Old Age Day by Day August 22, 2012

This is the month in which my best friend in my twenties, best friend as in next to me at my wedding, as in promising to take care of each others' kids if anything bad happened, died.  She shot herself with her brother's gun.  She had described to me just how she was going to do it, and I had begged her to get help, went to her husband and begged him, offered to take her two kids for a break, pleaded, and watched them move out of state, when they'd just completed building their dream house nearby me.  I miss her still.  I talk to her in the car alone sometimes.  And I never, ever forget the day she died, and never will.  We would be old ladies now together.  We would be comparing grandchildren's photos.  She would have aged well.  She was a stunner, with pale gold hair, green, green eyes and a sweet oval face.  We would be making things:  we were always sewing, hemming curtains together, stuffing pillows, painting furniture.  She would have gone on to complete her BA in Biology, and taught, and been photographed and held up as a feminist before the wave hit.  She was the first woman I knew who was in a consciousness raising group.  The first woman I knew who built her own furniture.  She had design skills that could have netted her a fortune.  She helped her husband with his pottery, sold and delivered it to galleries.  She meditated.

And I can remember loping down the hill in married student housing and looking in the sliding glass door and there she was in her rocking chair, meditating, and I would tiptoe back home.  I owe her my spiritual life.  She supported me when my husband and I divorced, and when I remarried, and when we had our son she took our two older kids in the middle of the night during a 7 Eleven robbery, with police all around, and she and her husband wrapped them in blankets, and got them safely inside.  She was the first to visit me in the hospital the next morning.  She could save me but I couldn't save her, from her history, family, and the insidious force of depression.  Her two kids are in their forties now.  There are a few of us, missing her terribly, still, and wishing she had been helped the way she helped others.