I still can't fathom the loss of a friend just before COVID hit. Sunflowered, smiling girl she was - the kinda chic you could rely on to make you feel at ease, and loved, no matter who you were. In her last months we texted a lot at 4 am - her, up with the pain of chemo, and me, flushed with hormones and anxiety and unable to sleep past that god hour. Everything felt apocalyptic, then, with the smoke of the fires sweeping an unnatural haze over the world. We'd spend weeks with the windows shut because we couldn't breath with the smoke haze. Sometimes burnt gum leaves would drift down upon us from hundreds of miles away. We didn't know what was coming - the virus in Wuhan was on the periphery, but it was just part of the general noise of the globe.
When she left, it was both sudden and drawn out enough for us all to say goodbye. She had her people pass through her house - besties and sisters, uncles and aunts, friends from all over, parents and in laws, all bringing food and laughter and a lot of tears. She was good with her dying. She'd had a good life by the time she was 40, and though she was sad there were meant to be other adventures to be had, she'd been lucky.
She'd sit, her skin yellow, her wrists thin, her clothes baggy, her hair short, and fade in and out. The girl had a way of making us feel comfortable even with her dying and our sadness - it wasn't until I'd be half way home that I'd realise she was going and I'd sob with the hurt of it. The last time I hugged her just like I'd say goodbye anytime - seeya babe, go well. I'll swim in the Ganges for you hon, I said. Take you on adventures with me. She squeezed my hand and said she was sorry she didn't go paddle boarding with me when I'd rung a month or so ago. She was getting her locks shaved.
I wrote a poem on the day of her funeral. Grief does that to you. Words form from the sharpest glass.
The rain as you left was such a cliche, though we all needed it
You loved yellow - I wished for an umbrella embossed with cheery ducklings
A hair tie & some yellow shoes
Scuffed and tired, though barely worn.
They take your breath with you, the good ones
Weeks of smoke haze did not help -
In the weeks of your letting go, the city in the distance
Covered in the dunnest pall
Earth gasping as the forests burnt.
In my pocket, a rock. Carved by wind over centuries
Scooped from the sand in the Sahara
I wanted to press it into your hand.
Instead, I burrow my thumb into it's sharp edges.
Will you breath with me, when I travel to far away lands?
I'll dip my feet into Ma Ganga for you,
Learn to say I love you in Arabic in Maroc,
Sip ouzo in the Ionian islands, clouded with ice,
And dangle my feet out the car window, with black
Roads ribboning to infinity.
The roads never did ribbon to infinity. I swum in Ma Ganga. I still hear the singing in Hradiwar: hare hare ganga, jai ma ganga, and the bright saris swirling under the water and floating downstream, garlands of marigolds and other debris. The news says this week that they're putting a net over the river to stop the bodies sweeping down from Uttar Pradesh. They're throwing their dead in the holiest of rivers because they can't afford the cremation. If I'd waited another year, I wouldn't have swum in the Ganges in this lifetime.
I never did get to Morocco again, nor to Greece. Instead we stayed on a narrow boat in England and walked more country miles than we'd ever dreamed we'd do, circles and circles across ordnance survey maps, unable to cross borders. I thought of Sal when I swum in the Avon and the confetti of hawthorn rained down on me in the warm spring breeze. Sometimes I want to text her, but I think she'd be asleep.
Life seems short, and seeing my parents age, and hitting a big birthday in a few months, I've been thinking a lot about the passage of the seconds and minutes we are gifted, and how we are here for a flap of a hummingbirds wing before we dissolve into the endless streams of time. Sometimes it aches. Sometimes life doesn't feel like a celebration, but a sadness, a poignancy. I don't care to make up any higher meaning. What makes me different to an ant, to the spider that makes it's home under the eaves?
It's never bothered me really, this banal viewing of life. I am not unhappy with the fact I will die in twenty odd years time, or sooner, and that I will be forgotten. I don't feel any conceit that I am worth remembering any more than the next person.
But when I think of Sally and sunflowers, I think of how being a good person can ripple out in the world long after you become one with the elements.
I celebrate the fact that we are able to live at all, to feel the warmth of a friend's text at 4 am or feel the sunshine streaming through the windows as I write. All I need to do is focus on the small things that fill my heart with light. Is celebrating this life just about feeling grateful for it? Feeling full of wonder that we have had this brief dance on the earth at all in this life time, in this envelope of flesh that breathes and loves and feels pain and joy?
On this cold Victorian afternoon pottering and doing nothing much at all, I'm seeing what Sally would have loved to have seen - a green grass parrot rushing at a rabbit on the lawn, the chickens pecking at the open pumpkin on the back deck, the light hitting the glass of stout I have by the fire, the love of a good man. We're planning our next adventure, a road trip towards South Australian and maybe to the red heart of this country, if we can make it that far. And there's bigger things too - connections to community, doing our bit to make this brave new world that formed this second, and this second, and this second, and this second, a better one. I don't know whether my part in it will be significant, but that doesn't matter. I'm grateful I get a chance to be here, thinking on these things.
This piece was written in response to the Abundance Tribe biweekly question, which asks how we celebrate life. I'm not sure if I suceeded in answreing it at all (you can view the question here - but I just followed my thoughts as they led me.