Farewells

 

Over a year and a half ago, an old and at one time very close friend of mine passed away. She fought with her internal demons and finally lost to them finally succumbing to complications from anorexia.

I knew her my whole life. We started to Kindergarten together. In Junior High, I went on my first real date, when I took her to see Jaws at the local movie theater. As young adults we helped each other through first her divorce and then an engagement of mine that went sour.Then time, distance, and circumstance drew us apart and I had not talked to her in a few years.

When I got the call that she had passed, I spent a good deal of time in a stupor; shocked that it had come to this. The last time that I had seen her she seemed thin but I did not think that it was a life threatening thing. My mind was momentarily crippled by the what-ifs:what if I would have realized her problem and what if I had done something about it. But as the weeks passed by a realized that even if I had been able to see her problem and tryed to help her, It would most likely have been for nothing. If she or those close to her at the time could stop this from happening then nothing that I could have done would have helped.

The week preceeding my high school reunion, I kept having a recurring dream. My friend would come to me in my sleep and warn me of something. I could feel her frustration at my inability to understand her. When I woke up in the morning, I could never understand or remember just what she said or tryed to say. Then a day before homecoming the dream stopped and has not returned.

I am by nature a cynic so I do not beleive this was her actual spirit coming to warn me of any approaching doom or danger, also I am very leery of Freudian mumbo-jumbo so I really do not think that it was feelings of guilt resurfacing. No, I feel that sometimes the mind gets so full of memories that we must put some of them in a zip drive in the back of our consciousness to make room for more. Though I will never completely purge myself of these feelings of guilt and remorse, it is time to shove them back to the far corner of my mind and seal them away.

I will always remember the good times and bad times that my friend and I shared but I no longer have room for regrets and what-ifs. Vaya con Dio’s my friend , I hope that you have found peace.

( This is a repost from Blugstuff but I wanted to post it here. This blog is the more personal side of me so I thought that occasionally I would repost some of those posts on Blugstuff that show my more personal side. )