I grew
up out in “the sticks”. The stretch of road that was our own had begun its life
in the 1800s as a corduroy road, part of a stage coach route stretching north
from Hamilton Harbor, toward the city of Guelph. In the 1950s and early 1960s,
vehicular traffic on this road remained somewhat sparse, nearly non-existent.
Not many people traveled past us, because our old stage coach route had been
supplanted by a nice new provincial highway which was a more direct route. No
one came down our road unless they were visiting someone who lived on it. Or at
least, that’s how it seemed.
We
lost my dad when I was about eight and a half. He’d been at home recovering from
a heart attack, and succumbed to a sudden stroke. He was only in his mid
forties.
After
that, life wasn’t much fun for me. He’d been the parent who paid close
attention, the one who would play and hand out hugs at every turn. My brother
and sister, at 18 and 14, had their own lives, and my mother had her grief, an
interloper who took up residence in our home and never left. There weren’t too
many “kids” my age in my neck of the woods, except two girls, one of whom I
really wasn’t supposed to play with (a mystery to this day).
And
then, when I was 10, two very interesting things happened. I got a paper route;
and a family moved in two doors down from us, and I met my new best
friend.
I
discovered that we had been born 8 days apart! And, she shared her birthday with
a half-brother and sister, twins who had been her birthday present from her
mother and step-father when she was 6.
This
family was different from any other I’d ever encountered: a single mother, with
five children! In my insulated world, I’d never heard of a family that didn’t
have a dad, where the dad hadn’t died (as in my case). In time I learned that my
friend’s mother was now separated from her step-dad, and had been divorced from
her real dad. I couldn’t imagine what that might be like, because, of course, my
family still bled from the too-early loss of ours.
We
became good friends, she and I, and I spent a lot of time at her house. Her
siblings became like my own, in many ways. I can close my eyes and see the times
I slept over there, the times we all spent together. We played Canasta and
Shanghai, and a board game called Shoe-buck.
She
told me not that long ago that her mother, while doing the best she could, had
never taken her anywhere. The only time she’d ever gone anywhere as a kid, had
been with me and my mom.
A few
years after my marriage and hers, for a long time, we lost touch. Life changes
you and you respond to it sometimes by closing others out. We did that, my
beloved and I, when the raising of the kids got really hard, when our middle
child, so troubled and troubling, took all of our energy and drained most of our
hope.
We
re-connected again, my friend and I, about five years ago. But in the interval,
I did visit her mother from time to time. Her youngest sister, who had shared
her birthday, had built a house on her mother’s land, and so was close by and
able to see to her needs. A visit to the older woman, often entailed a visit
with the younger.
Life
continued to throw challenges, as life will. My friend had already lost her
first husband during that time we were apart. We lost our son. Her mother
passed, sadly, when we were out of the country and I didn’t learn of it until
much later. And then, just about sixteen months ago, my friend lost her second
husband, a man she calls her true soul mate.
Not
many months after that, I learned her little sister had cancer. This was a woman
who shone, inside and out. She loved, and was loved. She’d met her own soul
mate—the man who had purchased our house, that one just a few doors down from
hers.
This
past weekend, my friend’s baby sister was called home. It always seems wrong,
somehow, to lose those who are younger than us—and yes, to a certain extent, to
lose those we sometimes feel are better than us.
Loss
is never easy, and oftentimes the echoes of that loss become embedded in the
rhythm of our lives. I try to remember the love and the joy and the laughter
that I shared with those I lose. We all of us live, and we touch the lives and
the hearts of other people. Those touches become a part of that person, a tiny
atom of the person they grow into being.
Those
moments are eternal, and it is those moments we seek to hold close when trying
to find comfort for ourselves and others in our bereavement.
My
friend wished her little sister to fly with the angels; I have no doubt,
whatsoever, that she is doing exactly that.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
No comments:
Post a Comment