In Case of Loss of Friend

In case of loss of friend, be prepared for what your body does and how your mind does not take control of the situation.

I have always thought that our minds and bodies are on one accord, that they are in a synchronistic pattern that cannot be easily disturbed. There is the beautiful symmetry with which they operate together. The mind says do this and the body does. For instance, look at pregnancy. The conscious mind does not know what is going on. But you better believe that the subconscious does; she commands and it is done! She says, “Make her period stop, her nipples hurt, layer that uterus. How about throwing in some nausea in the mornings? Afternoons too. That pee has got to get funkier than that,” and so on. The clues in the physical are put together by the conscious mind when a little red line appears and you sit on the john in disbelief. But you shouldn’t be in disbelief because you know what you did to get pregnant in the first place.

But things are different in case of loss of friend. There is a point where you are told. Your mind hears before the words are said and understands better than you think it ought for there is a primal sound emanating from your very core seconds after you are told. You have felt the words, not understood them. The phone drops. And you are wailing so loud and with such abandon that your child can only call to you weakly from another room, “Mom, what’s wrong? Mom, what’s wrong?”

And then, if you are like me, your mind is one place, in the ceiling, on top of your head, glancing down at your body as you writhe on the floor, clutching your stomach and saying things like, “Oh God, no.”

The mind is not involved in these antics of grief. It is a mere observer of the havoc the loss of a friend has gifted your life. But it does decide when the grief play should end. When you pick yourself off of the floor and reach for the phone to tell the caller that you will call back later, when you’ve had a chance to wipe the tears and snot from your face.

Second, be prepared to begin to tell everyone that will listen about this tragedy that has upended your life. There is an unreal-ness to everything and then there is the drama of the situation to contend with, the questions that make you cringe from people who make you cringe. “Who was piloting the plane? Are they going to sue?”

There is a quiet time involved in mourning. Personally, I took refuge in my bed with a pillowcase she had sent me right before she died. I remember opening the package and my husband making a face. My friend was a bohemian artist, who loved colors more than anything. I’ve counted no less than fifteen different colors in the pillowcase she sent me. Enough to make my husband, who only started to believe in non-white walls, nervous. Here was a large, yellow lipped fish whose body somehow morphed into a tree which really looked like a martini, (the tree looked like a martini, not the fish). I could see his point before her death but now, not so much. Now, it holds a place of honor as the very last thing friendship and love from her sent to me. Now it is an honored pillowslip, stuffed with a new pillow and treasured for its inability to fit in with any other thing in my entire house.

But instead of telling you of the pillowslip, I need to tell you about the silence and then the big overflow that runs from your mind into your body and then out of your lips. There is a dazed period where you do all the things you used to do, shop; go the salon; get your car washed; pick the kids up from school. But then as time passes, there is an insidious urge to tell people. They must know certain facts: it was a horrific accident; she almost didn’t go; your last conversation; her just retiring less than a year ago; the first time you met. All right, I have to digress because I need to tell you about how we first met.

How we met

It was summer in Florida and I was pregnant with my second baby. I was offered a job that I tried to refuse but the Boss (big attorney lady in charge and although my friend to this day not the friend who died), wouldn’t let me. So I made the rounds on my first day at work and met my friend to be. The Boss asks my permission to tell my new worker buddies that I am with child, (Boss is a delicate lady who has never been married and she uses terms like “with child” but she can also use the “F” word with delicious skill on a bad day). It’s okay I told her. Permission granted.

The next day, Kathy brings me a bag that she sits on top of credenza and tells me that she has cleaned her closets out and here are some maternity clothes that maybe I can use. I know I didn’t thank her. I was surprised. And, I wasn’t grateful either. In those days, eleven years ago, I was still about the black and white of a situation. I was no charity case. And, because I was (and still am for that matter, last I looked), black and sensitive to certain things like being given second hand clothes from a white woman, I tried to sense something more than was intended by the gift giver. I huffed.

I took the bag home not being able to huff overmuch at work because I was new in the office and wanted to keep my job. I took the dresses out. Not one of them fit over my breasts. Another reason to have my ire fanned. Kathy had been an anorexic pregnant woman to boot!

Don’t ask me how my fanned ire or her bountifulness became friends but we did. Perhaps it was long risky lunch breaks, or the beautiful, healthy, copper skinned baby born to me and released from the hospital long before I was and the visits she made to my room, sitting on my bed, making me smile, or one beautiful rendition of a black angel with red wings that she made herself, that now sits at the entryway to my home so that if anyone asks I can say my best friend made it for me, the one that died in a dreadful accident. There are so many things that happened over the years to seal our friendship. You don’t know how you come to love others but you do and when they leave, it hurts.

Overflow

But getting back to overflow. You are quiet at first and then you begin to tell everyone, even anonymous people on discussion boards how much you miss and love your friend. And, then you get corny and sentimental. You tell people to call their friends, their very best friends and tell them that you love them. Don’t let an hour go by you urge. Make sure that the people you love know they are loved. I knew I was loved. I got the fish pillowslip didn’t I? And the patterned socks from Slovenia. The silver cross from Arizona. The Mother’s Day card she’d made herself with glitter, feathers, pom-poms and a black turbaned woman on the front. Not many people can claim that they’ve received such a wonderful, colorful gifts from their friends, can they? In return I sent her a Jill Scott CD so she and her husband could get their grove on, a joke book with stupid lawyer jokes; a belly dancing guide to satisfy her urge to dance that she told me was stifled when she was a baby; Italian songs on tape because Italy was her most favorite place to visit and topaz beads because they reminded me of her eyes. So many other things we exchanged. Every room in my house is lit with her essence, her thoughts of us, her other family.

Third, and here’s the big catch, the selfish one, the one that burns. In case of loss of friend, be prepared to not want any one else to become close to you again. Oh yes, you have met some new people and they are all good but forgive me. Let me be blunt. They have no institutional knowledge. They have not slipped away from the office on a New Year’s Eve to enjoy drinks at the Hurricane and walk the beach with you, have they? They have not taken a day off in the middle of the week to go to the spa to get their necks rejuvenated, have they? Have they ever been late back from lunch with you and backed into a pole thus leaving a dent the size of Arkansas on their back fender? No, they have not. So, you know, that as much as you might enjoy your new friends, there can’t possibly be someone else to fill place of an old friend. Like that series where the ex-wife is called “Old Christine.” Yes, the man has got “New Christine” but shit, he is always near the old one – a tie that can’t be broken, an unfulfilled promise. My “old Christine” was supposed to be with me.

But the something that I want to tell you that other people will not tell you is that the loss of a friend, an old and trusted friend, can not be assuaged, not even by the keeping of a husband, an old and valuable husband.

He hugs me, he kisses me, he holds my hand. But he didn’t love her like I loved her and that’s the rub. You will not be able to fully articulate to a spouse or to anyone else for that matter, all of the memories that can’t be shared with any one else. There is loss.

Deep. Impenetrable. Absolute.

Ah, in case of loss of friend, swallow, cry, take a deep breath and live again. That’s what they will tell you. And, perhaps that’s what I’ll do. Not now, but in a little while.

I memory of my friend - Kathleen C. Freeble, she was an attorney for the VA as well as an artist. You wouldn't be able to find any samples of her work because she always gave stuff away and as talented as she was, art was mostly a hobby for her. She and her husband and a friend of theirs, Freddie, were flying to North Carolina in a small plane and it crashed. This happened on May 26.