“When I first learned about her, no less than two million buffalo stampeded across my chest. (That is just an estimate at the risk of sounding dramatic.) When the dust finally settled, when chaos clipped its own wing & the Earth relinquished her thunder, I found the remains of a heart not twenty feet from my aching body, trampled into a bloody mess. This heart did not belong to me, but I ripped open my own ribcage just to double-check.”
Years ago, I had a close friend of almost ten years. We worked together and saw each other almost everyday. She was a big part of my world. I frequently talked about her when she wasn’t around, recounting all the hilarious things she said or the kind things she did for me or others. I found that she talked about me when I wasn’t around also. And she always had something she couldn’t wait to tell me, usually about one of her grandkids. I never imagined we could ever be apart. Life without her was unfathomable. It made no sense.
Then one day she just dropped dead.
At work.
A heart attack they said.
It was quick. Probably painless. For her. She was already gone when her body hit the floor. I was not there that day. I was on a meditation retreat. When I returned to work I saw her folded up newspaper and her half full bottle of water on her table. The water she was drinking and the paper she was reading just moments before her death took place. They never took it away.
I thought I would never recover. It was the absolute most traumatic experience of this entire life of mine. It wrecked me completely. I could not sleep and felt I would collapse in grief & trauma everyday wherever I was. I would wake up in a panic in the middle of the night. My body was constantly in the “fight or flight” mode. I forgot what it felt like to not be afraid. Her death devastated my world. Nothing else I ever experienced in this life came close to that trauma.
I constantly felt the urge to scream hysterically or scream her name until my throat was raw & tasted of blood. I imagined myself frantically climbing up the tallest skyscrapers in the city, like a wild animal, with just my arms and legs, and screaming her name off the rooftops, not to summon her, but to expel the violent primal pain ripping through my body with every breath I took. I used to cover my face with my pillow in the dead of night to mask the screams. It was not crying or sobbing. It was screams. Primitive screams. Fear, pain ripping through me, trying to claw its way out of my body and escape into the night. Sometimes I would lay on a floor in a fetal position, holding myself, my entire existence throbbing hysterically. When I was able to finally drag myself up, I would look in a mirror and my eyes would be completely black. My face distorted by terror. It was a shock to see. I felt like the embodiment of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
I had no idea how to handle the fear of the thought of her being gone forever. I felt like I would go to the ends of the Earth to find her. It was the same sense of panic as a phobia. (I have, now dormant after exposure therapy, lifelong Claustrophobia, so I know). The panic of knowing she was gone forever, never able to return, the permeance of her absence, the permeance of death in general, death itself, threatened to drive me insane. Just very faintly, a hint of that feeling of possibly going insane without her here lingers today, only rarely appearing and is more like a hologram or a shadow than anything of substance. I knew people die and have even known people who died. But I had no idea someone can just die. I had no experience with it when it was someone that close to me. I suddenly realized the hard way that absolutely anyone can die and without warning. It was a rude awakening. I did not like it.
My mundane sense of safety & security was stripped away forever like being soundly asleep and having a warm comforting blanket unexpectedly ripped off of you and a bucket of ice water suddenly poured over your exposed body before you ever get the chance to process what is happening. For a while I lived in a constant state of confusion & shock.
I wanted to go back to my safe little bubble where no one close to me ever dies and couldn’t possibly die, where it was only something I heard about and knew in an abstract way, never my reality, my nightmare.
Sometimes I wondered if my own heart could handle the pain or if it too would soon give out, suddenly stop forever just like hers. There was once a couple months after her death where I truly believed I was having a heart attack too at 28 years old. I literally thought I was dying. It was something I never experienced before. I woke up in the middle of the night gasping for breath, plagued with the grief, but now accompanied by something else. My chest was caving in. It felt like I was suffocating. I couldn’t catch my breath. It felt like something crushing me. I dragged myself out of bed and looked in a mirror. My eyes were completely black. My mouth was agape in horror. Clutching my chest, I slid to the floor to die. Literally I believed the grief was physically k!lling me. It was the most terrifying thing imaginable.
Suddenly I realized it was the beginning stages of a panic attack. I never had one before. The only real anxiety I ever had before that was related to my claustrophobia but never resulted in a panic attack. I stopped it in its tracks with a meditation technique I learned. I never had one again but continued to live in a near constant state of panic for a while.
