It's been a strange few weeks. I actually started to write a couple of times, but well...you know how it happens in my world. If I can describe it in two lines or a paragraph because I've mostly said it before, I'll dump the gas tanks and ditch in the ocean.
The past two weeks have been all about the phrase "I wish I knew them better" which is, of course, always said as an afterthought. Such as we are in this high speed attention span world, we see and experience things and suddenly we're ready to click on the next thing. The very next thing. Watch me raise my hand. I can be guilty of this myself, but possibly less than the average person because I constantly look for something genuine, and then I write about it, or create it in stories. I'm an opportunist in that respect; I really tell those who are close to me what I'm thinking and feeling to a fault. This little self-indulgent collection of journal entries is a great example fo that. Whom do I write this for? Here's my secret: I don't consider this writing. I'm recording myself, preserving the moment in a medium that comes as easily as speaking. Whether I'm any good at it is up to the viewer. This is just what I do.
Here's another secret: Even though I do all this, I still find myself saying "I wish I knew them better."
A few weeks ago, I lose another friend to cancer. It came switfly in two emails; my former boss, much better known as my great friend Cathy, wrote to me to tell me that her husband Dave was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer towards the end of last year. I immediately remembered Maxine, I remembered Siony, I remembered the paradoxical unfairness and glory of Robert's last year, and then came Cathy's second email. Dave was undergoing chemo, beating the cancer little by little. In a cruel card up fate's sleeve, a blood vessel burst in Dave's lung and he bled to death. This stirs up so many conflicting emotions - anger at the deceptive patience of cancer, frustration over the growing belief that it is a death sentence, and the regret over not having spent more time with Cathy and Dave. We had dinner a few times when they lived here and I had a standing invitation to go visit them in Indiana. I just never made it out there. He had a dry sense of humor and was brilliant, but cancer doesn't discriminate. He was stolen from us.
And so we arrive at the final effects of the layoff my company began two months ago. I remember saying to a superior right before it happened that I didn't care if I was on the list, but I hoped they didn't take any of my close friends. The word came, and again, bad news came via email. My friend Nattie wrote an email to our little group and wanted to see us right away. She had two months left with our company, a deferred layoff, and now those two months have expired. Whether we spent those last months the best way we could have is irrelevant; I said everything that was on my mind and we had weeks filled with lunches and breaks and hundreds of text messages. The change was out of our hands and we all dealt with it the best we could, but...well, I can't exactly say that it's all over because we'll always be in touch, but things will be different.
So we find each other from day to day, we meet people we have something in common with and work our schedules so we can see them again. We connect and on rare occasions we say the right things to the right people and then suddenly time sits still. We think that things will always be the same. Think about that for a second. The things you count on from day to day could be there tomorrow, everything you know...every place you go...the people around you...but that just doesn't mean that you can take any given moment for granted. In hindsight you wish you had more of those opportunities, another chance to say the right thing.
What's left, but the love we have for the people in our past? Isn't it better spent on the people who are around us now? Yeah, I forget sometimes the short attention span of the average person nowadays. Most go through these shocking moments of reality and then click on the next thing, but I suppose the fact that I'm sitting here writing about it might put me in the exclusive minority. Or maybe not. There are a lot of blogs out there.
Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
~Kahlil Gibran
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