How Do We Continue?

I have often said that finding a new friend is a lot like falling in love. It’s an exciting surprise that life sometimes pitches your way, and you have to be ready to catch it, and when you do, there is a certain ease, and the exhilaration of connection, and it is as if you knew this person all along, and you wonder how it is that you didn’t. As John O’Donohue said, “Friendship is always an act of recognition.”

And so it has been with Kappy. We just clicked, and we walked together and talked about everything, and I admired her intelligence and creativity and charisma, and I fell in love with her, as many do. We encouraged each other in our work, she as an artist, and me as a writer, and we laughed about life’s absurdities and expressed our awe at its wonders. We were every age and no age at all, two in an expanding tribe of silver-haired women, all of us orphans, trying to learn how to be, and doing our best.

In the golden light of afternoon, we sat on lounge chairs sipping wine, and it seemed as though we were in a movie. Or we walked over springy tangles of kelp seeking oddities and artifacts in the sand, and we stepped across sparkling rivulets on their way to the ocean. We talked about our lives, which sometimes seemed important, and we talked about the planet.  Sometimes a distant boat faded into whiteness, and the sea was gray and unreadable, but always, predictably, the train went by, punctuating our days. And we waved as it passed.

“Someday we’ll be on that train, and we’ll look out and see ourselves waving,” mused Kappy. That’s the kind of thing she’d say.

Earlier this year, Kappy lost her son and became a grieving mother. Lost her son—that sounds like a forgotten umbrella. Her son is gone. He passed away. He was killed. She particularly doesn’t like the word “dead". Dead is a dull thud. It’s a window permanently sealed. It does not leave room for ambiguities and possibilities and mysteries, and Kappy has already glimpsed a few of those. Besides, even in his vast absence, her son is present at the center of her life, and that center is a force more than an emptiness. Maybe it’s best to say that he has changed his form and venue.

But there is no way to deny the pain or fully understand so terrible a bereavement. And how do I help and comfort my friend? I asked the advice of someone who had experienced the loss of a child years ago. “All you can do is be there for her,” she said. “Love her unequivocally, and listen to her, and accept her, and don’t expect that it will pass. The sorrow never goes away, and she will never be the same, but you can’t take away her suffering. She has to make this journey in her own way. Grief is a solitary experience.”

There are times when she feels desperate and unhinged, and times when her life is alien and bleak. Sometimes she tries to cultivate a kind of detachment, wishing to feel nothing at all. Occasionally she fantasizes about running away: “I wish I were a Borrower,” she told me once, alluding to the old children’s book by Mary Norton. “I could hide in your suitcase when you go to England, and maybe I’d meet some elves or fairies and escape into the woods with them.”

But always she possesses an astounding degree of courage and strength. There is something magnificent about my friend, even in her sorrow.

And she is learning a lot. This epic she now inhabits is a crash course in wisdom. She knows what is important and what is nonsense, and there is power in that. Maybe you need to stare into the abyss to finally understand. My poet-friend Dan recently quoted Keats, who wrote in a letter, “Do you not see the necessity of a life of suffering and travail to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

And who among us escapes suffering and travail? But the loss of a son or daughter seems particularly cruel and incomprehensible. How does one continue?

“I have come to the edge,” Kappy told me once, and I could see it in her eyes. Her pain breaks my heart.

But I also sensed that beyond her edge is another edge, a shore that will not fail her, and I believe that she will reach it.

I realize it will not be a linear progression, and there will inevitably be setbacks and detours, but lately she seems like a plant whose sap is starting to move after a dormant winter, or a stream beginning to unfreeze and flow, and there are flickers of her old self, signs of life.

My heart leapt with joy when I came to her house the other day and found her in a sunlit room wearing paint-splattered clothes, even a smudge of dark paint on her cheek, playing mindless Abba tunes, and working on a very large painting spread across the wall. Outside, the green hills shimmered and the treetops swayed. There is balm in nature, salvation in art.

She is only just beginning, but the work was already bold and breathtaking, emanating energy, opening into other dimensions, affirmative and defiant. It is a gesture, a start, and that’s enough for now. I have come to believe that grief will carve her soul into immense beauty, and the light will shine through her, and while she walks this earth, she will see miracles, and make meaning.

One evening, when the air was unusually sweet and still, we took a picnic to the beach, and the sky kept surprising us with different hues of pink and silver as it poured itself into the sea, and the dogs kept romping and returning to shake sand and saltwater onto our faded print table cloth, and the reassuring train chugged by at suitable intervals, and of course we waved, as we always do.

We wonder if any travelers notice when we wave to the passing trains, two incongruous old women with long gray hair and the skin of seven decades and a lot of sun, and we like to imagine that they see us as a pair of tomboy beachcomber hoboes making camp there, free-spirited souls who wander the beach and sleep under the stars. But we’re probably not kidding anyone, and it doesn’t matter. We’re just good friends, doing our best.

And one of these days we’ll board that train and wave to ourselves as we pass.