a loss

I was outside playing with my two youngest: a hot, sweaty July Wednesday. I had had a large cup of coffee early that afternoon, hoping to get me (cheerfully) through the day. It worked so well that I had pulled out the hose, washed off the old sand table, filled it with cool water and buckets, sieves, and spoons. Feeling pretty proud of myself, I sat down and pulled my phone from my pocket.

Message from my oldest friend on this planet: Call me asap. Nervously, I dialed her back, and she asked me to please sit down. She had some terrible news. Could I handle hearing it now, was I somewhere that I could talk? Cold terror gripped my heart. Is it my family? I whispered.
No, its XXXX. She died, the funeral was on Sunday. What? What? What?

My brain could form nothing but that single word. I felt like I had been punched and could not breathe. Her name paired with this strangely textured word made no sense. The word died simply didn't fit in my brain. It felt like a massive pill, something harsh and garish and orange and just wrong, that I could not swallow.

I met XXXX twenty-three years before. We met shortly before beginning high school together;  it was a small private start up school, and there were to be only five girls in our grade. We became nothing short of family, fast and firm. XXXX had long thick blonde hair, freckles, speckled hazel eyes, and a laugh that you could hear across the school. She was tall, loud, confident in her opinions. Curious about everyone and everything. I was much more reserved, quiet, unsure.

The thing that I first really loved about talking to her is that she was just a crazy listener. The most intense I've ever met in my life, to this day. When you spoke to her, she would squint and furrow her brow, focusing, concentrating, listening, listening, listening to every nuance of every word, spoken and unspoken. It was one of my first friendships in my life where I felt heard, in this incredible way. She was just genuinely seeking, constantly looking for wisdom and answers and truth, from anyone and everyone she met.

I don't know if she found the certainty she was looking for in her life. 24 hours after that phone call, I am still reeling, disbelieving. How can someone so vibrant, so completely alive, be gone? Where is she? She has to be somewhere.

I hear her laugh in my mind - she would throw her head back and belt it out. Our years together in high school had many sleepovers, long nights filled with giggles and laughter. I'm remembering a couple, not particularly remarkable, they just float up to my memory, silly and juvenile as they are (as we were).

She was always ready to laugh at herself. She was an atrocious speller. I remember one night we went through her address book, where she had phonetically spelled everyone's names that we knew. I, being an intuitively perfect speller, found it enormously amusing and started to laugh. She joined in, only half aware of the actual multitude and breadth of the errors, but we were soon hysterical on the floor, crying from laughter, imagining what the people would say if they saw their names written so "creatively".

Another night: I had had an x-ray earlier that week while experiencing some (extremely painful) trapped intestinal gas. I was telling her how I had done my utmost to control myself from releasing it, trying to be polite. And then they placed the xray up on the viewing board, and there they were: huge, clearly visible, gas bubbles in my intestine, right on display. I was whispering the story to her, (my father was pretty strict about us staying quiet late at night), and we both lost it, hysterically laughing, biting our pillows to try to stay quiet.

There are hundreds more moments like those.

We were a family, the five girls in that class. We stuck together after high school, sharing apartments, navigating college and boyfriends and household chores.
We drifted apart, some of us getting married, some traveling, experiencing the full extent of beautiful, brutal life. But there were always these invisible threads of connection. I have spent the better part of the last 24 hours on the phone with the other three girls. Girls? Women I guess. Somehow, I feel fourteen again, raw and terrified. I want nothing more than to have been told earlier, to have been able to attend the funeral, to process, to try to comprehend what this hole in my heart means.

I have seen her once or twice a year when we were able to, and every time its been instant, the comfort, the familiarity, the deep and still knowing of one another. I saw her last a few months ago, when I was visiting family for Passover. She was in pain, had had an injury, needed so much help with her beautiful daughter (her first, born just three days after my fifth child, also a girl, was born.) We sat at a park in the sun, the babies gloriously beautiful, exploring, examining each other. I just keep going back to that day, the peacefulness despite her pain, her absolute loving gaze at that perfect one and a half year old, and I am trying to understand that I will never see her again, never speak to her, never hear her voice, her laugh, her thoughts. I cannot comprehend it.