Free The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow

before you can’t give it to me anymore,” she’d say to him, and for a while, he was able to answer her.
    He’d tell her things like: “When you see your kids, remember me.” Another time he told her: “Remember the things I did for you that made you happy, and do those things for your own children.”
    Marilyn found herself looking back at both her father’s life and her own. She tracked down that doctor in California, by then an old man, who had performed her dad’s vasectomy reversal. She sent him a simple friendly Christmas card, with no explanation about who she was, but he recognized her name and wrote back to her. He told her he recalled her father well, and even said that he remembered the day in April 1963 when she was born.
    By the time her dad got sick, Marilyn and her husband and kids (and her two sisters) had long lived near Minneapolis. She and her siblings convinced her parents to move there so they could help care for their father.
    Marilyn had made new friends in Minnesota, and they were kind and well-meaning women who would often ask how her dad was doing. But they knew him only as an old man with Alzheimer’s. They had no sense of him in his years as a doctor, when he mattered to his community, when he felt free to counsel Marilyn’s friends because he had cared for them all their lives—and because he cared about them.
    During the years her father was fading, Marilyn usually felt fairly strong. But when she would reunite with the girls from Ames, she felt surprisingly emotional. The first sight of them would bring her to tears. In time, she figured out why. They reminded her of her dad when he was vigorous and in his prime. Whenever she talked to Jane, who became a college psychology professor in Massachusetts, they could return together in their minds to the McCormacks’ summer house on Lake Minnewaska in Minnesota.
    In his final years, Dr. McCormack’s lucid moments became rarer and rarer. Still, there were flashes of exuberance that reminded his loved ones of who he had been. One day he was in the car, and Marilyn’s mom was driving and talking to him. She was so engaging and, as always in his eyes, so beautiful. He smiled and stopped her, mid-sentence. Then he spoke to her wistfully but firmly: “You’re a fascinating woman. But I’m married.”
    Dr. McCormack died in Minneapolis in June 2004. He was seventy-nine. Marilyn’s new friends from Minnesota offered their condolences, gave her hugs, wished her well, and told her they’d be there for her. She appreciated that.
    But the girls from Ames—their condolences were so different. It was as if they hardly had to share any words with Marilyn. “Her new friends, they didn’t get it,” says Jane. “They might have met Dr. McCormack in his last few years, but they didn’t know the real man, the man he was. And we did. We knew him as this completely phenomenal human being. And so we knew. We knew what Marilyn had lost.”

3
    Karla
    K arla is cranky. For starters, it’s too loud for her. The other girls are chattering away, getting caught up on each other’s life and children, laughing long and hard—and loud, so loud. For Karla, this reunion at Angela’s is sensory overload.
    She’s also not getting enough sleep. Most of the other girls are staying up late, talking and talking, dragging her into their conversations. Because the reunion will last only four days, some of them see sleep as a waste of precious time. Karla, on the other hand, needs her rest in order to function.
    “Let me go to bed,” she says every hour or so, starting at ten P.M. But her protestations are ignored. The others figure, and they’re not all wrong, that she doesn’t really want to go to sleep, either. She’d miss too much. (Besides, as Cathy jokes: “The fear of being talked about will keep you up.” Jenny, who got to the reunion eighteen hours after everyone else, called ahead: “Don’t talk about me until I get there.”)
    Karla apologizes