Looking up my Past

 Other people died before my twenties:  my mother’s mother, whom I sat with at the hospital as she lay dying of melanoma, and my father’s father, whom I saw at 22 when my dad took us to Missouri right before he died.  But my big loss was my dearest friend in my twenties Mary, who died before she was thirty.  I met her and Dale when they moved to Goleta and ended up fast friends with my husband Sadiq and me.  I adored her.  Her husband helped with the dishes, she got to go to a consciousness raising group, she did woodworking classes, she breathed, she did not Stay in at night as I did.  When I left them, after leaving Sadiq, I took money my dad and lent her, and we established a relationship again.  I saw her after I moved to Berkeley, and she was in Santa Cruz.  When I met and married Bill, he was posted to Santa Cruz and Watsonville, and I was thrilled.  We rented a place a ¼ mile from theirs in Soquel.  The four of us became fast friends.  The next year we moved to Aptos, and then eventually she started building a house off Sea Cliff, by the university.  Her friend helped her, and I think maybe she slept with him or wanted to.  He was married to our piano teacher, and they had a child together.  Anyway, a few months before she sold her new house and left us, she told me she was deeply depressed and couldn’t figure a way out.  I begged her to let us take their two kids, go away by herself, anything, but please tell her husband.  I told him myself, but he ignored me, and they packed up and left, heading first to Salt Lake City, Utah, then to Mesa, Arizona and then back.  She’d left her car with me and her dog.  I had a few calls from her, but then she told me they’d put an offer on a house in Salt Lake, but when I next heard anything, she was dead.  She had taken her brother’s gun, in his bedroom, and killed herself. The day they were moving, the owner of the Salt Lake house had changed his mind. 

I have never gotten over it.  I had the ability to stop her, but no one did, and her husband hit on her friend at the funeral.  In two months, he was living with a woman, in four months she was pregnant with the first of her three kids. 

I saw the kids Several times, though we were in Colorado by then.  But they moved again to New Hampshire and ceased writing.  She was gone, then her mother died, then her father died, and all that is left is the socially retarded brother.

The loss is still one of the worst of my life.

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