On Getting Through the Worst Day

JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU’VE HIT BOTTOM, HANDS REACH DOWN TO PULL YOU UP

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

My beloved friend Bob left the planet recently.

It was time. He was done with all this. We have a good law, the California End of Life Option Act, that offers the choice of Medical Aid in Dying if one is a mentally competent, terminally ill adult. So after many years of battling cancer — most of them wonderfully good and productive years — he didn’t so much surrender as choose to leave the battlefield. We should all have the grace, and the good fortune, to make such a choice.

Still.

A few days earlier he’d called to say goodbye. I declined; we settled on See you around. Then on that morning after I awoke to an email of two hearts in my inbox from him; another two, later, from his wife. (Though he and I had loved each other deeply for years, she understood. I’m pretty sure I was not even close to being his only extra-marital beloved.)

I had gone to bed that night before, after sending off my own hearts, with a heavy one of my own. The hearts in the inbox helped, but the heaviness was slow to lift; loss takes its own time to wear itself down. As Anna Quindlen concludes in her poem “Old Friends” — which also references earthquakes and tsunamis and terrorist attacks — “Catastrophe is numerical. Loss is singular, one beloved at a time.” So I poured a cup of coffee, thought sorrowfully and fondly of his family, and wondered how any of us would get through the day.

And then these things happened:

A new photo of my one-month-old great-granddaughter popped up in a family text stream. Her father, my grandson, is shampooing her hair.

A neighbor of Bob’s — who knew him only casually but knew of our friendship and his illness — sent an email saying she and her husband were walking by his house this morning and thinking of how often they enjoyed the lovely music coming from his piano. She hoped things were okay and just wanted to send a note.

My daughter-in-law called to fill me in on family lives, and discuss some technological issues she has offered to help me with. If dealing with technology won’t take your mind off your sorrows (and/or replace them all with rage and frustration) nothing will.

A neighbor in my building sent a text saying how much he was enjoying the new flower arrangement outside my door. As it happened, the flowers in my building’s lobby were to be replaced in the morning,

New arrangement of aging flowers (Author photo)

so it was legal to snatch a few (the white ones, dahlias perhaps?) late last night. I poked them into a vase with some hydrangeas brought by dinner guests two weeks ago. Who needs new flowers, when aging ones bring community joy?

A political activist friend emailed an invitation to a fundraiser for some national candidates I greatly admire. She knew I couldn’t afford the big bucks initially advertised, but a few cut-rate tickets had quietly been made available. (Or so she said.) Maybe these folks aren’t as big a draw as we’d hope? — at least it meant getting to meet and greet a few heroes, and in lively, fancy company!

Some old Substacks and Medium posts generated thoughtful comments, some of them funny, all bringing just a tiny fragment of someone else’s soul.

At lunch I visited with a group of old friends; we talked causes and politics and trivia. After dinner, another old friend came for a visit and to use my shower, because she has no hot water. Life in senior living facilities does not always run smoothly. But her trouble was my gain.

In my reading pile are several unfinished New Yorker’s and Atlantics, Ann Patchett’s new Whistler and (audiobook version) The Odyssey. Miss Mabel K. Whiteside, who taught me Greek 101 an antiquity ago, would be proud.

Just another day on planet earth. Minus the physical presence but not the living spirit of one treasured soul, and still peopled with others — 

Each one reaching down a hand of friendship.