I need to call my friend’s partner and worry about the questions she will ask. First, I revisited our relationship starting from the end and then remembering the beginning. Luckily I did not call on these days for I remembered she would need to talk and I told myself, warned myself, to shut up and just listen because it was her time, her need. My grief has already passed. She is now just a feeling. When I thought she was just memories I tried to recall the time with her in detail. Yet I was limited to the memories reinforced by photos, the times of tears, and the moments of deepest suffering. To go beyond these memories was difficult and I could only bring forth a few more snippets of time. No, the memories too are gone. Just a feeling, a faint after glow and the knowledge that I loved her deeply is all that remains, that obsession had always been the best verb. She was the second greatest love of my life and before I met my husband, she was the love of my life.
I wish I had called on that day because now the sadness has invited its companion depression and I can feel its presence walking up the path. Soon it will be here for a visit and it is hard to put on a hostess smile when I see it has packed luggage for a long stay and is not just coming to visit for the evening or a rainy weekend. As my niece and her fiancé lock up the house, give me briefer hugs and goodbyes than I anticipated and drive away in the moving truck I close the door. It is just the cats, the blind bird, and my lover sadness and her unwelcome houseguest depression.
I think of only you when I wonder about the conversation with her partner. Is she already past shock? Has she entered grief? If so, she will want to know how to cure it and when it will be over.
I think of my brother‘s friend that we used to have family ski days with when we lived in Whistler. I never knew she had lost a little girl. We were standing in the snow in Whistler square. ‘The grief becomes a part of you’ she told me when after three winters I still believed it was something that would pass. If not the oft-quoted one year, and not then at three years, then five years must be how long it lasts. However, I see now that it is part of me like my gray hair and aging skin and the time before is no more attainable than the beauty of youth faded.
Do I tell her six months like the nephew of one of my widow friends told her? He had several losses close together. When my friend saw him a year later she told him he had lied. He said he knows that but it was what she needed to hear at the time. I can tell her it will last six months. Therefore, in time she will know me as a liar but be comforted now counting the days until the suffering ends.
Of course, it is not as bad. You must resign the loss as when you finally conclude that a treasured item is lost for good. The continued searching in the same places, the new places, and your mind, is futile.
It is lost: your soundboard, the smile that accepts your dreams, the ear that patiently waits for the hesitant confession of your fantasies, the arms that comfort, the thumb that smears the tear from your cheek, the warmth in your bed at night that absorbs all your fears and instinctively unites the tighter you wrap your body around it, the other that brings you all the happiness you need at the end of the day, the eyes that answer your unspoken thoughts, the hand that rests on your thigh at a family dinner and takes away the anger and hurt of decades, the lips that brush your forehead as the sun first softness the darkness and kisses away the nightmares to remind you that this is your life and you are loved.
How do I explain the journey of the last five years? When did I put down the backpack of rocks? When were the crushing bodice strings loosened so I could breathe again? When did I walk out of the deep water and each step become easier? How long was the walk through fire? How many times did I make the noise of a dying animal? When did I stop the moaning? How long after before I stopped sobbing, and as the waves became gentler, when did it become only crying, a more familiar response to sadness?
I should call tomorrow. I do not have an answer. I should just call to listen, maybe lie, and maybe give a response that is only an outline because she is just searching for the pill, the magic words, or the directions to end the pain that is only awakening.
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