Point of Return
| July 25, 2023The distance eats away at me. I feel unmoored, floating. My best friend is in pain, and I’m hiding
Nachamu, Nachamu Ami.
Comfort yourselves, My Nation. Dry your tears. Get up off the ground. I am the One Who turned away from you, and I am the One now telling you to move on.
“I’m frozen,” I confide to a coworker in a late-night email.
She writes back, short, to the point. “Maybe unfreeze?”
I would love to. I would love to unfreeze and pick up where I left off with my best friend of 25 years. But ever since she lost her baby two months ago, I haven’t been able to speak to her normally.
Shivah was the relatively easy part. Sit at her side, offer her drinks, listen when she speaks, be silent when she doesn’t. Be inwardly appalled at the inane comments people make. And cry. Cry together. Let the pain out in a relieved release.
But ever since she took that walk around the block, I haven’t been able to hold a normal conversation with the person I know better than myself.
I want to. I miss my best friend.
Sometimes, in moments of ugly self-pity, I think about how I lost my best friend the day she buried her child.
I find myself tapping out emails to her:
MAJOR SALE AT PETIT CLAIR!
OMIGOSH, you’d look sooo good in this top!
Why can’t I keep my eyes open at work?
And then hurriedly deleting them.
Who cares? Why would she want to look at a kids’ clothing sale that will remind her of her loss? Maybe she has no interest in looking good anymore? Why would she care about my sleep or lack thereof?
She lost the most precious thing in the world. And I have no idea how to comfort her.
The distance eats away at me. I feel unmoored, floating. My best friend is in pain, and I’m hiding.
And I’m lonely.
Who am I? Am I so poorly equipped to handle grief? Or is it just her grief that I find unbearable?
Her loss has become the barometer of all pain. I sway at Minchah, davening for people I know, people I don’t, but only when I mention my friend and her husband, that the Healer of broken hearts should send them a yeshuah, do I break down.
I sing Hallel out loud, happy, smiling, but when I get to the words, “hamavsa l’chassidav,” the sobs emerge, and I feel broken and battered.
I want to tell my friend that I feel her pain every day, that I haven’t just moved on to a world of recipes and sales and deadlines, but I don’t know how to bridge this chasm I’ve created.
And then one day, it becomes too much for me.
I tap out an email. I don’t delete it: I want to be there for you, and I don’t know how.
The reply is almost instantaneous: There’s not much to do. Maybe just be normal?
I grin because the answer is so her.
We start off slowly. Emails turn to phone calls. We schmooze about this and that. I have my best friend back. I feel complete again.
She still doesn’t have her baby.
But the Geulah will come. I can feel it.
And G-d willing, she will be the last Jewish mother to ever experience such unbearable pain.
In the meantime, she’s shown me how our entire nation can pick itself gracefully up off the floor and carry on.
Nachamu Ami.
(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 853)
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