This morning when I awakened, I heard the wind. Our house is a gorgeous updated house, but 70's style it remains--you can tell in the long narrow windows in our bedrooms, set up rather too high. I could only see the tops of the trees bending and tossing. Even now, the wind just blew open the door. It wails in the cold chimney.
I lay in bed, and for a moment, I thought of nothing. Then regret settled over me again. This is not a peaceful feeling. It makes you feel as if you are on the edge of panic, like a giant cat huddling in the shadows has been watching you, waiting for your guard to go down just a little, so it can spring onto your chest and dig in its claws.
Regret. What an awful thing it is. It whispers lies that are easy to believe, lies that say you could have stopped what happened. That you could have done so much more. That you didn't understand the illness well enough but you should have.
Regret robs you of grieving the person you lost. It holds a wavy mirror of horror up to your face, and everything is distorted. It makes you obsess over yourself and your own shortcomings.
It is, I realized this morning, as I struggled through getting ready for the day, a way of holding on. A way of not letting go.
There has been plenty of spiritual talk over our friend, and that has helped--most of it, anyway. But the sweetest release, the sweetest thing I have said is simply, "I have lost a friend. And I miss her."
Those words are the simplest ones, and like most simple, unadorned words, they are the best ones and the truest ones. I have lost a friend. I am sad. I miss her.
Oh, God, I miss her. She is all over our house, in the beautiful green bowls on the bookcase beside my desk. In the teapot and blue pitcher, glazed with such an eye for elegance and simplicity. She is in the collage hanging by our front door, in the flowers she picked and dried from our garden when we lost our community in Pennsylvania. She glued them over a photograph of our big red house, and on the top she stenciled, "Welcome." After we settled in Washington, she gave us that framed picture, and I cried, because it recognized what we had lost--our dear house and garden, our friends and jobs--and what we still had--our family, the ability to welcome others in a new place.
She is in the painting at the top of our stairs, of the red trees dancing against a starry blue sky. We were packing up her apartment in Seattle just a month ago, and I told her I thought the painting was lovely. An hour later, she gave it to me, along with a small box full of pottery that she casually mentioned she had made. She didn't want to keep much for herself, though we kept insisting she keep things. She wanted to travel light. I wrapped all her dishes and taped up boxes and I kept imagining where she would open the boxes again, without me this time, but with good people, in the next good place--Montana. Graduate school.
Up the stairs in our house, and she is there again, in the magazines stacked at my beside table, which she asked to borrow on Thanksgiving. In the dream-catchers she made for us a month ago hanging at our bedroom window. She had to argue with the woman in charge to make three dream catchers instead of the allotted one, and had some choice fighting words for her. Natalie could stand up for herself and could take people down with her tongue. But for those she loved, she was endlessly sensitive and tender. And funny. And so generous. Her wooden mat on our bathroom floor; "Who wants this?" she asked as we packed up her apartment that day. I did. She heaped things on us, things she didn't want, things that she wanted to travel light without. She gave away so much, to whomever wanted it, though we kept cautioning her to hold onto things, because she would want them again. But she was determined to whittle, and she did: she was going to pack everything in a small U-Haul and go to grad school.
She sent us her poems, all of them, her best ones and her worst ones, and we were supposed to go through them and help her prepare her portfolio. I still have not opened the document, because I have not been ready. Nor have I enjoyed going into the garage, which I spent hours converting into a bedroom for her during a week and a half transition from Seattle to Edmonds. Charley couldn't stand another dog in the house, and we didn't want a dog fight between him and Pickle, so we needed a door that could close. So I painted the floor and walls around the window, cleared space, put down a big red rug and a heater so it would be cozy and toasty-warm, set up a chair and a guitar, a large makeshift desk in case she wanted to write or paint or just be, a chair for her, a verse pinned to the bulletin board which I found later when I packed up her things at my parents' house last week. The bedroom there still smells like her. After the memorial service, I looked under the bed and found her glasses, her new glasses, pink frames because she said they made her feel happy.
Her time with us was simple--we ate together, took walks together, drank lots of tea, watched TV, talked and talked and talked. Her time here was complicated. We didn't understand, nor could we understand. We cheered and heaped positivity on her the way she heaped her belongings on us. We were all giving gifts in the best way we knew how.
My phone is so quiet. It is bereft of her texts, her texts about something she was reading or thinking or struggling through. Her mind was never quiet. It always buzzed, with some memory or new idea or song. Last week I sent her a final message, telling her that I had the pumpkin pie leftovers and I wish she could share them, since she'd finished my piece on Thanksgiving because I was greedy and took too much and it was such good pie. And then I erased all the messages on my phone. I don't know how to deal with something like this. It is an unmapped road for me.
And now, regret. It is not real grieving to regret, because it leads me into tunnels of myself, not into memories of my friend. I know: regret is destructive and must be treated as such. In time I will learn how to be by myself without it. Even today as I sat in the car after dropping off the girls, sipping black tea, listening to a rollicking piece by Chopin and watching the wind flatten the trees outside, I remembered to look outside myself, to see beauty. It's what she would have wanted us to do.