My whole world crumbled on top of me. It was like I had to learn to live again. It took years to rebuild myself.
I felt like I was drowning (when I was 11 years old I almost drowned in a swimming pool at a family member’s house, and this felt exactly the same) and like I was missing a limb. Every single day it felt like part of my body was missing, like my own flesh & blood was torn away. It felt like I had to learn to breathe again. Breathing no longer came naturally. Sometimes I was literally gasping for breath. My chest felt like it was being crushed. It truly felt like a nightmare I could not wake up out of. I did not grow up with Diane, I met her at 20 years old. I only knew her for less than ten years. We were not biologically related. But for some reason it feels and has always felt like her love has been with me all life long, for as long as I can remember, and her death feels, even to this day, almost like a biological injury, like I lost a piece of myself.
It took years for me to “get over it” as much as I ever will. She’s the closest person to me who ever died. I had friends/family who died before her, but nothing prepared me for this. My pets dying was not less painful, but I had pets who died since I was little and unfortunately expect that. I never imagined I would lose a human so close to me and so much a part of me.
She was old enough to be my mom and has sons around my age or a bit older. She showed me a love that was like a Mother’s love. She would give me loving mom hugs. She was very protective and would yell at anyone she thought was doing something wrong to me. One day my dad came to work and was messing around joking and said “What are you doing?!” And my friend was going by in a car and heard him and she yelled “She’s working!! The fuck’s it look like she’s doing,” not knowing it was my dad just playing around. He was pissed. 😂
She used to invite me to her house for Thanksgiving & Christmas with her big family but I always had family plans and never accepted the invitations. Now I wish I did at least once. She would make me lunch and check up on me and even brag about me like I was her own daughter. All three of her sons wanted to date me at one point and would argue over me, and she told me she wanted me as a daughter in law but that I was too good for all of them. 😆 She said “Wait til they all get their shit together and then choose one.” 🤣 Diane was a widow, her husband died years before and she stayed single. Her three boys and grandkids were her world. I met all of them. They would come to our work, and she would proudly show them off.
She frequently told me I was too good for this world. She also told me one of her biggest fears in life was that this cruel world would turn me cold, harden me, and that I would lose my sweetness, my soft, gentle ways. My warmth. She told me she never met anyone with my level of kindness and never knew it existed until she found me. She said I have a heart unmatched by any other and she was afraid that heart could grow cold.
I once overheard her expressing this same fear to someone else and telling them one of her only wishes in life is for me to stay kind, warm, caring, even in the face of the world’s bitterness. She made me promise her more than once that I would never lose myself to the cruelty & coldness of others. I always had to say “I promise.” Sometimes, years after her death, I have felt that happening and then I remembered my promise to her and felt myself soften.
She would often say “Love ya, girl” when we were parting ways.
“Unfuckingbelievable”
The last word I ever heard her say.
It was a cold February morning. A sardonic smile creeping at the edges of her mouth, scoffing at the situation before angrily slamming a window closed in my face. I remember it so vividly. It’s burned in my mind. She slammed the window closed without giving me a chance to say goodbye. Then she turned her back to me and walked away.
I never saw her again.
That last encounter makes me laugh because it is so her. I did not like her when we first met. I thought she was obnoxious. She asked me how much something costs. I meant to say 75 cents or two for $1 and slipped and said 50 cents or two for $1. And she said “Yeah, no shit it’s two for $1.” 🤣 I never imagined then that I could come to love her the way that I did.
It doesn’t hurt me that we never got to properly say goodbye. It’s quite fitting. We never had a proper hello either. Diane walked out on me the same way she walked in. Loud. Sarcastic. Cynical. Fiery.
It really was just so her. And I wouldn’t have her any other way.
She was loud and sarcastic and cursed constantly just in mundane conversations. If she was angry or unhappy with us we knew it. She was also very kind & giving.
She loved Rod Stewart. And strawberry ice cream. And hot chocolate. And soft pretzels. We would sit together on cold Winter nights laughing and drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream and playing Rod Stewart songs. The memories make me dizzy.
