“If we are identified with being married to a certain person, with a job, with our very body and life – that’s how deep it goes – there’s not any real peace or freedom because something in us knows that it’s all very fragile. So we are always on some level kind-of tensing against what’s around the corner.” – Tara Brach
When I was 20, I woke one morning in March at 6:30 to the information that my oldest friend had committed suicide. I say ‘information’ because that is the only way that I could process it. The moment that it went into my consciousness, a little part of me shut down. Within an hour of finding this out, I was sitting in a breakfast restaurant mainlining black coffee with a group of close friends. Within 8 hours my basement began to fill with our mutual friends – people who I loved with a passion born of spending teenage years together working at a summer camp – and we huddled together trying to understand our pain.
This morning as I walked to work, Tara Brach’s words on her podcast cracked that shut-off place open for the first time in 16 years.
I’ve written before about feeling like a bad friend. I do not write this for sympathy, but because if I compare myself to who I was until that day, I am a bad friend. I used to be the one who knew what was going on in everyone’s lives, the one who had people over, the one who would drive absurd distances to check in with someone at the merest whiff of unhappiness. Now I don’t answer emails for months, lose phone numbers, and generally hide away from the world. Only a few of those people who I sat and grieved with are still in my life because I let those relationships dwindle until they disappeared. But I think I understand now. All of this is because something in us knows that it’s all very fragile.
That day was the last in a line of three Marches in a row when I lost someone I loved. If I had had to learn any lesson it should have been that life is precious, love everyone fiercely while they are here. (In fact, psychologically I thought I had learned that lesson.) I should have become even more determined to see and talk to and know people. Instead, I started tensing against what was around the corner – because I knew without a doubt that something terrible was – and shut down. The lesson I learned was that it fucking hurts when people die, that there is often shame and guilt and agony surrounding death, and that the safest way for my sensitive heart to proceed was to become unconnected.
It sounds so simple written out like this, but now I can see all of the relationships that I have let slide, the chances I haven’t taken, and the love that I have missed out on and I am sad all over again. Grief is an unpredictable animal. And now that I know – now that the light has been switched on – I’m wondering how I can now heal. Somehow I need to learn to begin saying yes again.
“We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.” – Charlotte Joko Beck
My thoughts are deep and thick today. I woke from a dream of very old friends to find that they all remained in bed with me for a long time. I dreamed of one summer when I was a part of a strange group of friends who spent every waking minute together. It was a summer where I loved a boy, but we were never alone together because we were always with everyone else. When I woke up, a dozen other summers crawled into bed with us. Summers of laughter and drama and sunshine and families and friends. One dear friend who we have since lost curled up beside me and whispered in my ear, reminding me of the times we laughed so hard we had to hold onto each other for support. Another boy I once loved laughed and said he sometimes remembered me too and how was I? I never did get back to sleep. I lay there in the dark between remembered laughter and tears for a long time.