Losing People

Did you ever have a friend that you were so close to, you could finish each other's sentences?  This friend, you trusted them so much that you told them everything about you.  Everything.  You loved them so much you would have given them a kidney, or robbed a bank with them (or at least provided the alibi), and you could talk for hours.

I had a friend like that, once.

My mother did, too.  On Saturday we went to a memorial service for a very close family friend.  People grieve in different ways and I've found that the way I grieve is to either get angry or just avoid it altogether.  So yesterday, I warned my mother in the car, I'm sorry, but I feel really upset and I don't know why. I feel like punching something.  She warned me not to break anything and we got in the car and drove.

I'm not used to accepting certain feelings, I guess.  But, psychobabble aside, we went to the memorial and heard what we already knew: how generous she was, how kind, how busy and dedicated, how up until the very last days of her life, she was doing something for someone else.  She was always happy, always in a good mood, with a big laugh and a story to tell.  I will miss her.  We all will.

I hate losing people.  Sometimes, you lose people because they simply don't want to be in your life any more.  Maybe it's too complicated, or they moved on to something better.  Maybe the friendship meant more to you than it did to them.  Maybe they moved away. Maybe circumstances changed and that made sustaining the friendship too hard.  Maybe they died.

Any way it happens, it's painful, and sometimes, you never get over it. Ever.  No matter how hard you try, no matter how many times you remind yourself that they might actually be doing you a favor by being absent from your life, or that it was just time for them to go, you never get over it, and it just hurts.  Forever.  And you have these regrets.  You wish you could go backwards, and spend one more day with that person.  Tell them things you wish you had told them.  You wish that you hadn't gotten angry so much, or that you had made different decisions in the first place.  You wish that you could have handled that friendship differently, or not met them at all.  You wish you had treasured more the time you had with them. Some days you feel so angry. Other days you don't think of them at all. Above all else, sometimes you wish you had never given so much of yourself away, because people always leave, however they leave, and when they do, you've got one more empty, painful space.

Dawn wasn't like that.

My earliest memory of Dawn was being picked up from elementary school in her VW bug.  My mother was out of town for a week.  I don't remember where she went or why.  I remember that the VW was old and it was strange, riding in the back of it, and I had a vague memory of my mother saying that it guzzled oil.  But Dawn was picking me up and that was just cool, because she was the awesome aunt I never had.

I remember asking her for chocolate milk. She said no.  So I got mad and tried to make some anyway, but I ended up pouring the Nesquik into a glass of water.  I had to admit what I did.  She did an affectionate "I told you so" and we poured it down the sink.  I didn't get in trouble.

I wanted to set up a lemonade stand in the front yard.  She didn't think that was safe. She made me set it up in the backyard.  I remember that the grass was really thick and green, and the weather was nice, and no one wanted to buy lemonade from a little girl in a backyard!

I would hear stories about her and she would come and go over the years. There were long phone calls between her and my mom, with mom sitting on the floor, twirling the phone cord between her fingers, and me, fidgeting because I needed something from mom right then.

And then it came time for me to go to college.  And all of the sudden Dawn was back, and she had a room she was going to rent out to me.  I remember the move in date.  I drove up to Denton and walked up the sidewalk to the townhouse and saw her coming towards me. She looked up and said, "Oh, is that today?  I'm going to South America. Here's the key, don't worry about the cat!"

And that's how she was.  She was always thinking, always traveling or doing some adventure, and I loved her, and I was a spoiled brat during my first go at college and she knew it and loved me anyway, probably because she understood, better than I did, how complicated my life was.  My dad had just left and met someone, I was away from home for the first time, and I was a wreck and didn't know it.  I think she knew, and she was patient and understanding during a time when I didn't realize I needed it.

Someone at church gave a talk two Sundays ago. It was my friend, Courtney Coates.  And I'm paraphrasing, but he said that the only way we could lose people was if they made bad choices, and strayed away from what they knew was right and true.  So we haven't really lost her.  We just weren't expecting her to leave so soon.

And that's good, because losing people really sucks, and I don't think I could handle any more loss in my life right now.