How to deal with grief varies from person to person. There’s no magic cure for the weight of sadness. But telling stories helps. So here goes.
My best friend growing up was Polly Noble. We met on the first day of nursery school. We both had adorable bowl haircuts. Our apartments were 4 blocks apart. The rest, as they say, was history.
We spent years of our childhoods laying on the floors of each other’s bedrooms, playing Uno and Guess Who. We have seen the movie Grease together 2,659 times. At her apartment, we would play tag in the hall with her dog and have juice out of these endlessly fascinating coffee cups with little ceramic animals in the bottom. At my apartment, we would watch Nickelodeon and hide in the closet when her mother came to get her.
Polly and I went to school together for 13 years. It is fair to say our friendship was strongest when we were in single-digit ages. Play dates slowly trickled to a stop around 5th grade. We comfortably drifted apart and together through middle school, trying out different friends and adolescent lives.
Polly remains the most genuine person I have ever met. In a juvenile academic experience that left me hanging on to my very sanity by the thinnest of filaments, she remained centered, sociable, helpful and friendly. Today, when we see each other, we have that unique ability to pick up our conversation wherever it last left off, effortlessly routing through 30 years of friendship and memories.
Polly’s dad passed away last week.
I will always remember Mr. Noble as being gigantic in that special way that dads seem gigantic to 4-year olds. He would sit in Polly’s living room during our play dates, patiently enduring our running around him in circles, getting his beloved dog all riled up for a game of hallway tag. He was often looking at a book or a newspaper and had this wonderful way of peering up over the top of his glasses to say:
“Hiya, toots, how you doing?”
His voice was deep, friendly and a little gravelly. I don’t remember what I ever said back. But as I think back on those moments, they almost slams me to the ground. How to deal with grief is a question that lingers in my mind.
Grief is an unpredictable companion.
It exists with us all the time, shadowy and complicated, the dark side of the moon. I’m glad for its existence. Its tangled limbs hold me down to the earth in hard times. But I wish the wise old lady was not so unruly in her support. The strength that is offered with grief comes at a tremendous cost. The price of grieving changes the very fabric of life.
Mr. Noble lives in the threads of my childhood. I feel the fabric of my whole life pulling as I remember him.
As usual, Polly said it quite eloquently: My heart is sad, but full.
With love to the Noble family.
For more thoughts on life’s big questions click here.
Thanks for Mike Labrum on Unsplash for the banner photo.