Today is the anniversary of the death of my best friend in our twenties. She was 29 when she killed herself. I was thirty. So thirty five years ago. What a loss for me, her two kids, her family. Soon after her death her mother died, then her father had a heart attack and died. Only her older brother is alive, if he still is. And those kids, now around forty. I used to talk to her in the car after she died. I was very angry. I blamed myself for not doing more. I blamed her husband. I blamed her family. I wrote a novel about it. I had therapy. I tried to keep up with her kids until they moved back to the northeast and disappeared.
A friend at the time told me, "What makes you think you have the power to save someone else?" It was a good question. I now realize I'd been made to believe I had that power from my family, for whom I was the caretaker. At the time, I felt survivor's guilt, and like I'd been thrown into an alternate universe. A very strange one, where my dear friend had somehow been lost and I was alone.
I've lived every day since with a kind of gratitude that I was stronger or luckier or better supported, and I survived. As Buddhism reminds us, I AM MY OWN PROTECTOR. I've treasured my own life, and sometimes shared it with my friend, in the car, when I'm alone. Long gone, but not forgotten.
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