Dispatch #2
Holding On
Mare started out as Sharman’s quirky and artsy friend who would show up at the office in the midst of some nightmarish project or other. We’d tell her what we needed, and she’d wave her magical designer’s wand over our half-ideas and come back with a work of art. Somewhere along the way, she became my friend too.
Recently I was looking through old photos on my phone, still trying to take in loss. It seemed to mount with each passing image. Then the one above appeared. There we were, both in tears, still seated and holding onto each other as attendees prepared to leave Sharman’s memorial service. I looked at it and remembered another person who also feels suspended in the thick amber of grief while the world seems to keep moving.
Over the past eighteen months, Mare has helped me move into my new apartment after my marriage ended, shown up with dinner, shown up with things I didn’t even know I needed — like a step ladder, measured my windows, applied her designer’s eye to picking out the perfect curtains, and talked the salesman at Bed Bath & Beyond into giving me a discount. Then, after the curtains were picked out and hung and my life seemed to be settling into a new normal, she picked me up at the airport and ferried me home after my father passed away.
Now Mare tells me stories about her former life as a musician in a band called Bite Like a Kitty and their gigs on the Lower East Side when that was a very different place. She jumps wholeheartedly into my ideas to do things like throw a doggy birthday party, asking if she can design the invitations. The other day, when she told me that I’d graduated from the Mare School of Design with a recent purchase I’d made for my apartment, I thought: “I’ve made it!”
When I turned thirty earlier this year, Mare, Sharman, and I sat around a table, eating takeout pizza and drinking wine. Sharman teased me a lot about spending my birthday with two old ladies and joked till the last minute that I could back out of our plans if I found a better way to spend my evening. I never looked for one; there wasn’t one to find. I marked my third decade by marveling at the two women — so strong and funny and unapologetically themselves — who had invited me into their 20-plus years of friendship and also brought all their nurturing to bear in looking out for me.
Mare and I were chatting some weeks back when she said to me: “You can’t march through this world knowing what to do all the time.” And so in the face of loss, in the absence of knowing, we hold on.
