Over the next years, that long-ago learning prodded me again: death comes quickly and suddenly. Chances to clean up unfinished business can be lost.
Old friends came to mind. I picked over memories, thought of the people I’d let go. Two friends especially: one who had children and one who didn’t.
Bonnie was my friend who’d announced over a lunch of salad and tiny pink shrimp that she was going to have a tubal ligation, that she didn’t want children. Then she made that choice permanent.
She’d moved to Hawaii. This was long before email and social media made staying in touch easy, and our contact had dwindled after she moved. One of the last times I’d heard from her was when she sent that bouquet of flowers to our wedding.
Even though Bonnie and I didn’t talk, all these years I’d thought of her as the friend who had done what I’d done. She hadn’t had children. She’d been sure, certain, final. My touchstone.
I’d never tried to contact her. Maybe I hadn’t wanted the full validation of a life lived without children. Not until now. Now I wanted to know how her childfree life had turned out.
I dug out an address book and dialed the last number I had for her, the one from Hawaii. For sure it would be a wrong number.
She answered on the fourth ring.
“Bonnie?” My voice held my surprise.
“Yes?” she said, like a question.
“It’s Jackie. Jackie Shannon,” I said.
“Oh wow!” It was as though we’d talked just last week. “Jackie,” she said. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”
She sounded so familiar, and yet the years gone by made her voice new to me.
We did the back and forth of catching up.
And then came her news.
“Well, I guess there is one big thing that’s happened since I saw you,” she said.
A marriage, I thought.
“I have a girl. A daughter. She’s eleven.”
A daughter. Bonnie had a daughter. She’d switched plans on me. I felt a moment of betrayal. She wasn’t supposed to switch plans. This thought embarrassed me. As if I had any more right to talk her out of having a child than I’d had to talk her into it all those years ago.
She’d married a man who wanted a baby, and she’d had the tubal ligation reversed. She’d changed her plans for this man. More than eleven years ago.
“It didn’t save the marriage, but we made this beautiful girl,” Bonnie said. “She’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
I said all the things. How surprised I was. How cool. That I was happy for her. I always thought she’d be a good mom.
“Hang on a second,” she said. “Are you near your computer? What’s your email?”
A few seconds later, a picture. Bonnie’s blond-haired girl leaning forward over the back of a horse jumping two cross rails.
I poked around inside myself, trying to find the old sore spots. All these years I’d held Bonnie in my mind, told myself if she could be fine without a child, so could I. But she’d made a child happen. She had this beautiful horse-riding girl.
I was surprised it didn’t hurt. What I’d said was true. I was happy for her. Happy her girl was in the world.
Bonnie asked about Bill. I told her we were still together. Still happy.
“I always knew you two had a good thing,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “We do.”
Her girl’s hair was brilliant blond, the color of Bonnie’s. She loved horses like Bonnie loved horses. She was strong.
It took me longer to turn back toward Amy, my once-best friend from Eugene. By the time the prodding of death pushed me, seventeen years had gone by. Seventeen years while the child she’d had in her belly during that long-ago earthquake grew into a man.
I’d told myself it was normal, a friendship can run its course, things changed, we went different ways. I believed this with a belief so strong that it grew brittle, and any thoughts of Amy felt dangerous. Believed this until enough time had passed. Until being childless was solid and firm in me.
I put her name in Search and found her on Facebook. A dangerous thing, to send a light email. To friend an old friend you had abandoned.
“How are you?” my message said. “I’ve been thinking of you.”
It was messy and thoughtless. I wanted to be back in contact and wanted to skim over the possible hurt my turning away had done to her.
Her fierce response came a few hours later. Wild, and full of her anger. “You are offering to be my friend after seventeen years? You are not my friend.”
Then more messages came, one after another, full of the pain of those seventeen years.
I read, answered stupidly, defensively, justifying with small reasons why I’d cut off contact.
Her messages back: “It hurt.” “That doesn’t make sense.” “I was your friend.”
Over the course of days, we kept at it, long enough for me to begin to question my reasons for turning away from her. Long enough that small faults cracked open my own story. What I couldn’t let myself see back then: It had been too hard to watch Amy have what she had. This one specific friend. Having a child at exactly the time when my body, my dreams, my womb, craved this, too.
I used to not believe in regret. I saw it as a denial of our own actions, actions based on doing the best we could with the knowledge we had at the time. How can you regret a decision if you didn’t have all the information, even if the information is hidden under a cloak of self-preservation?
But I had to look clearly at what I had done to Amy. I’d hurt her. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t.
With the persistence of old friendship found again, Amy and I found our way back to each other. To a place different than we would have known had I been present for the raising of her son and the son that came after him. The loss of those seventeen years is a scar that holds absence and the thick healing that comes with truth and forgiveness.