It’s late on a Sunday afternoon. I’m sitting here at the kitchen table, the TV volume on silent, listening to the wind whip around the house. It’s not unlike the wind whipping through my mind.
A few days ago I lost a friend I’ve never met in person. We’ve never talked on the phone. You probably think this was an online friend. Well, kind of. We only communicated by text.
We were neighbors, as in, next door and not all that many yards away.
I haven’t left the house in over three years (unless you count ambulance rides); I don’t know if she did. We watched each others’ homes and if something looked wrong, we texted to make sure the other one was okay.
I’ve had first-responders and police over here far more often than she did. We were two out of three widows on this block. We had things in common that we didn’t explore, and oh how I wish we had.
In our too-short friendship, I found out what a generous, loving, and compassionate person she was. I can’t even put into words how much I’m going to miss her. She and her husband were awesome parents and grandparents, and friends to many, many people.
I miss someone I never met, and I’m homesick for somewhere I’ve never been. That would be Maine, but I’ll leave that for another column. I just wanted to give you some insight into grief, the kind that stays with a person for the rest of their life.
I felt a deeper grief than I’d previously known when a favorite aunt passed away in December of 2016. Gary and I couldn’t push through a sadness that lasted well over a year. As we began to see the light of day, Gary himself passed suddenly in March of 2018. It took me four years to pull myself from the depths of that despair. Just as I was beginning to feel like things might be bearable again, I was told something about our oldest son who had been missing for almost 20 years.
That news socked me in the heart and sent me reeling back to where I’d just come from. It was that night, March 8, 2022, when I had my first panic attack. I’ve had a few since.
I don’t know if you’ll believe me when I tell you that the four years of living in a world where every day seemed like a struggle to breathe prepared me for this latest blow, but trust me, it did.
I have so much more to tell you. More than anything, I’m hoping to share what has happened – with family, friends, and strangers who have come into my life and, in a few instances, suddenly left with no warning. But then you know that because it’s happened to you, too.
Here’s to new beginnings. Yes, new beginnings, even as we hold on tight to what we had. That’s what love does, right?
