I would like to add something to my most recent post in which I said I don't
take the world's trials as seriously as I once did. I don't want to seem as
though I take the loss of a friend lightly.
About four years ago I lost my closest friend. We'd been friends since we
were babies; we were friends in a twin-sister sort of way. Intimate friends.
Not lesbians, not that sort of intimate. But intimate on an emotional
level. We accepted each other totally, laughed at each other's faults,
cheered at each other's good stuff, celebrated each other's accomplishments,
cursed each other's enemies.
Her death was violent and took place under ambiguous circumstances. It
could have been suicide, murder, or just an accident. Shortly before her
death, she told me she didn't want to grow old. I was shocked by this
statement, because I'd always looked forward to being old women together--I
was planning to live to be 120 or 150, or however long I could stick around.
She was very beautiful when she was young, and as well as I thought I knew
her, I'd never realized how important her beauty was to her. She was
growing older and her beauty was fading, and she couldn't bear to take on a
new identity as a not-so-beautiful woman.
She would have liked the ambiguity associated with her death. She would
have loved it that the cops let the murder suspect carry away the most
critical piece of evidence. She would have laughed at the need I felt to
know what REALLY happened.
Anyhow, for several weeks after her death I was disoriented. Sometimes I
felt as though I was the one who'd died, and I would be surprised to find
myself walking around, touching things, talking to people, having them
answer me.
I still miss her. Even now after almost 4 years, I still sometimes break
down and cry at what I lost when she died. But as time has gone by, the
wound has...not healed exactly...but sort of grown into something other than
a wound, like when a plant grows new roots at a point where a stem has been
wounded. In talking about her to mutual friends I've come to see that some
of what I thought I knew about her was illusion of my own invention; some
was more...how shall I say? Real? Universal?. To the extent that there
was real communication between us, I've found that I'm able to access that
same vein in other people (the idea of the collective "database" again).
Bonnie
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