The Courage to Write and Remember

The Sonoran Desert and the Santa Catalina Mountains in Tucson, Arizona inspire me to keep creating and hopefully make a difference. I often write about the importance of getting away and stepping out of your comfort zone, especially for writers. My recent trip there allowed me to work on my novel and visit with friends I hadn’t seen in years. We shared perspectives and points of view and caught up on our lives. To be so trusting of one another after years apart was a gift, heightened by the great expanse of the American Southwest.

When I returned to Pennsylvania from Arizona, I learned that my best friend of over fifty years had died. It wasn’t this week or last that she died but in late January. Her distant family member hadn’t let me know of her passing, and for this, I remain deeply saddened. I was denied the opportunity to attend her funeral and was at a loss for how strange life comes to an end. Through technology and the internet, I found the obituary, which knowing she had an incurable disease, I admit I had searched for from time to time with great trepidation.

The obituary was sparse. She was a woman alone. Whoever wrote it knew little to nothing about Paula. Twice divorced, with no children, her parents long dead, there was no one to remember, to speak of her life, which was often difficult but far from lacking noteworthiness, including a journalism award she won for community reporting. There was me, her “sister” who remembered the day she first met the petite girl with big blue eyes who invited her into her house to listen to the Beatles, drink coke, and eat popcorn. She called me Susie and was present at every major milestone in my life. When our Women’s Writing Circle published its anthology, Slants of Light, she got each one of our authors to sign her copy. But Alzheimer’s had stripped her of her memory and her gentle nature. I lacked the courage to make the two-hour drive to New Jersey to visit her in the nursing home in her final years. I couldn’t bear becoming invisible to her and seeing her so distressed, caught between anger and weeping. The last time I visited, when she still knew me, she said hauntingly, “Don’t forget me.”

I am not proud that I never went back after that, yet when I mentioned this to a friend, she validated her own experience of avoiding any final visits with her cousin who also had Alzheimer’s.

As writers, we seek to make sense of the world around us, not just by drawing upon our own experiences, but by learning from the experiences of others willing to share their stories and moments of pain and suffering. My friends in Arizona and friends here…they help me realize I am not alone in this beautiful and terrible journey. To quote Kate Bowler, whose Lenten study I recently completed, friends and community strengthen us. However, where do we go from here? How do we find the courage to face the most beautiful and terrible things? 

I looked out the window this morning. I may have an answer. The luminescent lawn of green nurtured by rain and clouds offers April’s mystery. So do the fragile white and yellow daffodils that grow among the weeds behind tree limbs, fallen during winter storms. As the cycle begins again, it is April that strikes a chord.

April is the cruelest month, breeding

 Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

 Memory and desire, stirring

 Dull roots with spring rain

 – T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

The reminder that I will never see my best friend again is poignant and bittersweet. As winter fades into spring, life goes on. It’s easy to be hard on ourselves when things don’t go as planned. That’s why it’s important to be kind to ourselves and focus on progress rather than perfection. Writing can be a powerful tool to cultivate self-compassion. By allowing our uncensored thoughts and feelings to flow onto the page, we can explore and process our grief and loss. This April, I am inspired by the memory of Paula, my beautiful best friend, to keep writing and reflecting on the great love and gratitude we shared during our time together.