Tag Archives: loss

Being human, Emoji, Miss you, What is lost

Thumbs Up

I have an issue. My problem is with emoji.

Currently — and I just counted — there are twenty fat yellow thumbs in response to my last text to something or someone. I am all for efficiency and speed but here’s my thinking: what actually DOES this thumb mean?

“Yes, I read it?”

“Yeah, that sounds good?”

“Ok, that plan works?”

“Got the invoice, will settle?”

“Miss you too?”

“Thanks for making that happen?”

Just to cite a few interpretations. But my problem is I interpret this particular emoji as “I don’t have the time to actually communicate with you so this will have to do.” Well.

No one uses email or even posted mail these days so short efficient texts keeps me in touch with so many people. Don’t get me wrong I love tacking on emoji I mean there is even a BALL OF YARN emoji and a turtle and a lacrosse stick and a hairdryer and a steaming cup of coffee to name a few. These are really fun ones to jolly up a text, but that’s after I have used a few words in letters. So am I not worth actual words that convey the emotion/message you would like me to know?

Maybe I am too literal. I did terribly on multiple choice exams, finding a reason to check all the boxes if I thought hard enough. I want to be clear: I treasure our communications and take the time with my answers. But the key here is ‘communication.’

This particular emoji maybe ALL of them have dumbed us down; it actually takes less time to type a response than to search for that emoji and click on it. Try it.

It gives me a feeling of loss that we can’t use words anymore. So much is being lost right now, cultural and emotionally, politically and financially. We need to work really hard to keep being human together.

It’s a very ugly thumb. Even the heart emoji is better. Thanks for listening.

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Friendship, Grief, Ode to a friend

Make the call.

She called me ‘A-bomb.’

We met lumbering around in pre-natal aerobics in 1987 at a fancy health club in San Francisco we could barely afford. My mother had just died and I had spent four months in a new city throwing up knowing no one; both my skin and my soul were translucent. I have no doubt I heard her laugh first from across the room, but whatever drew us together lasted like glue for the following thirty-eight years, over thousands of miles, through serious health issues for both of us, the death of her spouse and the grief that followed.

When she beamed her light on you there was no going back. Everything she did, designed, wore, commanded was larger than life, straight-on classy and always crisp white or navy linen. I adored being in her orbit and later, as we faced our adult challenges, having her on the other end of the phone to laugh with, anger with and decompress alongside.

She sent me absurd and outrageous gifts which were somehow always just right: a waist-high hand woven basket for my yarn when I had my hip replaced. Tiny spherical etched glasses to toast my first steps. Over the years wildly impractical and sustainable skeins of yarn in — she wrote — the color that reminds me of you. In 2000 for the New Years a bracelet arrived so jingly and sparkly and joyful I still have it in a bag even though the elastic gave out long ago.

She read everything I wrote. She would call, begin at the top of her voice, “A-BOMB YOU ARE AMAZING’ then chastise me for not writing more. There are so many stories.

Losing her spouse, living alone, facing her own health challenges have been hard for the last two years. I was able to visit her many times over the decades in her various beautifully decorated nests in Sonoma, in between no matter how many miles apart we talked, texted at all hours, shared our project tips, news about weddings, babies and parents. Each call felt like I was sinking into that familiar oversized white linen couch, cup of tea in hand, our legs tucked under us.

We argued over the years as fiercely as we loved. Then we laughed harder.

This Christmas I sent her a silly little sliver of a bead bracelet and wrote her I had one too and it was to be our ‘friendship’ bracelet. We hadn’t had contact over the busy holiday season but last Thursday I checked in by text to see if she had picked up the package. She went to the post office immediately and replied that she had put it right on, then gave me a run-down on her visitors over the holidays, what she knit for everyone and what she was casting on for the next project. I sent her the links to my recent publications.

I should have called instead.

Her daughter phoned me Monday to tell me my friend had died in her sleep that weekend.

Sudden loss is an unbelievable grief. I keep wanting to call her about the wildfires in California, does she smell smoke? Is she safe? To hear her laugh and tell me everything is alright. But it isn’t. She landed almost four decades ago in an important place within my soul which has gone abruptly and irreversibly vacant. I vacillate between anger and tears. I don’t think there is an in-between anytime soon.

I have been through a lot of death and dying. For the most part I have had time to compose my goodbye, my grief, my breath. Not so here. I am still gasping.

Wow and wow this life is fragile and splendid, full of grace and heartache and it hurts, all of it.

Send the bracelet. Make the call. If you are thinking of someone it is because they need to hear from you.

Be the friend you need.

Miss you, B-bomb.

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Grief, Rosselini’s Bakery, Women

Hearts of All Sizes

This morning I realized my favorite bakery was full of women. Women quietly ordering and eating amazing treats — hot chai with whip, caramel lattes, croissant, strawberry jam linzertortes. I watched a young girl sitting alone, her sole concentration on a cerise mousse confection with a candied violet on top, licking each bite off the back of her fork. Another in her work suit was carefully choosing colorful macaroons. A dozen plates were covered in quivering quiche, tall cannele, brioche. There was not a man in sight.

I felt this surge of solidarity. A day when hearts are the theme can be hard — don’t hearts come in all sizes and shapes? — and in this buttery room it was a good guess that some were small or full or broken or mending or lost — and a Hallmark holiday does not fix this.

When a hot chocolate with whip was called out, no one stood. But a small pair of yellow boots caught my eye.

”I bet this is yours” I walked it over. She looked up at me, then at my yellow purse. “I like yellow” she answered, her spoon ready to plunge into the cup. “Well,” I answered, “we have to bring the sun to us when it is hiding.”

I did a heart check: mine is beating but broken, alive but grieving. I am a tattered heart; 2020 started rough. I lost a best friend, a woman who many called best friend — an amazing mother, a wife so loved. On January 6 a hole blasted through my heart and I know many other hearts. Valentine’s Day is the first of many many significant dates that I will want to call her and remind her how much I love her. But cannot.

I order a cortado and chocolate croissant and sit with my little piece of sunshine dripping hot chocolate all over her boots and thank the earth for holding me a little longer and giving me this moment.

To all the women at Rosselini’s today, bravo: today we make some sunshine for ourselves. One day at a time.
Missing you, Lou.

”We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

— Tennessee Williams

 

 

 

 

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