chapter eight

Loss

“Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.”

Pearl S. Buck
The Child Who Never Grew

Arrivals and Departures

I felt a mix of exhilaration and terror back in August of 1981, as my dad parked our enormous olive-green Olds Ninety-Eight in front of Williford Dorm. I was arriving at Rhodes College, a five-hour drive away from home, where I knew not a soul. As my parents and I unloaded boxes and began trekking up the stairs, I could hear shrieks of happy recognition as returning girls were reunited. Like me, the new freshmen were looking shyly around, their parents awkwardly nodding to each other.

My own parents wore big smiles but their eyes seemed too bright somehow, with the unnatural patina of tears restrained by sheer will. I couldn’t wait for them to leave. They lingered. Mom patted the pillows on the bed she had insisted on making up; dad chatted with other fathers and helped cart their boxes. I knew if my parents commenced with a big meaningful goodbye I was going to lose it, would start crying and wouldn’t stop, and we’d all end up checking into the Memphis Holiday Inn together.

And then my new roommate walked in the door. Her name was Blair Gatewood, and she was from Atlanta, which sounded glamorous and exciting to a small town girl like me. She was tall, with curly reddish-brown hair, big green eyes, and freckles. She had a sincere smile and seemed shy, but so did I for a change—both of us feeling awkward in front of our two looming sets of parents who were peppering the atmosphere of the tiny dorm room with their friendly getting-to-know-you questions.

Blair’s mother was poised, elegant, and a little intimidating. Her voice carried the intonations of her native Georgia, pronouncing her daughter’s name with two syllables and a soft “h” at the end. That afternoon would be the only time I’d ever see Blair’s father, but I’ll never forget his warmth and wide smile, and the way he bear-hugged his daughter, my new roommate.

Just when I thought we had exhausted all possible unpacking, tidying, and cheerful advice giving, my own father suddenly wanted to take a walk with me, “just the two of us.” No! I thought. This cannot get any worse. My parents weren’t big on life lesson talks. My mom never even told me about “becoming a woman,” for goodness sakes! (Even worse, she seemed vaguely embarrassed when I finally brought it up—at thirteen.) So what in the world did my dad want to talk to me about alone? Please God, don’t let it be about boys, I remember praying silently.

Despite his hearty college dad demeanor, I noticed a kind of sagging quality to his broad shoulders that set off alarm bells in my brain. I quickly revised my prayers into an alternating mantra of “Please don’t let my parents be getting a divorce” and “Please don’t let my parents have cancer.” We walked through the park-like campus in the Memphis heat, my palms sweating, and sat down side by side on a stone bench. He took forever to talk, and my mind percolated in dread, waiting for some doomsday news.

When he finally spoke, I was both surprised and flooded with relief to hear him say that he knew a lot of these Rhodes professors were going to be “way out there liberal,” and that I should always remember to not only listen and learn, but to think for myself, because I had a good head on my shoulders. He told me that he knew I would do well, and that he was proud of me. At that point the tears were welling in both our eyes, and my dad finally knew it was time to go. He had said what he needed to say, albeit cloaked in a warning about those crazy liberals: he had faith in me; he was proud of me; I would do well.

That evening, our parents finally gone, Blair and I set off together to have dinner at the Rhodes Refectory (also known as “The Rat”). She had a sincere, earnest way about her, and I liked her immediately. I knew she had gone to a fancy private school in Atlanta, and I was secretly afraid she might be a snob about my own small-town, public school upbringing, but she didn’t care about things like that at all. She never has. I don’t know of anyone who is more genuine, who values the substance of people over their surface, than Blair.

She is that rarest of person: the kind who would rather listen first. Back in college, our relationship was yin/yang: she was practical and no nonsense; I was a drama queen. A list maker, a schedule keeper, and an invoice organizer, Blair kept our phone bill paid and let me know what I owed her, down to the penny, on little white memo pads.

Our freshman year, she finished her assignments on time, studied well in advance, and didn’t procrastinate. I’d pull all-nighters, desperately writing papers I hadn’t begun until the day before their due dates, consume Cokes and junk food all night, litter the room with wrappers, then get punchy and wake her up to read my work and bask in its brilliance.

Her side of the room was tidy; its bed, complete with pretty comforter and coordinating sheets, neatly made up each morning. Mine was, well… not. She was indulgent of my messiness, my procrastination, my inconsideration. Looking back, I don’t really know why.

She was a bit of a mother hen and worried about my bad habits. Whenever I was stressed over a test I hadn’t prepared for and was pulling yet another all-nighter, I would often pull my hair out, strand by strand, hunched over my books and papers. It drove Blair crazy.

