I could probably write a hundred different things with this title. A thousand, maybe.
But this is about a special friend I had since childhood. Today would have been her birthday.
I have been fortunate to have a people in my life who I befriended earlier in my life stay friends through my life. L. was one of them. I don’t remember how old we were when I first met her, I don’t remember it at all. It could have been four or five. I really don’t know.
Of course there have been gaps here and there in our friendship. L. left Canada fairly early in our adult lives as I did myself much shorter period of time, and we lost touch. But social media grew and reconnected us, and we remained in touch ever since. When she came back home to visit family and we got together, it was almost like no time had passed. A connection between two souls, a recognition.
But since she died close to two years ago as a result of her health problems, things changed. I have struggled to make sence of my feelings and my choices, and her choices.
Movies often portray approaching death in a way that indicates we all develop a wiser understanding and learn to forgive and repair just before death. While I am sure this is the case for some, and I have witnessed first hand that some grievances stay grievances, that there is no wise understanding, no life-affirming forgiveness, some things just stay broken.
Deep down, in the heart of my less evolved self, I’ve been mad at L. for – as I saw it – a kind of giving up or giving in. That’s just one of the things I’ve been mad about. I should state right now, that was my perception. Not reality. I don’t know what the reality was. Also, the use of the word “mad” (not crazy). But a word I would have used as a kid to describe angry, but not as angry as angry. And maybe appropriate since the true amount of time I spent with her was not as an adult but as a child.
It’s not at all fair to her that I feel this way. And having gone through my husband’s cancer and death, and maybe also in having kids, it really should have been a lesson I learned, and clearly I didn’t: a person’s life is clearly a deeply personal journey that only they themselves can live and take responsibility for. To some degree we can influence that, but we cannot live anyone’s lives for them, we can’t possibility deeply understand what it’s like for them, the hidden forces that drive them. We don’t even know ourselves that well.
Perhaps I don’t like to think of this because it makes me feel that existential loneliness that I try, at times desperately, to keep at bay. Instead it’s easier to stay on the surface and just be mad and judge them, and judge yourself for being mad and judgey.
But part of what I was angry about — though I couldn’t have articulated it clearly at the time — was the sense that chose not to take action based on a narrative she held about her situation. Not a narrative I could fully see or understand, and certainly not one I was in a position to judge, but a way of framing things. A way of coping. I felt, rightly or wrongly, that it was a story that didn’t serve her, or at least not in the way I wished it would. I felt frustrated by it. Helpless in the face of it.
I started with wanting to write a tribute and then this frustration was what it seemed I was going to write about and did for a bit. But in the process of writing, while my mind was occupied with finding the write words to adequately express my thoughts and feelings, my subconscious had an opening to push through a realization was something about me: my choices, my story, and a feeling of having done something wrong – of being wrong. I realized my anger was not just anger, but that it had a function entirely separate from what I was actually angry about.
The anger was distracting me from paying attention to something that I was not able to really forgive myself for. Something I didn’t really want to admit to to myself because it was coming up against a carefully curated self-image that we all grow for ourselves.
She called me, I think – I don’t even remember. I should have called her back. I didn’t. At least for too long time.
It is sort of a minor thing – or maybe it would have been if she hadn’t been struggling. But that lack of choice came up against my values and who I believe myself to be as a person and a friend; reliable, caring, and wanting -trying – to do the right thing. Did I try? I didn’t.
When we can’t forgive ourselves, we often can’t fully take responsibility for it either. For me it my choice (or lack thereof) became a kind of a sort of “yes, but…” “I know I should have, but…” “I didn’t because…”. Over and over I justified my own lack of action. A kind of loop that would not get closed. I really didn’t want to look at it. Sometimes we do look at the things we judge ourselves for, and then punish ourselves for it. And weirdly – we still aren’t taking responsibility for it. In fact I know it can be easier to tell yourself what a terrible person you are (this can be a seed for depression, or over-work or other things that don’t ultimately serve us) because the punishment is easier than owning it.
Instead I resisted calling her. I procrastinated, and when I came up against that I should, my mind slipped off it to other things, and put it off some more. Later, later, later. I should, I should. Only when finally the self-recriminations were greater than my resistance for calling, I finally called her back. She registered it with an indirect something that I took to be betrayal.
I let myself be angry about that, too.
I had my narrative. The defence I rehearsed. My justified grievances I never really expressed because there wasn’t the place for it. The idea that this was not a big thing – maybe later the realization that she could have called me. Maybe even later the realization that something could have happened to me. We patched things up. I gave an excuse rooted in the truth but not the whole truth. She pretended to accept it. On we went.
Months later perhaps, she had a party for people on a Saturday I attended. A dull grey day. She seemed more herself than I had seen her, buoyed by her friends and loved ones around her. By the end of the weekend she was dead.
We forget that our slippery minds lead us into making those choices that maybe go against how we think of ourselves, just as much our slippery mind criminate ourselves for having made them. And of course our slippery minds are just as involved in the cover-up because we don’t like difficult things.
We all carry shame – the function of shame being that we learn to behave ourselves to the extent so that other people will like us enough to help us survive. We have all been scolded children, we have probably all experienced the shock and dismay of being judged and or reprimanded for something we thought was perfectly ok to do. There has always been some kid on the school yard that amplified this for one of us, whether we were the victims or just the witnesses. We have been the subject of disappointment when we have not measured up. And I suspect we are hardwired with the deeply primal terror of not being found worthy enough, and the burden of knowledge knowing that we are utterly dependent on less than perfect beings. And then a great many of us have had to create a construct for replace the security of unconditional acceptance that should have been there. It’s a convoluted tangly mess we all have wrapped up quite tight that our vulnerable selves fiercely protect from our rational conscious version of ourselves.
I don’t think we can not see into our personal versions of this space unless the distress we are currently feeling is great enough that the distress of visiting this place is not that much harder. But still, even to the most blind and oblivious of us, that personal space of ours is percolating away, there contributing to our present feelings, thoughts and actions. Messing about.
I sometimes write to loosen up these things that I sense I should let go of. But I didn’t intend to do this here – I intended to write a tribute. I could not give a tribute. I was mad. But sometimes I try to start with the one thing that I can’t shake and end up on another more difficult truer thing.
We tell ourselves stories to make sence of things and to give meaning to this chaos we call life. Because without meaning we go down the slippery slope of existential dread. Some of us do anyway. Instead I would like that we should try to understand and forgive ourselves and forgive others for these stories that don’t always serve us. Compassion. Humility. But I’m still a little bit angry. And I still haven’t forgiven myself fully. This is not quite done.
But the loop that was going round in my head got closed a little. Not just for myself, but for her too. I have freed up space to be able to think of my friend with the love and admiration that I had for her, and feel the sadness of her loss in the world.