Losing People - Part 2

 

"I'll sleep for you and you can walk for me." Those were the last words my friend Mardy spoke to me from North Dakota. I was in Geneva, Switzerland. She was facing surgery after an accident and I was exhausted after chemo and radiation. 

I survived. 

She didn't.

We became friends in high school some 53 years before when an adorable boy tried dating both of us. We decided we liked each other better than him. Neither the width of a continent nor the Atlantic ocean dimmed our bond over the decades.

Our friendship took us through life's pains and joys and everything in between. It extended to her family. 

When I had problems at home, I would camp out with her family. Her father would never let a father and daughter event go by without taking me. I was estranged from my own at the time.

When I was getting a divorce, her mother would visit at least once a week to make sure I was okay. She often brought beautiful baby clothes for Llara from the Unitarian charity shop where she volunteered. 

Her parents gave Llara her first wagon. When I moved overseas and went back to Reading for a visit, Mardy's father would shake his head in wonder and pride about me and how, "A Little Girl From Reading" went on to travel the world and write.

In our busy adult lives and lived in the Boston area we couldn't always get together as much as we wanted. Her work included research with the mentally retarded. We celebrated that her enlightened boss gave her credit for any paper they worked on together and was published. She cheered me on as my jobs got better and better and more along the lines I wanted.

After too many postponed meals in Harvard Square, we decided to not temp fate by saying when and where we would meet. "Let's not eat at The Blue Pirate, Friday at seven." That seemed to work. My housemate would ask as I dressed to meet Mardy, "And where aren't you meeting her?"

We moaned over problems with men and husbands, work, divorce and women's problems with credit only because we were women. One time when we hadn't managed to contact each other for far too long and things in our lives had been running smoothly, I answered the phone. "I want you to know, I'm not just a foul weather friend," she said.

Walking in the woods behind her parents' Maine cabin we picked and ate blackberries. "This is like an ad with two women talking about tampons," she said. So...we talked about tampons pretending we were being filmed. 

I loved visiting her Boston apartment which she furnished with second hand or found and refinished everything. It would have made a fantastic spread in any decorating magazine. 

Once in Geneva I received a can of potato sticks. I didn't need a card. I knew she was the sender, a reminder of all the times we ate potato sticks and played gin rummy when Llara was a baby and I was sad about my upcoming divorce. By the time she left after one of these sessions, I was never sad.

A passionate needlepointer, she passed the passion onto my daughter, giving her a lifelong hobby. I look at my daughter's walls covered with Llara's work and my own needlepoint gifts from my daughter and love flows for both women like a tsunami.

No blog, no article, no book can recount all the ways that this woman was woven into my own life. Writing this, I tear up thinking how she left $10,000 to my daughter for grad school. 

They say, it is possible to put a cover over the grief hole left by losing someone precious. Sometimes it is necessary to remove that cover as a reminder, not of the grief, but of all the shared memories that brought such richness into a life.