When I was a child, I had two best friends, one boy best friend and one girl best friend and because they were in different categories of girl and boy, I thought I could have two with no conflict. The boy, M, lived on my street and raced me in the woods, and taught me to ride my bike over a rocky cliff and secretly held my hand during sleep overs. The girl, D, ignited my imaginative, mischievous side. We played pranks on our families, devised ways to make money, and wrote elaborate plays we would force the neighborhood children to perform. When I moved away at thirteen, M did not write to me, did not visit me, did not call me, and so he remains a child in my head. D and I remain friends to this day.
Within the last month both of these best friends has lost a parent, and although we are now adults, we are on the youngish side of having parents who are the age to die. Which I find terrifying and confusing. It insights in me an anxiety I haven’t felt since I was a child and thought the loss of my parents would have left me orphaned. I played Little Orphan Annie with my sister a lot, but we could get off our hard closet shelf beds anytime and go hug my mom and get a snack.
When I found out about the M’s mother, I wanted to go to the memorial, but I worried that because I’d moved away from our hometown and had barely seen him since, there would be too much focus on me from the other children-now-adults who we grew up with. When I run into people from my childhood who all pretty much remained in the town after I left, my presence is perplexing and attended too. Funerals are for the living, but not in that way. I could not reconcile the appropriateness of going to support a person who I loved as a child with the fact that I hadn’t seen him in almost thirty years.
For my D, I will attend anything and all things, because I practically lived in her house, and my children know her children, and that is clearly the thing to be done.
We have been best friends ever since we were eight and she shared her grapes with me at lunch. And sometimes we weren’t best friends, but just friends, and now she is like family. For the last three days since she called to tell me about her dad, a man whose nighttime habit of watching tv registered in my bones the way my own parents’ proclivities have, I have thought of her in a swirling repetitiveness that leaves me confused and useless. I am crushed for her, but not crushed with her, because I still have both my parents, and I do not know what to do with the fact that every time I say, How are you? Or what do you need? I mean, Because you’ve lost your father, and I fear that the rest of the sentence which gets implied is: which I have not.
When people die there is so much to do, and yet, after the plans are set, there is nothing to do but wait. The children still need to be fed, and taken to the park, and the car still needs gas. Time creeps on where its slowness is threaded with boredom, and then feels as if it has evaporated or never existed at all. There are gaps of time that need to be filled and so much to do in the circling of your brain. Or maybe that’s just projection.
But I keep thinking of her and I want to reach out, but I worry about being an imposition. I worry that I will create the expectation that she pay attention to me when I am supposed to be paying attention to her. I don’t want to call, I don’t want her to feel like she needs to spend the time that is both careening and flailing by soothing my emotional needs under the guise of letting me be there for her.
I send a few texts, quick hellos that don’t require anything from her, but in this case texts seem so impersonal and inappropriate, so distancing, that I almost hate myself for doing it. And what if she’s in a blissful moment of not thinking about her loss and mine is the text that reminds her? The world will be full of harsh and accidental reminders, but I don’t want to be the one to cause them. Still, I don’t call, because I don’t want to impose and then I chastise myself for not understanding the etiquette of death by my age. Do I send flowers? Do I bake them bread? Why have I not driven to her house and thrown my arms around her?
People can give me the run down of what is traditional to do all they want, but it’s hard for me not to worry if this is the right thing to be done.
I try to think about what I would want. Probably some mixture of constant support and being left alone, a random and unpredictable weaving of not having to take care of even the small task by myself and simultaneously, not being treated like anything has changed. I would want support now, in the days before the funeral. But I would need them later when the world says the healing is supposed to be done.
That post-funeral world, that is one I can understand. That is an etiquette I live and breathe. The messy liminal space where time is not one thing or another, where meaning is between two defined moments in history, but is not a place in history. A cyclical thinker in my regular life, I find it natural to sit and listen to the same elegiac reckonings again and again like a reflector ticking around with the turn of a bicycle tire. I still miss him. I love him. He was too young. I think about him still. Last night I dreamt he was there. Do you remember when?
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