So simply, today: I miss my friend. She is gone and I am having a hard time letting her go. I love her. I miss her. Enough.
I lay in bed, and for a moment, I thought of nothing. Then regret settled over me again. This is not a peaceful feeling. It makes you feel as if you are on the edge of panic, like a giant cat huddling in the shadows has been watching you, waiting for your guard to go down just a little, so it can spring onto your chest and dig in its claws.
Regret. What an awful thing it is. It whispers lies that are easy to believe, lies that say you could have stopped what happened. That you could have done so much more. That you didn't understand the illness well enough but you should have.
Regret robs you of grieving the person you lost. It holds a wavy mirror of horror up to your face, and everything is distorted. It makes you obsess over yourself and your own shortcomings.
It is, I realized this morning, as I struggled through getting ready for the day, a way of holding on. A way of not letting go.
There has been plenty of spiritual talk over our friend, and that has helped--most of it, anyway. But the sweetest release, the sweetest thing I have said is simply, "I have lost a friend. And I miss her."
Those words are the simplest ones, and like most simple, unadorned words, they are the best ones and the truest ones. I have lost a friend. I am sad. I miss her.
Oh, God, I miss her. She is all over our house, in the beautiful green bowls on the bookcase beside my desk. In the teapot and blue pitcher, glazed with such an eye for elegance and simplicity. She is in the collage hanging by our front door, in the flowers she picked and dried from our garden when we lost our community in Pennsylvania. She glued them over a photograph of our big red house, and on the top she stenciled, "Welcome." After we settled in Washington, she gave us that framed picture, and I cried, because it recognized what we had lost--our dear house and garden, our friends and jobs--and what we still had--our family, the ability to welcome others in a new place.
She is in the painting at the top of our stairs, of the red trees dancing against a starry blue sky. We were packing up her apartment in Seattle just a month ago, and I told her I thought the painting was lovely. An hour later, she gave it to me, along with a small box full of pottery that she casually mentioned she had made. She didn't want to keep much for herself, though we kept insisting she keep things. She wanted to travel light. I wrapped all her dishes and taped up boxes and I kept imagining where she would open the boxes again, without me this time, but with good people, in the next good place--Montana. Graduate school.
Up the stairs in our house, and she is there again, in the magazines stacked at my beside table, which she asked to borrow on Thanksgiving. In the dream-catchers she made for us a month ago hanging at our bedroom window. She had to argue with the woman in charge to make three dream catchers instead of the allotted one, and had some choice fighting words for her. Natalie could stand up for herself and could take people down with her tongue. But for those she loved, she was endlessly sensitive and tender. And funny. And so generous. Her wooden mat on our bathroom floor; "Who wants this?" she asked as we packed up her apartment that day. I did. She heaped things on us, things she didn't want, things that she wanted to travel light without. She gave away so much, to whomever wanted it, though we kept cautioning her to hold onto things, because she would want them again. But she was determined to whittle, and she did: she was going to pack everything in a small U-Haul and go to grad school.
She sent us her poems, all of them, her best ones and her worst ones, and we were supposed to go through them and help her prepare her portfolio. I still have not opened the document, because I have not been ready. Nor have I enjoyed going into the garage, which I spent hours converting into a bedroom for her during a week and a half transition from Seattle to Edmonds. Charley couldn't stand another dog in the house, and we didn't want a dog fight between him and Pickle, so we needed a door that could close. So I painted the floor and walls around the window, cleared space, put down a big red rug and a heater so it would be cozy and toasty-warm, set up a chair and a guitar, a large makeshift desk in case she wanted to write or paint or just be, a chair for her, a verse pinned to the bulletin board which I found later when I packed up her things at my parents' house last week. The bedroom there still smells like her. After the memorial service, I looked under the bed and found her glasses, her new glasses, pink frames because she said they made her feel happy.
Her time with us was simple--we ate together, took walks together, drank lots of tea, watched TV, talked and talked and talked. Her time here was complicated. We didn't understand, nor could we understand. We cheered and heaped positivity on her the way she heaped her belongings on us. We were all giving gifts in the best way we knew how.
My phone is so quiet. It is bereft of her texts, her texts about something she was reading or thinking or struggling through. Her mind was never quiet. It always buzzed, with some memory or new idea or song. Last week I sent her a final message, telling her that I had the pumpkin pie leftovers and I wish she could share them, since she'd finished my piece on Thanksgiving because I was greedy and took too much and it was such good pie. And then I erased all the messages on my phone. I don't know how to deal with something like this. It is an unmapped road for me.
And now, regret. It is not real grieving to regret, because it leads me into tunnels of myself, not into memories of my friend. I know: regret is destructive and must be treated as such. In time I will learn how to be by myself without it. Even today as I sat in the car after dropping off the girls, sipping black tea, listening to a rollicking piece by Chopin and watching the wind flatten the trees outside, I remembered to look outside myself, to see beauty. It's what she would have wanted us to do.
So simply, today: I miss my friend. She is gone and I am having a hard time letting her go. I love her. I miss her. Enough.
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