“You’re going to be bald!” she’d yell, throwing pillows at my head. “You look totally insane!” Eventually she helped me create my “Study ’do”—a tight ponytail that sprouted straight out of the top of my head, à la Pebbles Flintstone. There was no way I could pull my hair out once I had my study ’do firmly in place, and I’m grateful to Blair for, among many things, saving me from baldness.

We lived together for six years—three in college and three in Atlanta after graduation. She is frank in her opinions, often blunt. It can be annoying sometimes, but is mostly refreshing. You know you’re getting the unvarnished truth with Blair.

When I was about twenty-three and we were living together in Atlanta, I was hospitalized for two days for a severe allergic reaction. The guy I was dating didn’t bother to visit me but called to let me know he would be taking another girl to his Halloween party that weekend due to my illness—but he sure hoped that I “felt better soon!” My boss called to check on me and, once assured that I wasn’t dying, briskly informed me that my brochure still needed to get to the printer by deadline, so “perhaps you could just finish a few articles from your hospital bed or, if not, then over the weekend would be fine!”

“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order.”

Eudora Welty

I remember lying there, feeling miserable and abandoned, indulging in some major self-pity, when Blair walked in the door. She carried a huge pumpkin in her arms and sat it on my wheeled hospital tray. We spent the next hour carving a face into it, making a terrific mess, intent on our work. Scooping out pumpkin pulp, I cried a little about the shallow jerk who was dumping me in my hour of need, my insensitive boss, how much the IV had hurt and how the nurses seemed a bit blasé about my (clearly serious) condition. She didn’t try to say any of the usual cheer-up stuff, but she didn’t need to.

We all need friends who give us sympathy—but we also need those who remind us when it’s time to stop wallowing, find our sense of humor or even just our stoic’s spine–and carry on. My hospital stay was just a minor upset in life, nothing major, but I’ll never forget her smiling face, bringing me that fat pumpkin.

Blair has a way of cutting through the maudlin, which is something that I love. There is, after all, so much of life that is deeply painful. And no one is spared. In the decades that have passed, each of our group of seven has experienced her portion of loss, disappointment, failure, and despair.

Sometimes our losses and regrets are only shared with one friend; sometimes they all come out at once to the entire group during the reunion. Those moments are hard, because you suddenly realize just what she was going through in the last year, many miles away, while you were only seeing the surface emails, the “doing fine” face we all put on for the world when we’re just trying to keep going, fighting to stay out of the breakdown lane.

When I asked Blair to tell me a story of a woman who inspired her for this book, I had a feeling that she would choose her mother, Nella, and also that she would want me to write about her beloved father, who she lost in January of our freshman year, so soon after we became roommates and friends.

I remember answering our dorm room phone just a few months before it happened, on a windy day in October. It was her father, calling to say hello. Blair was in class, and I told him I would leave her a message. “Be sure and tell her that her dad loves her and thinks she’s beautiful!” he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice.

Blair’s story is not only about her mother’s resilience in the aftermath of this loss, but also about the sustaining force of her mother’s lifelong group of friends. It is a story that echoes, in many ways, the abiding friendship that our own group shares.

“Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.”

Elizabeth Strout Olive Kitteridge

Season of Joy and Sorrow

Blair’s Story

In January of 1982, when I was in the middle of my freshman year at Rhodes College, my handsome, energetic and outgoing father suddenly died at only forty-nine. I was in the midst of what was the happiest, most exhilarating season of my young life—I had done well in my first semester classes and was excited about pledging a sorority. Best of all, I had already made friends at college, real friends.

I didn’t know then that those friendships would last a lifetime, didn’t ponder such things; but perhaps, unconsciously, I did. What I knew for sure was that I had never laughed so much, or felt such a sense of belonging. The women in this book represent my most enduring friendships, made the year of my terrible loss.

With one phone call, my untroubled world was shattered. I returned home to Atlanta, numb with shock and sorrow. The funeral, visitations, and condolences are a painful, muted blur in my memory. One thing I do recall is how my mother’s friends were a constant presence during that time. These were “other moms” I had known my entire life—women my mother, Nella, had forged deep friendships with over her decades as a wife and mother in Atlanta.

“What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, for all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”

Helen Keller

Our home was filled with women from her Sunday school class at 2nd Ponce de Leon Baptist Church, her tennis partners, her neighbors, and the mothers of my brother’s and my friends. They did what women everywhere do when confronted with the worst: they sprang into action, organizing rides to the airport, getting the house in order, preparing food. They simply did what needed to be done.

