Not So Young

I’m too young for thoughts of grief and advice for processing death, or so I would have thought until I realized several of my close friends have already lost a parent. When I was seeking funeral information for the most recent passing, I came across an obituary for a woman two years younger than me, someone I’d known all throughout my years growing up and with whom I took dance lessons in middle school. If I had had cause to think of her, it would have been as a girl, static at 16. But she’s dead. While I hadn’t spoken to her since high school, it unsettled me as unwelcome reminders do, the type that refuse to let you maintain your naive obliviousness. 

I am not so young as to consider death in the abstract anymore. It’s becoming a rehearsal to identify how much grief is the appropriate amount to work one’s way all the way through it to the other side, and even then a certain scent or song might knock you sideways in remembrance. 

As I prepare to attend the funeral of one of my closest friend’s fathers tomorrow, I’m choked with emotion that doesn’t feel rightly mine. It’s her father after all, not mine, but I think of the years we were inseparable and all the hours I spent at her house and the countless interactions I had with him and how interconnected our lives were. The sense of loss pulls at me. 

It is, of course, a sense of empathy along with sympathy and sadness for my friend and her family, but selfishly (helplessly) it is a reckoning of loss for me, too. It’s the admission of disappointment that I haven’t kept in touch with my friend the way I’d like, that I’m no longer—and haven’t been for years— the friend she confides in or asks for advice. We lead very separate lives across the country from each other, but somehow I’d been able to convince myself we remained closer than we do. 

I am trying not to make it about me because I have no scope and scale through which to measure her grief, but it feels like one more string cut from the ties that once bound us to the point of predicting each other’s next sentence. I wanted to be needed in this, one of her most trying times. 

And so I am grieving for the loss of our childhood, of our adolescent freedoms, of our friendship’s former incarnation. 

Tomorrow I will travel to my hometown for the funeral, drive past our old houses and the streets where we walked to and from school, past the park where we spent afternoons and weekends on the swings daydreaming about boys and the adventures we’d have one day, days I foolishly assumed we’d share.

In the throes of teenage friendship, the kind where you can’t bear the separation of a whole class period before catching each other up on the latest, it feels incomprehensible that you won’t always be close and connected. This theme reverberates around me now as we move further into adulthood. It’s a bittersweetness to straddle youth and old age, peering back at the treasures of memory with aching gratitude and also ballooning with hope for all the life left before me. 

Any encounters with death serve as important reminders to stop putting things off playing the someday game. I am not so young. Again, I am feeling this more and more. I must start aligning my current state with my ideal life. Now. 

I need to be more present and stop stressing about how I’ll appear or about what others think of me. They’re probably not thinking about me at all anyway. I can’t prepare for everything to get it all just right.

There is no preparation for the loss, not really, whether friendship or a life. And so I’ll leave behind trying to show up to the funeral perfectly collected and too cool to cry. I will sit in the church pew, listening to the hymns, inhaling the scent of incense smoke, and allow myself the loss of her father as well as the loss that is all mine, the loss of that carefree youth and a friendship meant to withstand a lifetime but didn’t.