It’s hard for me to think about what happened six
years ago and make sense of it. Looking back most of everything that happened
during those three days in the hospital is, for the most part, a total blur.
Yet each year when the anniversary of my mother’s death rolls around, I can’t
help but think about time. How much has passed. How I can’t believe it’s
been so long since I’ve seen her. I feel compelled to write about it but in all
honesty there’s nothing left to tell. It happened, a story of loss that’s
common to many. Sure it’s a story that will keep unfolding in its
own private way inside my heart forever - but the rest? Well, we keep going.
Yet the other side of the story I’ve never told is the story
of my friends. The people who, unlike my mother, still remain.
In the wake of hearing the news that my mother had been in a car accident and was lying in
a hospital bed in a coma, my friends showed up within hours. People came up
from New York City and Washington DC. They flew in from Wisconsin, drove
down from Boston. Friends old and new, some who knew my mother and some who didn’t.
Memories of what happened while we waited to see how that story was going to end, (the
one that would tell whether my mother was going to live or die), appear and
disappear from my mind. At times they’re perfectly clear and I remember what I
was wearing, what I said, who was there, what she looked like lying in that bed
with machines attached to her. Yet there
are other times when I try to summon those days from my past, and I can’t
remember anything at all. It’s all just darkness. Like it wasn’t even real.
And then this week as the anniversary of her death was approaching, something came to me. It was a flash of
clarity from what has now become a chain of events that unfolded so quickly that at the time I could hardly process anything. I saw my closest friends from high school, the six people I used to do everything with, all sitting
around the kitchen table in the house where I grew up. I don’t remember what we
were doing exactly, but I remember they were all there, these people I’d known
since I was in junior high, some even as far back as kindergarten. There they
were. And over the long days that followed they would go home to sleep only to return
the next day.
I remembered one night it was snowing, and we all went for a walk illuminated
by nothing but the soft glow of the moon shining against the white blanket beneath our feet. And my heart was hurting, and my head was in disbelief, but
there they were, walking alongside me. And they were okay with the fact that
sometimes I would talk and sometimes I wouldn’t. Sometimes I would cry, or
shut down. Sometimes one of them would make me laugh, and I would manage a smile.
I had known for a long time that I was lucky to have such
good friends, people who knew me throughout all the different iterations of who
I’d been over the years and still cared. But this was big. Because sure, they
stuck by me through the awkwardness of adolescence, the drama of high school,
the harder truths of college and beyond. But death? Is anyone ever ready to
deal with that?
And then I realized –these people already knew. This group of young men and women
had already been there. Because these people I’m still friends
with today I was friends with at eighteen, and at eighteen one of our group, his father died
suddenly of a heart attack just a few weeks shy of us graduating high school. BAM! Just like that, we grew up.
So just five years later when we were twenty-three and it was my parent who died, they were ready. And there is something irreplaceable about this being the last
group of people in my life who will know my mother. Over the years she’d hug
them when they’d show up at our house. She’d pick them up at school
dances, and the movies before we could drive. She’d have them over for dinner, ask
about their love lives, how their band was doing, their parents, what their
plans were after high school, what their plans were after college.
It’s
strange for me to think about how everyone I’ve met since I came to New York
will never know her. How every person I’ll meet from this day forward won’t
know who she was, won’t know the kind of person I was before I lost her, had to
bury her, and everything changed. But I know that’s okay because this is what happens. This is
how the story goes. And the older we get the more, unfortunately, we're going to have to deal with it.
What’s important however, is
knowing that you have people who will be there. People who will drop everything and get on a plane or train just to hold you, cry with you, try to make you
laugh. What matters is that there are people who reach out to you every year on
the anniversary of your mother’s death (even now, six years later), just to tell
you they’re thinking about you. That they love you. That they’re there if you
need anything as you take time to reflect, remember, and remind yourself to
keep going.
This calls to mind one of my favorite Walt Whitman quotes,
a poet whose words from The Leaves of
Grass have gotten me through the darkest of times. “I have learned that to
be with those I like is enough,” he wrote. For me, I have learned that to be
with those I love is enough, because that, I believe, is life. It’s quick this time we have here, and in the whole scheme
of things we’re nothing more than a speck, a mere flash in what is the vast
scope of the universe. The history books will not record many of us, and our
deaths will not be mentioned on the evening news or in slideshows at the
Academy Awards. We will end our lives much the same way we came in, significant
only to those who knew us. Knew us as mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers,
husbands, wives. As friends. That’s how we live on long after we’ve become fading
newspaper obituaries, and dates on crumbling tombstones.
Whenever I start to lose hope and question everything and
want to hug my mother so much it makes it difficult to breathe, one truth repeats
through my head like a mantra. It’s what I know to be the most important thing
in the world, what will always be there to keep me going no matter what: the people,
the people, the people. Always.
And let me tell you, I'm lucky to know some of the best.
