Piling up

A dear friend was found dead in her apartment late one night last week. I am bowled over by her sudden, unexpected death - she was a vivacious person in her early thirties who had made lots of strides in creating the life she wanted. We don't yet know why she is no longer with us. I can't stop thinking about the overseas trip I was meant to take to visit her later this year. We were both so excited. Now her family has to bury her.

J was helping me through my mom's loss, out of the generosity and caring of a heart that was lucky enough not to have been through this. Now, in this space of missing both of them, I desperately want to talk to each to process the death of the other. All I wanted this weekend was to hide in my mother's arms and cry on her shoulder and ask, like a child, why J was taken from us so early. Now I have two loves' worth of grief sitting on my shoulders. My grief is not as bad as the fact of their absence, but it feels to heavy to carry nonetheless. Nobody shares both losses with me. I am the only one deeply mourning them both.

Another friend recently told me that when her dad died, she experienced several other losses soon after. She said she believes that when that happens, karma catches up with you and sets things right eventually. What really spoke to me was her conviction that the piling up-ness will end. My family's last experience of that was in 2003 and 2004 - my mother's cousin died, my grandmother died, our cat died, and at least two other relatives died, all in about a six month period. I had always thought of that as my annus horribilis, and I expected another the year of my mother's loss, but I thought I'd be much older and much more ready, and I didn't imagine any other deaths accompanying it.

While I am the only one mourning both my mother and J, I am also the only one who knows how their different versions of magic complement each other. My mom was magic. She raised me on her own, playing the double parental role with love, trust, and humor. She was the inciting architect of lots of my childhood daydreams and imaginings and plans, and she obliquely directed me to the path that allowed me to elaborate on them and work my way into a life of no small amount of creativity and movement. (That's a pretty good metaphor for my whole life, in a lot of ways.) She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. She knew which college would suit me before i knew, but she stayed quiet and watched m make my own decision. Even when she was dying, when she said that it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth.

J was magic, too. She earned three master's degrees before the age of thirty, and moved to a new country knowing nobody for the third one. She straddled the two cultures of her parents in beautiful and inspiring ways - talking to her always meant learning something about India or Ireland. As she helped me through Mom's illness and then my grief over Mom's death, she made sure I knew that because she was overseas, she was available to talk when nobody else was awake. We became friends because she reached out and told me she wanted to be, and I was so flattered, and now I am so grateful that I was able to have her in my life, even for a short time. My memories of her glow, and I will never forget her or stop missing her.

Both my mother and J were strong, brilliant women. Their intellects shone, and sometimes burned with the strength of their incandescence. They both cared so deeply about the world around them and the people inhabiting it, both in their immediate orbits and beyond. The world is a colder, sadder, duller place without them. I will spend the rest of my life missing them and trying to live up to their examples and their love.