We Often Think That Others Will Fatigue of Our Grief

“Hi Gem,” I said, as I lay on the sand.

There is something about laying, exposed, when your body is this mottled that feels like it’s deeper than the word exposed being exposed. It feels more than just vulnerable and raw… it feels almost wrong.

On the second vaguely warm day of the spring, I struggled to get to the water. Struggled to lay down without a helping hand. And struggled to eat my cheese danish while reading because the second I felt the warmth and saw the same scenery as the season we lost her… I whispered out loud: “Hi Gem”.

I don’t care who hears me (though I think only geese did).

I once lost a friend to CF when we were both just kittens - I, a young mother who barely knew her (I hadn’t even earned the title of friend really), newly diagnosed and scared, and she, an even-younger young adult who’d been hurt one too many times growing up with the disease I didn’t know Amanda, really, but rather her best friend (who I will keep anonymous), who’d post about her often after the fact, and just recently did again, though it’s been a decade or so or more since she’s gone.

“Thank you for keeping her alive for us,” I commented, and I’m not sure I’ve ever meant a sentence more.

I think we often THINK that others will fatigue of our grief. As if they’ll scroll and say, “Okay we get it. Not this again” and… maybe they do. Maybe they will or have with my family and Gemma… but she wanted to be kept alive and I fucking well will. (And as that was her favorite adjective in all its vibrant colors, I’m not going to bleep it this one time with a * … as if that actually tricks any of us to not know that a word is a word anyways, and when you’re talking about a teenager dying before the 16th birthday she dreamed, a * sort of insulting).

“Will you keep me alive like Amanda?” I’ve often asked my best friend, Hepburn, in the same my daughter concerns herself with living a legacy for her best friend Gem.

Hepburn and I talk about this a lot.  It was the one-true-love of these kismet sisters that made us see ourselves in the sand; Hope that maybe we’d luck out and be one of the very few in this world who have someone to hold our hand when we fold.

Every time her best friend posts, I share it to Hepburn. As if to say, “This is still the deal, right?” But Hepburn gives me her list of demands as well, and that’s not something that everyone who lays on a beach on the second warm day of spring will think or care about, or think someone is thinking about.

Hepburn lost the first love of her life in ‘our’ early 20s or so- with no warning… and so even though my body looks strange and war torn on the weathered well-marketed dirt of a season, we both hold similar reasons to be shattered and torn to shards, unseen, inside.

There’s no place to hide when you lay (covered in sunscreen, of course) on an earth that won’t house you forever. A place that makes no promises; no pause to regroup.

I think we often THINK that others will fatigue of our grief… but I’m tired of giving a shit.

“Hi Gem,” I say outloud to the air…

And I hold my breath as the sun shines back.

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