This One's for the Girls

I saw Bridesmaids a couple nights ago.  Loved it.  Especially loved the part where Annie makes a toast to her best friend, Lillian, and ends up singing, "That's what friends are for..." (I still know every word of that song and also the accompanying sign language, thank you 6th grade music class).

Since losing Eliza, I've met some amazing women who are also walking this path and have forged genuine and meaningful friendships with them.  These relationships are true lifelines and I can't say enough about the way they have lifted me up.

But this post isn't about that.

This post is about my old friends.  My high school friends, my college friends, my grad school friends, my friends from my previous life, my lucky life, the life in which I expected a lovely, screaming, wiggly baby instead of a lovely, silent, still one.

I have chosen good friends throughout my life.  And I think that I've been a good friend, too, because I've managed to hang on to most of them.  My closest friends and I have been there for each other through the best and worst of life experiences, and all of the complicated stuff in between:  parties, concerts, canoe trips, vacations, sleepovers, and nights out dancing.  Boyfriends, engagements, weddings, the ups and downs of married life, and mother-in-law drama.  Also, co-worker drama, new jobs, new homes, graduate school, unemployment, and job promotions.  We've seen each other through parents divorcing, grandparents dying, parents coming out of the closet, and parents dying.  The last couple of years have seen struggles with fertility, planned pregnancies, surprise pregnancies, and new babies.  And now, the death of a baby.

We've stuck by each other through all of it.  Of course.  That's what friends are for. 

When Eliza died and I plunged into that black pit of grief (from which depths I am ever-so-slowly emerging, but prone to slip back into pretty often), in those early days, my friends would often say, "I miss you."

I was very absent from all the places I used to be--happy hour, shopping trips, dinner parties, chatty phone calls, rambling voice mails.  I didn't think I'd ever get back there again.  I felt so completely altered.  I wasn't sure how my friendships would last because I felt like I had turned into someone else and the qualities that made me a good friend--being thoughtful, being funny, genuinely caring about other people's problems, being able to hold a conversation about something other than Eliza or my grief or the plot of a TV show--these are qualities I seem to no longer possess.  I'm sad about that, but I can't see any way around it.

I am a bad friend right now.
 
I don't call.  I don't write.  I almost always depend on other people to initiate an e-mail exchange, a coffee date, lunch at a Mexican restaurant.  I make plans that I may or may not cancel at the last minute.  I don't inquire about babies.  I would rather rip out my own fingernails than hear about a baby shower or a baby's newest milestone.  I don't remember anniversaries.  I don't send birthday cards.  I can't remember other people's schedules (I can barely remember my own).  I can chatter about superficial nonsense or I can cry about Eliza.  There is little in between.  It takes great effort for me to remember that I should ask, "And how have you been?" when someone asks me how I'm doing.  When I have "normal" conversations, I mostly feel like I am running on autopilot.  I love my friends, but I feel like I am too tired to care.

My friend Jamie said to me once, "It sucks that this happened to my best friend."  She said that because she loves me and she hates to see me hurting like this, but also because it sucks for her, too.  As my friend Beth said, they loved and lost Eliza, too.  And complicating that grief is the haunting idea that in losing her, they also lost me.  The friend I used to be.

Jamie had a baby boy in October.  I have seen him three times since he was born.  If Eliza had lived, I would have seen him at least every couple of weeks.  I still haven't even met my friend Carol's baby who was born on Christmas day.  And I feel guilty about that--guilty that I don't want to see pictures, guilty that I don't want to hear stories, guilty that when Jamie tells me Owen has gotten so fat, it makes my stomach feel cold and tight because all I want is MY fat, happy baby.

