If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ve shared some of my journey through the loss of my friend. Thanks for being with me. I originally wrote this a couple of weeks ago:
Today is the anniversary of the death of my beloved friend, Norma. Her husband and I are going to sit in church for a little while, then go have lunch together. We’re going to remember how funny and brilliant and spiritual and earthy and irreverent she was, how practical and hard-headed, and how lucky we were to have her all those years. Not that I ever forget. Not than he ever has a moment he forgets.
She was an auntie to Matt, godmother to my three nieces, and a friend to my husband. She loved her friends, and she let us love her back. More than anything, she loved her family. She looked at life and people with a clear eye, but she still saw the best in everyone.
She was always late, everywhere, except maybe to church. She was an usher in her church, and she was buried in the white suit the ushers wear. She made all the plans herself, down to music and the food. It’s a big church, and it was full. A young woman she had mentored spoke, as did her12-year-old grandson. He was eloquent through his tears.
Norma started an AIDS ministry at her church. It’s the oldest African American Baptist church in Austin, and a lot of the folks are elderly, and conservative. She coached them through their awkwardness and showed them how to reach out to people who’d been invisible to them before. She taught homebuyer classes to low-income couples, and helped them get houses. She touched hundreds, probably thousands of lives.
She wanted to live more than anything, at least long enough to see her grandsons grow up. She put herself through much, much more treatment than I would have chosen, but she bought herself some extra years. When all the treatments stopped working, she was relentless in preparing us all. At the end, she stayed longer than I think she would have otherwise, because her daughter just wasn’t ready. She has a new baby granddaughter who will never know her.
She made the best gumbo and sweet potato pie ever. When we were both single, we’d sit up all night sometimes, talking. Occasionally we’d put The Blues Brothers, our favorite movie, into the VCR and say all the dialogue along with the actors. And sing the songs, loud and badly.
She brought me two six packs of beer the night I brought Matt home from the hospital, because I’d been craving a beer for nine months. When he was two, she asked me if I was planning to wean him before he went to college. Next month we’ll be at his college graduation, and she won’t be there.
She gave me a hard time whenever I gained weight, because she was slender and a bit vain. It always pissed me off. She was beautiful. She and Van went to Ghana, and she came back with wonderful Ghanaian dresses, and a turban she wore sometimes after she lost her hair.
One day when I took her in for chemo, the woman at the front desk called out her name and birthday. I looked at her, and she looked back at me with a big sheepish grin. I started to laugh. For 25 years, she’d been lying to me about her age. She was born two years and nine months before me. All those years, she let me think she was three months younger than I. I’m laughing now, just thinking about it. Laughing and crying. What are you going to do?
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I wrote this in the night last night. Then I went to bed, thinking about the mystery of life and death. We arrive, we’re here awhile, then we leave. I do believe existence is much bigger than just our time on earth. But we are so solidly anchored in our human bodies, it is hard to bear the loss of the physical presence of those we love. I miss Norma’s hugs, miss holding her hand as we pray together.
I was lying there pondering all this, and suddenly I felt her with me. She was radiating joy, and pouring comfort out on me. I felt her reach out to touch me, not a physical touch exactly, but contact between us. Then I slept.