Kimberly's Story
This story comes from reader Kimberly:
Hello,
I just got the book yesterday, and have completed most of the stories in the book, in one evening. It has been a journey through my own lost friendship that I have taken many a time. There have been so many stories I've read where the friendship, the deep bond, is so obviously still there that it pains me to hear these stories as much as it does for me to reflect on mine
Ann Hood's in particular seems to me so clearly a case where her friend, very simply, blames herself for Ann's daughter Grace's death. If I followed the story correctly, they had gone out the evening when the fever began to spike, of course not knowing what would happen. Though of course it was no one's fault, I really feel that her friend Amelia just felt as though it were her own fault, and she probably believes Ann Hood blames her too. That's why she comes sometimes, but stays on the periphery. She would not come there if she still did not care. But she is racked with guilt and doubt.
My story has been tragic enough, but too bad for me I can offer no solutions as to how to regain my own best friend. We've been more like mortal enemies for over a year now, since last February, though I don't know if the fact that she never has said ANYTHING to me since then can be taken as an enemy. We met at our sons' school about 4 yrs ago, almost 5 now. I have one son and she has 2, her oldest has a congenital birth anomaly and is my son's age. From the minute we met we hit it off. Everything about us was either the same or very similar, a point which always felt like a badge of honor to us. We even had similar names, her first being a variation of my middle. And interestingly, my family always has called me by my middle name, I use my first outside the family only.
When I was 15 I lost my sister suddenly to drowning.
That plus childhood mistreatment from my father in the form of verbal abusiveness and spanking (more like beatings), made me at first simply incredulous that she could want to be friends with me. I just didn't have many close to me, and felt I had a penchant for losing those who would have been. So at first there was her just almost all but saying she wanted to be friends, and me being too much in disbelief to pick up the signals, but still hopeful enough that I was warily returning them. When we let our guards down enough, we began to go out for coffee after morning drop-off at school. We found we were similar in shopping interests, intellect, and even an interest in fishing. There are very few girls in our city that like to fish! And we both loved fishing. She eventually offered to me that her parents were both abusive to her and her siblings. I used to usually keep that to myself. When I heard it, it allowed another guard to fall and I told her about my father. We were similar in even that, though with me it was one parent. We already had a bond because each of her boys were in my son's class, and the boys already had a great fondness going for each other. Our bond only deepened. We loved each other a great deal. For each of us, I don't think either of us had the opportunity to make many friends and we were very happy about finding each other. I'm married 12 yrs now, and she was in the process of finalizing a divorce. Her marriage had about the same duration as mine does.
We began to become inseparable, doing things as much or more together on our own as with the kids. We were both at-home moms and at least once a week made it a point of doing things from going to antiques stores to going to our favorite housewares stores, just whatever we could. Then my last and only sibling left experienced a metastasis of breast cancer, which had been in remission for 10 yrs. This began in 2003. My sister told me the day before my birthday that the cancer was back. This sister was almost 20 yrs older. My other who had died when I was 15, 10 yrs older. Needless to say this news gave me a restlessness that wouldn't wait.
My friend was the only one who stood to be left who was like a sister to me. As my sister got sicker, my restlessness grew and I know I became a lot more just different than usual. We began to do some drinking when we were out, my friend and I, but what I didn't know was that my friend had a big fear of someone overdoing it. I was drowning my sorrows and trying to make the fear of having to go through another loss abate some, and also the fear of having no more siblings. My friend stopped and told me she wanted me to as well. So I did. But then I became bothered about the WAY she told me. I felt like I was losing her friendship too, that she was losing her patience with me. We were to take the boys sledding one day in the winter of last year, early February. She didn't have sleds and my son and I were going to pick up a couple for her before meeting them at the hill, so I had to call her a few times. Then I got stuck in some unexpected traffic and called her again She said simply "Kim, you have to quit calling me or I'll never get out of the house", firmly but not angrily. I didn't know it at the time but her son, the oldest, had been having trouble that morning with his stomach. We were supposed to meet at 10:30 that morning, and were trying to squeeze all this in before an appointment she had for herself that day. I had always been understanding about her son. I never rushed her, genuinely never felt he was any different than anyone else. People can't help if they come into the world with any "differences" and to me it's never been any big deal. My husband and I raise our son the same way, and so he never knew any "difference" either.
I know I panicked looking back. I felt I let her down. I felt she wanted to get away from my restlessness and my grief. My sister who was dying, Felicia, of course brought up things about Glenda, my other sister, and when I had mentioned this several times to my friend, she thought I was not enought done with even my Glenda grief. I felt she lost patience with me. I decided to leave a message on her cell phone about not wanting her to talk to me in the manner I felt she had, which really had been nothing and was borne of my own insecurities and the pressures of feeling like my sister Felicia was going to die. To make matters worse I tried to pick a time to make this call during off hours so that I would get her voicemail and just leave a message. The phone woke her instead, she had accidentally left it on. She called the next day, which was the last day I talked to her, and we still had a chance, but I was so afraid I might "snap" at her if she did it again, that I kept saying "I don't know, I don't know." Probably she thought I meant I don't know about the friendship, and it just went south from there.
Days went by and nothing. I tried a couple times to call, a couple to leave email. Still no answer. Then, she sent me an email saying we could no longer be friends. She said it was excruciating. I wrote back that it was excruciating because we shouldn't be doing this. I tried my best to explain. The more I explained the more ingrained her silence became. We already, from the outset of this were forced by this to pass each other at school without a word. A connectedness that often found us driving up at exactly the same time, as friends, became a curse of coming in time after time at exactly the same time. I couldn't stand it. It's a small school and many parents know each other and there is lots of regular greeting every day. She would have it no other way. I tried to ask her to let's just talk. The one thing she said was "It's too hard". My sister went into the hospital a week after my friend dumped me. She had congestive heart failure from the radiation or from the chemo she had been getting. That's what had been making her get worse and worse, the fact that they then found her heart to only be at 20% capacity. Felicia and I did okay with a relationship, but she was never as close to me or Glenda as Glenda had been to me, and my best friend was like the close-in-age sister I never had, and the close sister I never got to see into my adulthood. I cried and cried. I got nightmares, which I still have every night to this day.
Felicia died this past November. My friend, who I know had to find out through a friend of a friend, never said a single word in condolence. That hurt me, though how I could expect she would even do that makes me wonder why I thought she would. Once I sent her an email saying how stupid it is to avoid each other like little kids, and how hard that's been on me. I told her she needn't worry, I had gotten her message and if we wound up at a school assembly together I wouldn't say a single word. The significance of that is, she came to the very next assembly, waited in the halls for my son's class to file through, and said hello specifically to him and asked how he was doing. I became guardedly filled with hope. She of course has never said another thing. But maybe it means she still cares and is hurting too. The pain of the whole thing is immense. I miss that my sister has been gone about 7 months now--I have been refusing to keep count because it gets hard. I miss that my friend and I don't have each other. She had said I was very supportive about her grief surrounding her son's challenges, which of course is very ongoing in nature. And she had been very supportive up until that snag--the only fight we ever had.
I wish with all my being I had never made that phone call. I miss my friend more than I can say, and always will. Her son always sees me in the halls and still, naturally, speaks to me. He wants a playdate and can't understand what might be going on. It's been a strain being at school for me. There are so many other nuances I don't have time to get into them all. It's a sad situation all the way around.
Thank you for listening to my story.
Kimberly