I always said if I knew her heart was going to stop beating, that last day I saw her I would have cracked open my own chest, ripped my own heart out if I could have, and handed it to her. I would have given my heart to Diane so she could meet her grandbaby and so she could have more cones of strawberry ice cream and so that she could hear one more Rod Stewart song and so that she could keep yelling at her boys for “not having their shit together” and so that she could keep giving big tips to food workers (as food workers ourselves we had no money, but she always gave her last dollar to someone else).
She already had my heart. But if I could I would have given her every beat of it I have left, to keep her here.
She was about to have a (great) grandbaby and could not wait to meet him. It was all she talked about. She died at 58 years old, just before he was born. I got to meet that baby and tell his sweet mom (her granddaughter) how much she already loved him, how he was all she talked about at work.
I have a sterling silver necklace with her name engraved on it and her birthstone (the one I’m wearing in this picture) that I bought after she died. I think of her often. It has been nearly ten years without her, but she’s always somewhere in the back of my mind, I can always feel her. While I felt the loss so deeply & so profoundly and to some extent still do, I never felt that I lost her love. It feels like it has never gone away. It’s an ingrained part of me that can never go away. It feels almost as essential to me as my DNA.
My grief for Diane is now quiet, calm. It’s as mellow as it will ever be. Such a sharp contrast to what it used to be. Even the “flare ups,” you know the ones that hit at random moments or are triggered by a memory or anniversary or certain part of the year, are quite soft now. It no longer traumatizes me or floors me or provokes the urge to scream into the night. And my eyes are no longer black with terror at the thought of her never walking this Earth again. There’s a somber acceptance now. A sad knowing that can coexist with me.
I am still sad. There is still heartbreak. But I can breathe again. My head feels like it’s above water.
Every now & again I feel a wave approaching. A wave of that grief I know so well. The grief that used to knock me to the floor or the ground, wherever I was standing. The grief that knocked the wind out of me, leaving me breathless. I brace myself for the blow as it comes at me. But when it arrives it’s soft & gentle. Briefly touching me, almost like a caress before bouncing off. It doesn’t take me under like it used to. There may be a hint of that despair riding on each wave. Sometimes there is still a sharp pang in the gut. But it never hits like it used to. It’s like an Ocean’s wave by the time it reaches the sand and only comes up to your ankles. You can still feel the piercing coldness of it and the distant or potential threat of it knowing how powerful it once was, how uproarious & v!olent. But it’s harmless. It’s just there. There may even be a touch of beauty to it.
Today I no longer think about what I lost but what I had. Her love was a gift that never had to be given to me but was.
And I am so so lucky.
Randomly, I write about Diane and share it. Ten years later she is still my inspiration for writing. I have written about her even before she died. My last post about her a while ago is something I titled “The Forgotten Mourners” and is about how the loss of a platonic friend is disenfranchised grief (and especially when it’s the loss of an online friend or a coworker).
It’s always someone else’s grief first. It belongs to the spouse or to the children or to the parents. It’s never ours. We’re always lost in the shadows of their mourning, the “real” mourners, seemingly hijacking their grief. This can make it so it feels like it’s not our place to grieve or to grieve as deeply as we are. Whenever my grief would reach its pinnacle I told myself to tone it down. What about her sons? Her grandkids? What about her siblings & “real friends?” Who am I to tread? Years ago shortly after she died and I wrote about her death, I asked everyone to withhold any sympathy/compassion directed at me, I said it wasn’t my loss, that it was her family’s loss, the loss of her “real friends,” I was just a little old work friend.
Years later I take that back. She was my friend. I was her friend. And it is a tragic loss to me, one that has left me with a deep gaping wound that took years to heal. One that still marks me today. Our grief is ours to claim. Some losses are more profound than others and someone grieving for the same person may have it worse. I’m sure losing a spouse, for example, is more devastating or extensive than losing a coworker. But that doesn’t make the grief for a work friend any less valid or any less painful than it is in its own context. There is unfortunately enough grief to go around.
My love for Diane has never faded like the worst of the grief has. My sense of missing her also hasn’t.
If I could whisper one thing into the uni-verse that could reach her it would be:
“I love you, Diane. I love you.”
“The rhythm of my heart
Is beating like a drum
With the words ‘I love you’ rolling off my tongue” ❤️
I promise.
Xoxo Kim ❤️
