Another Goodbye.

Today.

Oof.

Today I am trying to feel positive instead of my usual negative. As we speak, my husband is upstairs on a conference call (we’ll get to that in a minute), Sophie is watching Octonauts, and I just finished packing for the night. Once he’s off the call, we will pile, with dog, into our car and head down to my mother- in- law’s pool. We try to go once a week, but this summer has had us on a whole new path. My parents moved to Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, and a lot of free time has been spent driving to them to help them get settled, to help them unpack and so Sophie can see her grandparents. And my husband has been with us the whole time. He ruptured his Achilles’ tendon at the end of June and has been on crutches since. He’s had surgery, but recovery time is long and arduous, and since its his right foot, he also can’t drive. It’s been a trying summer in that respect, because he needs a lot of help, I’m constantly driving him to work, to the doctor, to his parents’ houses and to Pennsylvania. It can be a bit much- I’m not  used to having someone else in the house with us during the week. It kind of throws off the routine. It’s hard to explain to a 3- year- old that even though Daddy is here, he can’t play right now. Anyway, off we go, shortly. Sophie will play in the pool with me and her grandmother, while Matt works in the house. Hopefully, we will manage to convince Sophie to take a nap (fingers crossed), they will all BBQ and have dinner in the yard while I shower and change so I can meet my sister for the night. For a wake. Of an old friend.

I don’t want to go spreading things around, so we’ll call her Lisa. Lisa and my little sister became friends in middle school, 20+ years ago. There was a group of them that seemed to be together all of the time. All of them towering over my shrimp of a sister. They fully embraced the grunge of the early 90s, wearing over sized pants, flannel shirts and overalls, sitting around in someone’s room listening to Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, smoking cigarettes stolen from someone’s mom. A few of them actually got the opportunity to go see Pearl Jam live, and I was sooo jealous. I remember one of the girls calling my sister to let her know that they got the tickets, and my sister happy- cried for an entire day. They were a hysterical group of kids, always laughing, always doing something silly. Always.

I don’t really remember what happened after that. I know that the friendship stayed strong through a good amount of high school. Some of the girls took a different route, adopting a different style, everything from raver to rockabilly, and some just holding on to the hippy- dippy style of their parents. Some moved away, some got married, some went to college. Our parents were far too conservative to really allow us to have our own style or opinion, so we basically took the respectable route: college, salary jobs, studio apartments in decent areas of the city, getting married to nice guys, buying practical automobiles. My parents’ influence on our lives was infuriating as a teenager. I completely get it now.

To make a very long story short, drugs (big drugs) entered the picture at some point, far after my sister and I had lost touch with the group. Occasionally we would hear through the grapevine that someone had overdosed and was in the hospital or was seen strung out in town somewhere, and unfortunately the call would come that someone had overdone it and had died. It has made me very grateful that we had managed to dodge whatever bullet it was that had hit our friends- girls that at one point were so much like us. And here we are today. Attending yet another funeral or wake or memorial for another friend who took the wrong road. I wish I could say this is the first time we’ve been through this. I wish I could say this is the first time we’ve been through this in the past year. But it’s not.

I don’t know if it’s because I am disconnected from that whole scene now, my party and club days far behind me, but it amazes me that with all that we know about this shit, that people (in their 30s!) are still doing it, and still dying from it. I don’t know. I’m not an addict of any kind. I don’t feel left out, necessarily, but I do feel like, maybe, people who have gone through it and have come out, just think I should shut up. But I made a conscious decision a long time ago that I would stay far away from it. And you can call me a goody- goody, or a prude or whatever. But Lisa is dead. I’m not. Nothing in the world is more important than that. It’s so sad, it’s so fucking sad. Maybe it’s because I’m a mother now, but the idea of losing my baby is hands- down the worst thing I could think of. I have no idea how I am going to be able to look her parents in the face tonight. I have no idea how they have been able to cope the last few days.

For the most part, our friends are all clean now. Unfortunately, we don’t really talk to, or about, the ones that aren’t, and some of them aren’t here anymore to talk to. This wake tonight is going to be awful. My gut wrenches just thinking about it. Lisa is at peace now, but her husband, her family, all of us are left to miss her and to hopefully learn about how to live from not only the good examples she left us (she was such a happy girl, she loved her friends desperately, she was so in love with her husband, she saw beauty everywhere, she laughed a lot),  but maybe we can learn from the not- so- great examples too.

I hope your demons have left you now. We honor your memory today, lovely girl.