I wanted to write something about a family friend who passed away this week. This is sort of a depersonalized version that I posted on a public forum. I deliberately left out names because of that. I want to post a more personal version on the blog, where some of my readers will actually know the people I am writing about. That will come. For now here is the public version.
Yesterday I went to the funeral of a family friend who sadly passed away unexpectedly early in the week.
Until about 2 years ago I had very little experience with death. Of course I had been exposed to it. People I knew died. But with maybe the exception of my great grandmother and a friend who committed suicide, both who passed away when I was 22, I hadn't really lost anybody that I was very close to. In the past 2 years that has changed and I have lost a number of people I have loved dearly. After not having to deal with death for 26 years, all of a sudden it seemed to be all around me. I can't really explain this feeling but after losing 2 of my grandparents, 3 friends to accidents and another friend to suicide within the span of just over a year, I fell into an almost obsessive fear of who in my life might die next. It was not so much that I was obsessed with death. Rather it was more of the very difficult realization that people I loved were actually going to die at some point. Maybe it sounds stupid that I only realized about death at 26. But prior to that my experience with it had been so limited that death wasn't something that I thought about at all really. My injury and then some subsequent very serious health issues related to it had me thinking about death some. But mostly it was thoughts about my own mortality, not others. But once I started contemplating the mortality of those I loved, it scared me much more, made me far more disturbed than any the thoughts about myself did.
Every loss has its own emotions and meanings attached to it for me. The loss of this family friend is particularly difficult because this is maybe the first time that somebody I have known my whole life has died. That is not entirely true. I grew up in a very small town. There are many people I have known my whole life. And many of them have died. But this family friend was different. I literally grew up with her daughters, something else that is bringing up a lot of emotions for me. My parents became friends with her and her husband before I was born. We camped with them in the summer, I went to birthday parties and sleep overs at their house. She taught me to ride a horse and was the leader of the girl guide group I belonged to. Her and her husband are close to the age of my parents. Besides their twin daughters being my age, they also have grandchildren the age of my youngest nieces and nephews. It is difficult not to look at this family and not see a sort of mirror image of my own family.
My heart is breaking for this family. Even if I have not really been in touch with any of them for a few years except vicariously through my parents, I have known them so long they feel like family to me. Her death was completely unexpected. They are devastated. But I think there is some solace. She got the chance to see her daughters grow into women, finish college, and start their own families. She got the chance to know her grandchildren who really were the light of her life. She was a life long, well loved member of the community active in many different things from girl guides to the food bank. The hundreds of people at her funeral, in a town of less than 1000, speaks to how many lives she impacted.
Something that makes me smile, she spent her last day alive doing what she loved best, riding her horses out in the country. She put them back in the barn, brushed and fed them then went for a walk down a beautiful trail on her family's land. It winds through a meadow in the shadow of a mountain and then cuts through the forest. She took care of her beloved horses, took a walk here and then she was gone. I feel so sad that she never got to say goodbye to those she loved but I think her last hours must have been happy and peaceful and I hope that thought will help ease some of her family's pain.
I feel a lot of sadness for my parents, especially my mother. I think it must be very hard to lose someone you have been friends with for 35 years. Someone whose life followed your own through young motherhood to being a grandmother. I wish I could say something to her because I know she is hurting. But I don't know what to say. I am always so bad at knowing what to say to people in pain. My dad took this lady's husband for a long drive this morning. He is struggling with this in his own way. But my dad is more of a closed book than my mom, he doesn't talk about things. But behind his silence he seems very shaken and this is one of the very few times in my entire life I can say my dad seems vulnerable. Usually he is a rock. In more ways than one.
One thing this loss has made me realize is that I don't tell the people I care about nearly enough how much they mean to me, how much I love them. Especially my parents.