In the face of death, everything else falls away. But somehow the living must still breathe, eat, and sleep. I don’t know how, but those women made sure we did. And no one can provide tangible acts of love and comfort like a Southern woman, usually in the form of chicken casseroles, honey hams, and coconut pies. Looking back, I am deeply grateful for the tender care they took of our small, sorrowful family: my younger brother Hal, my mother, and me.

In spite of my grief, my mother insisted that I return to Memphis quickly after the funeral, and encouraged me to immerse myself in my classes, my sorority, my new friends and interests. She was fierce in her determination that I keep every plan that I had made.

Now I see that she kept my brother and me to our routines because she was afraid that, without its stabilizing influence, Hal and I would dwell in our despair and forever be altered by this early, shocking loss. Her greatest fear was that we would always feel that life was simply too precarious, undependable, and that we could be abandoned at any turn. And if that happened, she would lose us too. Simply put, my Mother wanted us to make an effort for happiness, and not to feel guilty about it.

And so I returned to school. Our weekly phone call became daily, but there was rarely a moment that she didn’t sound brisk, even upbeat. She wanted to hear about everything: the Chi Omega formal; my grades; whether or not I had a date that weekend. She spoke about the ordinary, kept the topics prosaic: our dog Bandit’s trip to the vet; my brother’s college applications; and the thoughtfulness of neighbors who invited her over for barbecues or a hand of bridge on the weekends.

Until I was much older, I didn’t know that my Mom cried nearly every day that year; that her despair, sadness, and anger were so overwhelming that she thought she was having a nervous breakdown. Her loyal cadre of friends surrounded her, buoyed her, and carried her to shore, but I doubt if she even showed them the depth of her grief. My mother is a true Steel Magnolia, a believer that one only breaks down in private.

I was making my debut in Atlanta that year, just as my mother had in 1952. The upcoming summer was already scheduled with parties to be hosted and attended, escorts to be arranged, and friends to invite to the festivities. My mother refused to cancel anything. I look back now at the whirlwind of activity and I understand that, even if it might seem trivial, it was healing. It kept us engaged in life.

My mother and I shopped for my white debutante gown together. As I pulled layers of silk chiffon and tulle over my head and modeled dress after dress for her, I could tell that her thoughts were the same as mine: how inconceivable it was that my dad would not be there to escort me to the dance floor. I would not hold his arm, or feel the warmth of his proud smile as my name was called and we stepped into the ballroom together. But she never acknowledged those thoughts, never said the words aloud, and neither did I.

And so, the following November, as the girls I had grown up with stood in line with their dads; I was escorted by my younger brother. It was hard for me, as I know it was for my mother, to watch my childhood friends swirl past on their fathers’ arms. But our loss remained unspoken. My mother wanted us to focus on all we still had, and to be as appreciative as we possibly could of the shining moments before us. That was her way. Looking back, I am grateful for her strength.

Today, more than three decades later, my mother Nella is still the same strong, pragmatic woman. At eighty, she travels to England three times a year to buy furniture and accessories for the antiques business she started with a group of friends two years after my father died. Antiques were something she and my dad had a shared passion for; it was the dream business they had planned to start together after he retired. She was not afraid to pursue that dream on her own.

She has lived alone since 1982, in the same house I grew up in. Her loyal group of friends has lost a few members to illness through the years, but they continue to support one another through good times and bad. My mother is always first on the phone for any of them in times of need, asking what she can do, dropping off groceries and casseroles, giving rides to the airport or the doctor’s office, whatever is required. She is organized, no-nonsense, dependable. She is someone to be counted on.

I think of her group of women friends as a kind of cheerful fire brigade, rallying for one another in a way that is the essence of true community and friendship. When my mother broke her leg at age seventy-eight, she didn’t want me to fly back to Atlanta to be with her; insisted that she didn’t need a fuss, that she was perfectly fine. I flew out anyway. When I got there, I was amazed.

Those same friends and neighbors had created a large calendar in the kitchen on which they had assigned names responsible for driving her to doctors’ appointments. Meals were already arriving in a steady, organized procession. She had friends who took turns spending the night with her for months until she was out of the cast. Ever the Southern lady, by the time she had recovered, my mother had written 300 thank-you notes.

She is much loved and she gives much in return. I have often taken her strength for granted, never really thought that she was that remarkable until I was older, and a mother myself; until I had lived long enough to understand just how hard it would be to fully embrace life without a partner to ease its burdens. Now I am in awe of her bravery, independence, and sense of adventure. She did not allow loss to rob her of joy. And thanks to her example and love, neither did I.