on the death of a friend
“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” Virginia Woolf
dinner
A few weeks ago, I met a friend I see a couple of times a year.
“So, how are you?” he asked, after we’d exchanged hugs and hellos and settled into our chairs. The restaurant was cozy and warm, lit by candles and strings of tiny white lights.
I paused before answering. “It won’t last,” I said. “But at the moment, apart from all the sadness and craziness in the world, everything in my own life is fine. The kids are doing well. All my friends are ok. And my husband and parents are healthy. Right now, there’s no one I love who I have to worry about.” I felt uneasy as soon as I said it, despite the verbal knock on wood. “Tell me about you,” I said to my friend, taking a sip of wine.
Valentines Day
My friend Maude and I went out for a walk. I’d spent the morning in the kitchen baking heart-shaped cookies, basking in silence rather than listening to a book or a podcast, as I often do while cooking. In a couple of hours, I’d make shrimp scampi for dinner, my husband would come home, we’d pour Prosecco, sit in front of the fire, exchange funny cards. And in between, on a February day that held a promise of spring in the air, there was an hour to spend catching up with a friend.
As we turned and headed back to our cars that afternoon, Maude’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She pulled it out to check the text and saw the headline first. “There’s been another school shooting,” she said quietly. “In Florida.” We stood there in the woods for a moment, uncertain. Should we stop in our tracks, phones in hand, and seek out the details of this latest tragedy, or should we continue our walk, our plans for the day, our own ordinary lives?
We walked on, subdued by the knowledge that somewhere far from our quiet country trail, a horrifying, all too familiar drama was once again unfolding. Back at home, fixing dinner, I left the TV off. And later that night, curled up on the sofa next to my husband as the fire died down, I found myself conflicted again.
How are we to live in these times?
words
As a person who writes in order to figure out what I think, I’ve always found order and comfort in the slow, halting explorations that bring words to the page. Writing is my way of making some sense of things. But not lately.
I have been trying to write my way through the wake of seventeen more innocent people dead, of the NRA digging in, of our government in shambles, a president who seems unhinged, human beings slaughtered in senseless wars, our planet under assault, the unfathomable threat of nuclear annihilation.
I have been trying to write about the shock and sadness of losing a friend who was larger than life and dearer to me than I can begin to express. But I can’t do it. The very noun “friend” – so generic and flat, so casually assigned — is inadequate. She was more than that.
Writing, like reading, is a way to awaken myself to truth, painful as it may be. Writing creates a pathway upon which my heart and mind can meet and come into alignment. Writing deepens my awareness, creates intimacy, clarifies my intentions. Writing, I knit myself back together. In the past I’ve turned to words to mend and heal what is broken, to inspire me and to teach me what I need to know. At the moment, my faith in words is shaky.
Each time I turn on the evening news I’m reminded: words are a double-edged sword. They have the power to inflame as well as to inform, to separate as well as to connect. Words destroy alliances, fuel anger, and spread propaganda, fear, and falsehood. Used cruelly, words shame and alienate and bully.
And in the throes of grief, words fail.
There is something to be said for silence.
note
“Pretend I can spell, pretend I know how to punctuate, and anything that really doesn’t make sense, let me know and I’ll sort it out.”
She’d been sick, she said, and dictating took less energy than typing. But the autocorrect on her phone had a mind if its own and had stopped responding. Hence the random, nonsensical words sprinkled through her previous email, which she was attempting, with only moderate success, to fix in the second.
I could figure out what she meant pretty easily. But, despite forty-two years of ongoing conversation, I completely missed the message.
Here’s what doesn’t make sense: These were her last words to me. Two weeks later, she was gone.
coffee
I’d never had a taste for coffee before I arrived at college in the fall of 1976. Tory, who had lived in Paris and gone to high school in Munich, was a connoisseur at eighteen. We drank hundreds of cups of coffee, sitting across from each other at tables all over campus, all over town. These were pre-Starbucks days, back when a cup of coffee in a small New England restaurant was just a cup of coffee. Even so, we had our ritual. Tory would fill her mug to within half an inch of the rim. She would add cream, slowly, deliberately, till it formed a trembling, frangible skin just slightly higher than the top of the cup itself. And then, waving her arm as she launched into some story or other, she would bump her mug, sloshing a wave of hot coffee across the table. She did it every time. Even on the refill. Tory always believed there was just a little more room in the cup. I learned early on to take extra napkins.
timing
When I turned fifty-nine last October, I began thinking about things I wish to do before my sixtieth birthday. My goal was to arrive at that milestone without regret. There were no bucket-list adventures on the list I started keeping in a black notebook. But I had ideas: to spend more time with my parents, with my husband, with our kids. To say “yes” more often. To have more fun. To stay in closer touch with my friends. I wrote down the names of people I most wanted to see.
“Perhaps I should visit you and your studio in Santa Fe before it’s too late?” I wrote to Tory in January.
I did not know then that the flu she’d had all fall was not the flu. Or that the parasite she thought she’d picked up in Australia was not a parasite. I did not know she would not be moving to a new home this summer as planned.
I did not know that it was already too late.
news
The morning after having dinner with my friend, I awoke early and reached for my laptop. The first thing I saw was an email from someone whose name I didn’t recognize, with a subject whose name I did.
You must not come to Santa Fe, Cynde insisted a few hours later, when we finally spoke by phone and I told her I’d get on the next plane. Her voice was kind, but firm. Tory was no longer speaking much, but she had made her final wishes known – for solitude, for privacy.
“She says she’s not scared,” Cynde said. “And she doesn’t want anyone to see her this way. Not even you.”
quotes
“Write out of love or anger.” ~ Patty Dann
“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” ~ James Salter
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.” ~ Isak Dinesen
intention
I will try.
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