What is time even?

What is time? We know that an hour is 60 minutes, and a day is 24 hours, and a year is 365 days but the passing of time rarely feels linear. It’s usually a rollercoaster of speeding up and slowing down and I am not sure we ever exist in a moment where time feels appropriately long (or short, for that matter).

It’s been a whole year since my best friend from home (referred to as BF from here on) passed away. Perception is a time warp. It might as well have been five years ago, or just yesterday when I received the dreaded phone call from her mom. I had been anticipating it. I knew her time was coming to an end. And I knew it was going to be a release from pain and long years of battling cancer, a release from a life that she had envisioned so differently in many ways. I wanted so much more for her. And there were a lot of things I wish we could have experienced together and of which we were robbed.

She never got to visit me here in my new home country. We didn’t get to travel much together (I always envisioned we would. The photo above was taken after our graduation on a girls’ trip to Italy.) We missed a lot of important events in each other’s lives because it wasn’t always possible to travel for every single one of them. In a lot of ways, our friendship changed over the many years that her health was declining, and I wasn’t physically there. I still carry a bit of sadness and guilt sometimes, wishing I could have been there for her more when things were tough.

We knew each other since elementary school but became inseparable in highschool. We had always dreamed about living next door to each other. Our childhood homes were less than a mile apart. Putting 6000 miles between us was not an intentional decision when I fell in love with California and a Californian boy, but that is how life goes. She herself (temporarily) moved for love. It didn’t change anything between us. I always knew she was just a phone call away, even though I wished she lived just down the street.

My grief feels a bit subdued and different from people who were able to be with her all the time. I only got to see her once or maybe twice a year for many years, but it doesn’t make the hole that she left behind in my world any smaller. In a way, I was used to missing her, just in a different way. Our friendship was sustained by care packages, phone calls, and later video calls and Whatsapp messages. She loved sending me silly videos and memes.

Our long distance-friendship worked because our emotional connection never faded. Losing her in midlife when those old, reliable friendships feel so very essential, feels extra cruel. 

I’m so grateful for her friendship. Despite the distance, she was always my person, and I was hers. She told me that many times. I told her that one more time when I held her hand for what I knew would be the last time last summer. I am not even sure if she could hear me or if she knew that I was there, she was mostly in a comatose state at that point, but I believe that I felt her squeeze my hand once. She knew. No one can convince me otherwise.

Unfortunately, I don’t know many of her other close friends, the ones who lived closer. Except for my sister, who also kept up with BF, I feel isolated from these other friends that grieve her loss in a similar way I do. I imagine it would be nice to talk to them and reminisice, find out how they’re coping with this loss. 

I’ve kept in regular contact with her mom though, and it’s been good for her and for me. I think we both struggle with the fact that life just moves right along. We talk about BF. I send her old photos from a time when things were happy and carefree. We don’t shy away from mentioning her name, like people are sometimes prone to do after someone passes away. I understand, it’s awkward and they don’t want to trigger a wave of emotions. But sometimes I’d rather be triggered than pretend that nothing happened. I feel an obligation to BF to bring up her name and talk about her, lest she thinks she could ever be forgotten.

I talk to BF sometimes. I take her along on my runs, show her around my neighborhood, and tell her about my day. Grief sometimes overwhelms me in the most unexpected moments.

Grief, in its many forms, is pervasive. It doesn’t simply go away after a prescribed period of time. We don’t get over grief. We carry it with us throughout our lives, another rock in our proverbial backpacks. I know BF’s backpack was heavy, and she carried it with so much dignity.

When we lost Jon’s mom and BF in short succession last year, something shifted in me. Do you know that feeling when something that you knew on an “intellectual level” finally clicks emotionally? I still feel young with plenty of years ahead of me, but nothing is ever guaranteed. As I am grieving the loss of my longtime friend, someone my own age, I’ve been made strangely aware of the many more griefs I will experience in my life, in a way I didn’t understand before. And now more than ever, I feel the urgency to live every day with intention and to cherish every moment with the people I love for as long as they are – or I am – here.

I couldn’t let today go by unacknowledged. One year without BF. We were friends for 40+ years. I still cannot imagine a world without her in it.

I’ll leave you with a quote that I have come back to many times in life when saying goodbye – for periods of time, or sometimes forever – was hard to do.

HOW LUCKY I AM TO HAVE SOMETHING THAT MAKES SAYING GOODBYE SO HARD. – A. A. MILNE