still working at this

There’s another part of my problem with Facebook that I haven’t talked about, so here I go.

Other people have this experience from different angles–parents’ jobs, broken families, etc.–but when you are a military brat, there’s one thing you can be sure of. Change. You will not have one hometown, one school, one set of friends through your childhood and adolescence. If you’re lucky, you’ll get two years in one place, but more likely one year.

I have no complaints about this. When I balance what I learned and the wealth and diversity of my formative years against the sacrifices of change, I embrace the best and accept the not-so-great for what it was: preparation for the shifts and curves and sheer drop-offs that I’ve traveled on life’s road.

Even though I got lucky because of my father’s Army retirement and had a few more years in one place (sort of: three towns close together and only two high schools in six years), after that, I was on the move. Tuscaloosa. Back home. Tuscaloosa. Montgomery. Tuscaloosa. Huntsville, and then Texas. Each of those moves involved different homes, different sets of friends, different jobs and coworkers, different romances.

Those moves also meant a lot of contacts and friendships that faded away. I have a core group of friends who were part of my teenage and undergraduate years–I think there were eight of us–Lynne, Liz, Riley, Debbie, Carreme, Joseph, Kathy, me; we are down to five now. They are not all connected to one another, but they are all connected to me and know of one another. Regardless of the scarcity of times we talk or see each other, I can pick up the phone and call, or text or email, and it’ll be like we’ve never been apart. That’s a huge gift, and I treasure it.

Since three of the eight have died, we have mourned our losses together. We have celebrated one another’s weddings and the births of children and grandchildren. We have consoled each other through broken relationships and lost jobs. We have felt each others’ losses to death of parents, spouses, family members including siblings, a niece and a nephew, and friends.

All of that is a lot, and we were only eight in number. What happened when people from all the different parts of my life began finding me on Facebook was that I experienced what people who stay in one place do: ALL of the celebrations and ALL of the losses, except in one condensed, intense place and time.

While it was wonderful to hear all the good news and I was happy for it, it was overwhelming to hear all the other news. The sicknesses. The heartbreaks. The deaths. I can smile over the birth of another grandchild, send best wishes for any happy event, and move on. But I know too well from my own experience how losses are not just a moment and then a move forward. The shock of death, the years of grieving–these are not the stuff for an “I’m so sorry” and then just moving along. I hurt for these losses and because we are aging, there were so many. It was like every hometown, every school, every person I’d known was all right there, every day, on Facebook.

Adding all of that to the other shocks of reconnecting with people I knew long ago and finding out the changes in their politics and personalities–I think it’s good to have some people fixed in time as one part of your life and let them stay there. I got a call one time from a long-ago friend, and after talking about how we were all getting older, he said, “But do you still have your beautiful skin?” I could only laugh and say, “I’m like everyone else. I weigh more. I have more wrinkles. I don’t look the way I used to look. You just hold on to that girl in your mind and let her be the one you see. We all need our illusions.”

I need my illusions, too.

I will always be grateful that when I got the shocking news that Riley had died, Susan B, who made me aware (thinking I already knew!) was sensitive to the devastation it caused. She had no intention of being the one who told me. She wasn’t there to see me fall apart, to run to Tim and sob incoherently in his arms because I couldn’t believe it and didn’t think I could bear it. (Poor Tim thought my mother had died, but that didn’t happen until four months later. In another part of this pain, when I told her about Riley, who of course SHE had known for as many years as I had, it was one of the things she couldn’t take in because of her Alzheimer’s. She couldn’t remember who Riley was. The person who’d always been my refuge was disappearing, too.)

Susan B wasn’t with me, but she realized the effect of her news, because she said kind, compassionate things to me. Twelve years later, she and I are still in touch through Instagram, where we can like and comment on each other’s posts. Even though we weren’t “best” friends, we had a lot in common and we were definitely friends throughout our school years. Our lives are different, our opinions may be different, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll always be connected not just because we knew each other a long time ago, but because in one of the worst moments of my life, when I needed it most, she was kind to me.

It’s a hard fact of life that as we age, we’ll know more loss on every level. It isn’t just friends and family members, or those who taught and ministered to us; the people we never knew who slip away from our lives affect us, too. The ones who shaped national and world history. The artists who inspired us. The people who made and appeared in the movies we loved. The ones who wrote the books that changed us. The ones whose music gave our lives their soundtracks.

Last night, Lynne texted to tell me Jerry Jeff Walker had died. He joins a pantheon of songwriters/musicians lost, and every one of them hurts. I don’t just say, oh, too bad, about people like Jerry Jeff and Tom Petty–and I won’t even add to this list, I’ll just say that all grief is real, and we feel it because we are lucky enough to love and connect.

I’m trying to write a short story right now, and this story is NOT my story with Riley. But it is hitting every damn nerve I have that’s connected to him. So I write a little bit and cry a lot, and I have no idea if anything I write will be worth a damn.

But I’ll keep writing it. I’ll keep writing at all. Because creation is really the only answer some of us have to pain and fury and loss.

Riley, year and photographer unknown