Skip to main content

Follow Friday: A friend in need

This week's Follow Friday is dedicated to one of my oldest friends. I am blessed with many dear people in my life so I hope that nobody feels offended or slighted by this post.

Jamie has been my friend for as long as I can remember. In fact, I don't remember not knowing her. I think we met sometime around Kindergarten. We lived only a few blocks from each other and even though we were a year apart in school and only attended the same school for 2 years, we were constant companions in childhood. 














 This is not a childhood picture of me and Jamie...but it could be. This is actually a birthday card she sent to me years ago. It hangs on my bedroom mirror and constantly reminds me of our friendship.

Summers were spent riding bikes, swimming together, pining over boys (both those in our school as well as impossible celebrities), playing games, creating crafts (oh, the friendship bracelet obsession!) and making mischief (ask her about the Pepto Bismol story!). In many ways, Jamie is the sister I never had. We've laughed together, cried together, and totally pissed each other off numerous times. Jamie also likes to remind me (incessantly) that Roger was the only boyfriend I ever had that she actually thought was good for me. Maybe that's why I married him. He received official "best friend" approval. 

I don't think there is anything we wouldn't do for one another.

Case in point: yesterday, I booted up my computer and was greeted with this message. 

I couldn't even run the computer in safe mode. If any of you have ever seen this screen, you may know it as the blue screen of death. I had recently downloaded some new Adobe software and apparently the computer was freaking out on me. 

I tried Googling some possible solutions but wasn't finding anything solid so....I looked to my best friend. Who also happens to be a computer expert.  She was still at work but promised to call me on her way home. We talked through some solutions. They didn't work. She researched some more. At 10:30 PM she called me with more information. We tried a few things. Long story short, Jamie to the rescue!

She joked that a shout-out on Twitter was in order. She got her shout-out but I don't think that was nearly enough. Hence, this post. 

Here's the thing: Jamie and I are best friends but we don't talk every day. In fact, since Charlotte's illness and death, we've kind of grown apart. It's complicated. 

But here is what I know: we are and will always be there for one another. We are so much like family that we don't need to talk every day to know that our friendship remains solid and intact. I know that when I call her (or if she calls me), we are there for one another. 

For anything. 

That's what friends are for. Happy Friday!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Edge of Seventeen

It's that time of year when the blog musings center on my grief journey. Every year, it seems like we are busy with end-of-the-year school activities and the start of summer, planning vacations, and then (kablam)...it's almost July 9.  Grief is funny. Grief is weird. I remember very early after Charlotte died, I watched the movie Rabbit Hole.  There's an amazingly poignant scene where Nicole Kidman's character is talking with another woman who lost a child over 10 years before (played by Dianne Wiest). She talks about grief being like a brick in your pocket. It never goes away. Sometimes you can even forget it's there. But it comes back and makes its presence known from time to time. And (she says) "it's what you have of them."    I probably did not fully realize then what a powerful and true analogy that is. As time goes on, our grief changes. Yet, it is always there on the edge of things. It sits in that pocket and sometimes makes itself known.  This
Post a Comment
Read more

The Stages of Grief: COVID Edition

It's 2020. It's almost Christmas. We're still in the middle of a pandemic. In fact, we are experiencing what appears to be an incredible surge that is exerting tremendous pressure on our healthcare and social service system. The headlines are clear: we're not done with this madness and December 31, 2020 will not magically be the "end of it".  Earlier in the year, our family thought about whether we might be able to travel at this time. We thought that maybe the curve would be flat enough that we could take a few days away from home during the Christmas holidays. We realized that the pandemic would still be happening, but with the right protections and with prolific mask usage, we could get a much-needed change of scenery. During what is now (clearly) a delusional thought process, we booked a stay in Gatlinburg, Tennessee for the week of December 19th. Spoiler alert: we canceled the trip almost two weeks ago.  Canceling this trip was not a tragedy. In fact, I
1 comment
Read more

Bittersweet Sixteen

I think about Charlotte every single day. However, this time of year, I'm flooded with all kinds of memories as we commemorate the anniversary of her birth. This year feels like a bit of a milestone. Sixteen.  If cancer had not taken her life back in 2010, I have a feeling I would be planning a massive birthday celebration this year. 16 always feels like a landmark year in someone's life.  I have been thinking a great deal about the last birthday party we had for Charlotte in 2009. We didn't know it at the time, but we were halfway through her treatment journey. We had been through three major brain surgeries and a few rounds of inpatient chemotherapy. Treatments were not going well. In fact, right after her birthday, we would make the trip to Houston, Texas where we would settle in for about 10 weeks of proton beam radiation treatments and a new customized chemotherapy protocol. This was the unspoken "last chance option" to beat that aggressive brain tumor into
2 comments
Read more