It sucks.  It sucks that I can't bear to hear the play-by-play of the baby minutia that would have otherwise enthralled me.  It sucks that I am essentially missing out on Owen's first year.  I'm not attending his baptism next weekend.  I don't know how I'll feel this fall when the birthday parties start, but I can't guarantee that I'll go to them.  It fucking sucks.  It sucks for me, because I'm sad to miss out on this stuff, but it also really sucks for Jamie because she deserves to have her best friend there, and she deserves to have a best friend who can put her own problems aside and celebrate with her and be happy for the life of her beautiful baby boy.

But, because she's my best friend, she will forgive me for being in too much pain to do that.  She will forgive me for being small and mean and self-centered about my grief.  She will forgive me for putting up limits in order to protect my broken heart. 

She has to, or we won't stay friends.  Because my baby fucking died and I simply do not have the capacity to be strong or generous or brave or considerate of other people's feelings. 



I am a bad friend because right now I am first and foremost a bereaved mother.  My baby died, and I am absorbed in my grief.  I don't know how long I will be like this, but my friends have to learn to accommodate my pain just like I do.  It's what friendship means.  I am sorry it has to be this way, and I know it isn't easy for them, and I know they won't be able to do it perfectly all the time.  But I love them for trying. 

And when I look at this objectively, even though I feel guilty about my absence, I know that if they didn't try--well, that's on them.  The thing is, I need a friend but I can't really be one right now.  Most of my friends get that, and I'm so grateful. 

My best friend Monica sent me a text one day that said, "My sympathy will last as long as your grief."  I wonder if she realizes what a commitment that is.  Because my grief has no end in sight, and I know that it is hard to feel sorry for someone for an extended period of time.  After a while, we want them to buck up, to put on their big girl pants, suck it up, and get on with life.  I dread the day that my friends lose patience with me.  Because I am coming up on six months, and although I feel better, better still feels really shitty.  I worry about becoming a broken record.  I miss Eliza.  I want my baby.  There's nothing I want in life as much as I want that baby.  When will people finally get tired of hearing it? 

Yes, there is an extent to which we grow accustomed to this sorrow and the constant underlying presence of grief in our lives, and we find our old, frivolous selves emerging around it.  I went to dinner with Jamie on Saturday and when when the waiter recommended the "Ewephoria cheese" (a sheep cheese pronounced "euphoria") and I laughed and said "Yes! I want the cheese that is a pun!" and I felt for a second just like my old self, the self who regularly went to dinner with friends and loved puns and cheese.  I think, in those moments, that I will be okay eventually, and that when I am, my friends will be there--they will have never left. 

But I wonder if they are impatient with me, not that they want me to forget my grief (they would never expect that), but if they are ready for me to become better at navigating around and through it.  I wonder if they are impatient for me to be a good friend again.

I'm asking a lot of my friends right now.  Because of me, they're having to face truths no one wants to admit--that babies die, that the universe is random and scary, that bad things happen for no reason at all.  They're grieving Eliza's absence in our little world.  And they're having to figure out how to be there for a friend who is alternately sad and angry and sort of okay.

I worry that my friends will resent that I have such trouble celebrating their babies' lives even though I wish nothing but happiness for them.  I know that this sucks for them, too.  Their pain is not like my pain, but it's real and it's sad, too.

I have to remember that friendship isn't just about the good times.  It's about love and support and trust.

So I trust my friends to hold up their end of the deal while I keep trying to drag myself up out of this pit of grief.  I trust them to make me believe that however this has changed me, for better or worse, they still want me to show up for happy hour, to go to dinner, to offer my opinion about an outfit or a recipe or a crazy mother-in-law.  Right now, I have a hard time believing that anyone would hang out with me for any reason other than pity.  I trust them to remind me that I can still be fun.  I trust them to be patient with me, to keep calling even when they just get my voicemail, to continue not to talk about their babies until I mention them first. 

In this moment, even though I'm a bad friend, I trust my friends to be good ones.  To help me honor Eliza's memory, and to extend their sympathy as long as I grieve--which is to say, forever. 

Because (as I could sing for you while simultaneously doing sign-language) that's what friends are for.