Death and Midlife
My friend of 15+ years died on September 30th. For the first time in my adult life, I got a call that someone my age crossed over. Not a grandparent or a distant relative. Not a friend calling to share their pain about a loved one. Someone my age. One of my soul sisters. My close friend. And I’m pissed.
She was so beautiful - her build and face reminded me of a younger Diane Lane and a head of wild hair like Lily Tomlin (she inspired me to go gray in the first place!). And her smile and laughs? I had a girl-crush. Not in a sexual way, just in a: “Goddess, she’s so fucking gorgeous, could I just try on her skin for a minute?” But she didn’t get it. She didn’t believe in it. Humility is one thing, but self-loathing, trauma, and addiction is quite another.
I’m pissed because I really didn’t think she’d go so quick - she had so much more to do in her life.
I’m not pissed at her addiction though. Or her failures to be completely truthful with me during the countless conversations we’d have about her long and short term goals and steps to sobriety. I’m pissed because of all the parts of her the world took for granted. All the things it’ll miss without her on earth-side. And I’m pissed because I really didn’t think she’d go so quick - she had so much more to do in her life. She was an artist, and to lose another undiscovered great isn’t just a damn shame. It’s a fucking disservice.
When I got the call, I was eating dinner with my husband and kids. It was dreary and cold outside and all I wanted to do was curl up on the sofa and watch another episode of Lego Masters with the fam. But out of habit, I checked my phone and saw a few minutes prior, my friend’s mother had left a message. My first thoughts:
I’m tired.
Do I really want to listen to this voicemail?
She’s probably calling to tell me her daughter is back at the hospital (she’d spent some time there last month dealing with some kidney and liver infections, but she’d come out okay and I just talked to her a couple weeks ago).
But I couldn’t shake the feeling it was something else - something more this time.
I listened to the first 10 seconds of her message:
“Tera, she died and hour ago.”
That’s all I needed to send my thoughts and emotions in a tailspin of “What in the literal fuck?”
Before menopause and midlife, my friend was one of my first girlfriends in Los Angeles. We met through our husbands - they went to high school together, though they weren’t particularly close as adults. (They divorced, but she and I remained close - we both agreed they married just so we could meet and become friends and for that the failed marriage was well worth it).
I loved her. She was funny and we shared in exploring many of the same hobbies: crafting, sewing, cooking, gardening, traveling, politics, feminism, and adoring varying mediums of art.
But life changed. Once we had our first born, we moved to Nashville and then to a resort town in the Colorado mountains - her hometown coincidentally. Our contacts weren’t as frequent though. We were going through different phases of life for a few years and our relationship became distant but remained close on a spiritual level.
Then, she divorced the guy and moved back to Colorado. It happened right around the time my menopause story and the beginning of my awakening began. I was at a loss for friends who lived nearby and really understood the hormonal challenges and psychological shifts I was going through. But she was there. She got it. And she was always available to take my tearful calls:
I think I’m going crazy.
I don’t know if I want to be married anymore.
Motherhood sucks.
This town and the unbelievable soaring cost to live here is going to eat me alive.
One of my fondest memories is when I called her on a particular downfall. I’d just found out I was pregnant with my third and really felt undeserving to mother another child - parenting during menopause is no joke. She sat on the phone with me for almost two hours, listening, soothing, and sending me all the love and warmth I needed to get over the shock and reality.
She reminded me about passions and purpose. We had many - we were artists - and to ask us if we had to pick just one, we’d rather sucker punch the fool for making us choose. She’d gone to school in Hawaii for her undergrad and studied Southeast Asian theater and got her masters in entertainment at Carnegie Mellon. She was brilliant and probably should’ve been a professor at a university somewhere, but life just didn’t unfold that way. She worked in production in Los Angeles for over a decade, writing, directing, and dreaming of new projects that often got overlooked by someone with better connections and more money. She never let me forget my dreams and ambitions. Never let me shelf a goal just because it sounded impossible or far fetched.
She was so fucking amazing.
Did I mention we were going to do a podcast together? You know the one in the navigation bar: Ladies, Learn From My Mistakes? Over the past month we’d been plotting how to get this ball rolling - how to send our message to the world to enrich and enlighten the lives of women worldwide. Now, I have to figure out how to do it alone. Or find another partner who “gets me,” and that’s really hard to replace when you had someone with 15+ years experience in production and dealing with your partner’s highs and lows of whacked-out new ideas.
It’s hard to find someone else with equal parts experience in working with you and knowing you.
She wouldn’t want a traditional funeral. She wouldn’t want a line of people saying: “sorry about your loss.” But what else?
Death and midlife is not something I was prepared for. Shit, it’s still not something I’m prepared for. When I think of all my friends - ranging in ages from 30-60+ it’s scary. In my 20s and 30s I guess I thought we’d all live forever or at least die together. Marriages, divorces, career changes, babies? Done it. Together. Midlife Crisis For Women? We got each other’s backs!
But death? We didn’t plan for that. We didn’t even talk about it.
That’s where I’m at now. Wanting to talk about it. What my friend would want me to do or how to honor and remember her. She gave me no hints - I just talked to her a couple of weeks ago and she sounded great. She didn’t even sound sick.
I know she wouldn’t want a traditional funeral. She wouldn’t want a line of people saying the same line: “sorry about your loss.” But what else? I want her to tell me. I want her to be alive and look me in the eyes with her beautiful, kind heart and say, “Tera, this is what I want…”
You know what I want when I die?
Candles.
Music.
Plants - not cut flowers, but plants and flowers and trees that can be planted and live long after I’m gone. I want a fucking garden.
I want a group of women to come to my memorial - I don’t care if I’ve known them forever or never met them. I want them to sit in a drum circle and sing and dance well into the night with their skirts and dresses flowing, their hearts free and wild, and the moon their only audience.
I want tea - loose leaf and herbal, and delicious, decadent desserts.
I want stories to be told. Other people’s stories. Stories I knew and stories I probably would’ve loved to hear or read. Empowering stories.
I want a cob house - an adobe or rammed earth hut - to be made by the hands of women, filled with women, and visited by women. Not because I have a thing against men, mind you. But because there are no more wells to commune or campfires to fan.
And I want to be buried like fertilizer to the plants and trees that have given me life all my years on this planet.
That’s it. That’s what I wish.
My friend would’ve liked that, I think. She would’ve granted me that last gift of honor. But she’s not here - not in the physical form anyway. She can’t force the hands of my loved ones to do my bidding one last time.
Who will? My husband for sure, but my sisterhood? My women-folk?
One of my closest friends died the other day. And I didn’t get to give her a hug or tell her one last time how much of a badass influencer she was in my life or how much I wanted her to go through this crazy phase of menopause and midlife with me.
My friend died and I’m sad, lonely, and wishing I could call her one last time.
I know Grief Is a form of love, but right now, love is pissed…
Share this: