Part 20: Grief Revisited

How soon is too soon to get back to life after losing a friend? 

Ethan-Jonah and I both lost friends tragically  over the holidays and are walking around only partially engaging in life, and only perfunctorily engaging with each other and the rest of the crew that we are sequestered with. I want to be a good role model. And I’m probably failing. 

The thing about grief: it has no roadmap.

Even if we have experience with it, grief is dodgy enough that it is qualitatively different every time. And we are lost. 

I am thinking – I have lost friends before, but always far away friends, or friends from long ago. I felt sad. I wept. I looked through old pictures. 

But this friend – thanks to messaging apps, I spoke to a lot. Almost every day. We had a large group of very close friends in common. All in England. He was my lifeline to them, as not many of them are as good at keeping in touch as we are. 

We were. 

When we talked it was almost always about the boys first. He had an insatiable interest in how they were doing with school and work and love. And I have so many boys that there was almost always news. Then he would fill me in on the doings of the “Family” which is what we call the tight knit group of close friends who live in London. A group to which I am a peripheral member, because I don’t live in England. My visits to London are always all about the “Family” – we have known each other since childhood or at the very least, our teenage years. We were all singers and actors once. Some of us went pro and still perform. We have between us, a million memories of shared music and performance and shenanigans. And we have rituals that we repeat whenever we see each other, on my trips to London. At my rabid insistance, we always sing. Simone-Marie  and I always have dinner alone at least once. Nigel arranges parties and he and I have our customary wine fueled heart-to-heart talks until the wee hours. Stuart and I go to the theatre. CJ and I haunt museums and blues bars. Either alone or with boys in tow. Nigel always says, when I return home, “the family is getting some much needed rest now that you have gone.” 

Next time the rituals will be different. 

I can’t even begin to contemplate “next time.” 

And a voice in my head says there will not be a “next time.” 

What a selfish, self-involved , self-flagellating thought.

Of course there will be a “next time,” but we will be forever changed and nothing will be the same.

There was not much news to share recently as life came to a grinding halt with the shut down. But we still checked in. Almost every day. Even if it was two lines of text or a two minute call. 

With one exception- the last days of last month. The last days of his time here.

I was fully engaged in head-on Christmas preparation mode. The boys were headed home one by one and construction on the ground floor was still being completed the day before Christmas Eve. When the furniture was moved back in that day, there was a mad scramble to get the tree and presents back downstairs, throw up a few decorations, finish cleaning, baking, food prep, making sure the rooms and beds were ready for the boys, helping with their wrapping. It would be the first time we had been all together since March, and the last time before who knew when again. I no longer have aspirations for “perfect” – but it needed to be as special as my means and energy stores would allow, while keeping perspective and managing expectations. And it was. Perfectly imperfect. 

Meanwhile, in London, my friend was ill with Covid and I was completely unaware. 

I don’t think I will ever recover from the guilt of that. 

Every year, for years and years, we wished each other a happy Christmas on the day itself. He would throw legendary Christmas parties and would call me during, so I could speak to our friends. This year there was no party. And on Christmas Day he didn’t call because he was so ill. And I didn’t call, because my head was filled with Cornish hens and trifle and finding the napkin rings.

The day of the night he would die, I got his Christmas card. And I thought: I need to let him know it finally got here. This shutdown era mail is so slow. But my head immediately filled with making dinner because my household of six had become seven, with the arrival of Timothy’s girlfriend, and I missed the opportunity. 

And I am beyond sad. 

At this loss. At my failure to be there. At my inability to rewind time. At my inability to make things turn out any way other than the way they did. 

Adolescents have this thing they do. It’s a unique experience fallacy. 

Because they are by nature self-involved, coupled with inexperienced, and tripled with immature, they see themselves as experiencing a particularly unique journey, with little awareness that others have felt as they feel, and have done as they have done. They are barely aware either, of those on a different path, with wants and needs and loves and hurt of their own. It’s a developmental stage and they usually outgrow it to become people with a certain degree of compassion and empathy and honest introspection. 

At pivotal moments in my life though, I feel like I regress. 

I see the world only through my particular personal experience, with my vision skewed by sadness. 

And not just sadness either. Shortly after the birth of my first child, I had a surreal experience. I was at the mall with my mother and my baby, and i was struck, as I saw droves of people hurrying about, throngs of teenagers and happy families with children exhibiting different degrees of misbehavior, amid the noise and chaos of Castleton Mall at Christmastime, and had a sudden realization. A momentous thing had happened to me, personally. And not to the world. These masses of people neither knew nor cared that my life had been forever changed. That I had survived a precarious delivery and was now a mother to this perfect human. But I did see another new mother, with a young baby in a stroller, also in The Limited, also probably looking for leggings and tunics to accommodate post-pregnancy corpulence . We looked at each other, this girl and I, for one beat longer than is socially acceptable. We didn’t smile. Maybe she was coming to the realization too, that this brazen world had carried on in indifference, while unspeakable things had been done to her body as she made a human and changed life as she knew it, forever.

And so it is, for me, in grief.

The sun, when it manages to shine in Indiana winter, does so much too extravagantly bright for my liking. What birds remain after the smart ones fly south, sing too loudly, and mock me with their song. Life goes on too much and too fast. It refuses to slow down. It refuses to wait for me to catch up. In the three weeks since he left, the world changed, and he wasn’t here to see it. 

The lesson then, and I suppose there must always be a damned lesson, is that grief is a lonely traveller. But while life continues when we hop off the treadmill to follow that path for a bit, our place is marked, and waiting for us to slide back into our spot, and rejoin the race when ready. And in the mean time, the obnoxious birds will keep calling outside our window, and the equally obnoxious sun will continue to shine too brightly, reminding us that the world anticipates we will be joining it again, soon enough. 

Because that is the way of it.

We grieve, and then, inevitably, we go on.

Even if we are limping. 

Even if our heart is bruised.

I miss my friend.