On Aging & Friendships

Friday. How did that happen?

Behind, behind, behind, that’s the pitter-patter that’s been in my brain all week–I’m so very behind. Behind in getting our taxes organized (they were still filed on time thank you to a wonderful family friend who does them for us). Behind in work. Behind in my ongoing list of to-dos. Behind in getting out of my head and getting outside. As I said on Instagram this week: “My heart just isn’t in it.” That’s a line I stole from a Neko Case song called “In California” that has been in my head all week and I’m even behind in getting it out of my head.

But today it’s raining, I’ve worked my work week (I do M-Thurs, 8AM-6PM and keep Fridays quiet so I can attempt to not be behind), and I’m sitting quietly in my office listening to the album, finally. Oh, and I’m writing my weekly blog post. So, where’s my head at this week? What do I need to process? Where am I wandering in my mind. Behind, behind, behind.

More than any other season, the summer is a memory-builder for me. It’s the season of adventures. It’s the season where I’ve done most of my traveling, and it’s the season where, like many other people, I recharge–soak up enough sunshine to get me through a Canadian winter. But it also means that my mind cycles through regrets as often as it reminds me that I have been to Paris four or five times.

Trying to capture that sense of a season in prose is hard. Those feelings, the freedom, the fact that I once drove halfway across the country to spend not one but two summers in Banff, Alberta in university without a phone or a credit card or really any kind of safety net–that’s what I want to bottle in some way and show it to my son one day. Look, your mom did these things, she did them even though she had a disease, even though she had no family out there, even though it would have been safer to stay in Ontario. We hopped in a car with one of our roommates and we drove from here to there, found jobs, found places to live, built a community, and lived wild for four months before going back to university in September.

I did all of this with my friend Hannah. We met in first year, we were in the same dorm at Queen’s. We both were taking arts courses, and we came from similar backgrounds (read, we didn’t go to private school). We became fast friends. And I used to tell people that Hannah was the person who was most like me in the world–and that I was lucky to find her at school. It wasn’t the happiest time for me. The trail of sadness after losing my mom before starting high school, getting sick with the disease, and a number of other compounding losses meant I was deeply messed up those years. I made some really poor decisions. Most of them involving boys. But I used to think it was all worth it because I had Hannah. We stayed together for all of university, the kind of BFFs you have in your early adulthood, when you find your second family. Your chosen family. And you think, yes, this is it, I can finally be myself.

And we stayed friends for a long time after university, too. She lived (or still does, I don’t actually know) across the country in Vancouver, and I’d go see her once a year, once every other year, often planning other adventures around seeing Hannah and spending time together, and when she’d come back to Ontario to see her family, she would do the same. I remember one year when I turned thirty my now-husband and I flew to Vancouver, spent time with Hannah and her fellow, and then drove all the way down to California. It was a fantastic trip, even when my now-husband told me (on the eve of my birthday no less) that he never wanted to get married or have kids. Ha! Funny how these things turn out as we’ve now been together for twenty-three years and our kid is turning eleven in October. But my point is that things change. People change. But you never notice how you, yourself changes–and when you’re as stubborn and intensely anti-reflective as I am–it seems that you never do.

Except, I must have. And she must have to–because, I’m sure you can tell from the title of this post, that we are no longer friends. I don’t even really know what happened, but when my son was about ten months old, Hannah had come back to Ontario to see her family. I was talking to her on the phone from our cottage, excited to drive somewhere to see her, even if it was halfway between her place and ours–I wanted her to meet my son. I wanted her to see him. And I wanted to give her a hug–as it’d had been one of the most difficult years health-wise I’d ever had–truly, and without a word of hyperbole–I was lucky to be alive.

The phone call hangs in my memory like a picture on a wall. When I can I see you? I ask. Hannah hums and haws. I’ll drive anywhere, I say, I’ve got the car, I can come to you. No, she says, she’s got to help her family with a yard sale. And I’m upset at this point–crying, big dopey tears–I’m heavily medicated, I’ve got a newborn, I’d learned I’d broken my pelvis and my blood pressure was in the toilet from all the meds so I was living through mud, my husband was back in the city working, and I was surrounded by my family who helped with the baby all the time, but I was exhausted. And she said, I don’t think it’ll work out, this time. But you won’t meet the baby? I said. You’re breaking my heart. Those my exact words: You’re breaking my heart. Don’t say that. She replied. Don’t say that. And then we hung up–we must have said goodbye but I don’t remember–but I do know this was the last conversation we ever had.

And to this day I don’t know why. I don’t know what that triggered for her to stop talking to me and I just knew that I couldn’t be the one to call first and all these years later (my kid will be eleven this fall) I still regret not getting over myself and just calling her the next week to say I’m sorry or what happened or why did that upset you so much that you simply ghosted me.

Because it’s hard when you’re already in so much pain and in such a tough place to see how that tough place might impact those around you. And all of this is to say that for those friends that I’ve lost in my life, today I am feeling the regret. I’ve got a big birthday coming up in July (I’m not going to name the numbers, it’s awful, LOL) but I will say that these past few weeks I’ve been really contemplating the loss of friendship and how it impacts your life.

I love my husband. I love my son. I love my other BFFs, and my beloved ride-or-dies from high school who knew me before Queen’s and still loved me after I got home, which I think might have been tough, as I was probably more than a little bit of an asshole. And I’ve got other wonderful friends that I’ve met in the years since, mom friends, neighbours, our close-knit crew that make up our found family, my husband and I–and I have some absolutely amazing girlfriends that I talk to all the time, that I make a point to see, that I love to be in their company because they’re truly amazing humans that make my life better every single day. But a part of me still misses my friend Hannah who one day stopped talking to me and never resurfaced again. Because that’s what loss is–it’s that people make an indelible imprint on your life and when they’re not there any more those feelings don’t have anywhere to go, and there’s just a bit of a hole. It might be a pinprick, it might be a black hole, but it’s a hole nonetheless. And sometimes it aches like a phantom limb when you’re behind, behind, behind in just about everything.

I could go one and tell you about another relationship that fell apart a few years ago that I still miss too, but I’ve obviously talked too much as it is. I could tell you about the time I blew up my old book club with my big mouth (sense a trend?). These are my three main regrets in life–losing Hannah, blowing up my old book club, and the loss of another friendship that’s still too raw to really process, and it’s been almost three years for that one.

Oh, the song’s on now–“said you were happy for me, but your heart wasn’t in it,” the line goes. “Just a phone call away, now there’s nothing to say, as the days roll by disconnected.”

And that’s sort of where I am today. Pondering regrets and wishing I could make apologies, fill up those holes with some sunflowers, maybe a little earth, pat the garden down, give a place for the bees to congregate and tell the people that I let down that I do still love them.