesitated and offered to come back, but Michelle, her face brightening, told me it was fine to stay. I soon realized that I had arrived at a delicate moment, in the middle of a session with a hospital psychologist. They seemed to be reflecting on Michelle’s life—her five children, her many friends, her work, and of course her long love affair with the Knicks. She nodded toward me and said, “I have this wonderful friend because of it.”
“It sounds like you have many people who care about you and that you’ve had a very fulfilling life,” the psychologist said.
“Oh, absolutely,” Michelle said. “No complaints.”
The dual kindness and cruelty of their conversation hit me at that moment. I was witnessing the brave confrontation of a terminal situation. Michelle knew she was going to die, though without a real sense of how much time she had left. Alone for the next couple of hours, we avoided the subject—more because I just wasn’t yet ready to go there. We talked about normal stuff: The end of the NBA season. The mess in Washington. Her kids. My kids. Her grandkids. She told me how relieved she was that her artistic granddaughter, Dylan, had decided not to quit a good job in Manhattan for what sounded like a quixotic adventure with a boyfriend in Italy. Through it all, she was in good spirits, alert except for one brief period when she dozed off. Concerned that it might be more than fatigue, I raised my voice. She opened her eyes.
“Michelle, am I boring you?”
“Never,” she said.
When the staff called to take her dinner order, she requested a Caesar salad, steak bits, sweet potato and sweet potato fries, and rice pudding for dessert. She ate almost everything—reassuring me for the moment that she was still strong.
I told her that friends were asking to see her, but she demurred. She made a point of saying that she didn’t want to put Lori out by making her come all the way from Washington. Even now, she hated the thought of being fussed over or, worse, pitied. Whatever there was to say could be said by phone.
“So you’re telling me that if anyone else comes to visit you won’t let them in?”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said, smirking.
I did. Michelle just wanted me to know that she would not be insulted if people didn’t come, but I also knew that she would be happy to see whoever showed up. So I returned a few days later with Jay Greenberg, another of her sportswriting pals.
Their friendship, like so many others, had begun at the Garden; Michelle had seen to it. Jay was a newcomer to the New York Post column lineup in 1994, best known in Philadelphia for a hockey expertise that eventually landed him in that sport’s Hall of Fame. Suddenly he was covering Pat Riley’s Knicks on the way to the NBA Finals, uncertain he was up to the challenge of a much less familiar sport at a moment when interest in the team had soared. A woman stepped forward from the front row near the Knicks bench one night, gave him an unsolicited pat on the back. “I’m enjoying your columns,” Michelle told him. He was surprised she even knew him, but happily accepted the praise. He came from a family of non–sports fans and in that respect, Michelle became for Jay what she had long been for me—the familiar and comforting face in the amorphous collective otherwise known as his readership.
Jay and I met in the hospital lobby. On the way to her room, he asked me how Michelle had seemed when I had visited her last, what he might expect. “Actually, she was OK,” I said. But she was much less than that this time. It was obvious from the moment we sat down on opposite sides of the bed that the cancer was wasting no time. Her voice was weaker, scratchier. Her face had less color. She wasn’t very talkative, though she listened attentively and laughed along as Jay and I swapped newspaper war stories.
A doctor came by, telling Michelle that he and the staff were checking scans, trying to determine what the next steps might be.
“Steps?” she said. “No more steps.”
Michelle had obviously moved on from being “in a tizzy.” She was in the full-acceptance stage and made this exceedingly clear as we stood up to leave upon hearing that a couple of her children were on their way and she wouldn’t be alone for very long.
“I’ll see you again, Michelle,” Jay told her as he stepped toward the door.
Michelle shook her head.
“I
