The Day I Lost My Friend
The Peeper Frogs are calling from the pond on my farm. These harbingers of spring always make me smile and give me hope for warmer days and the end of winter’s bone penetrating chill.
The Peepers are calling but I have no one to tell. That’s because the only other person in this world that I know who cared about such things (besides me) is no longer here to call. Each spring my friend and neighbor would call me (or I her) to announce we’d heard the Peepers and asked if they had too.
My friend, Julie, has gone. Left her loved ones and friends behind to live without her. With little notice. Not near enough notice…
The only notice I had of her leaving was a frantic phone call from her adult out-of-state daughter, asking me to go across the street to help her dad because he’d called the squad for her mom. For my friend, Julie.
I won’t go into too much about her passing. It’s too private. Too intimate. But I will say I was there with her husband when the paramedics worked desperately to revive her, praying and willing her to live.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Surely she would have if it had been her choice. But it wasn’t.
That scene haunted me for a while, intruding on my every thought regardless of the time of day. I have succeeded in pushing and corralling that scene — the sights and sounds — into a corner of my heart and mind where it lives mostly in darkness until it escapes for a few fleeting moments into my daylight.
I have chosen to replace it with the thoughts and memories of a friendship with a well-loved neighbor friend of 20 years. Twenty years.
And so I literally look down towards Julie’s house across many acres of farmland, and believe I can still see her waving as she jumps up and down laughing and telling me hello.
So now I spend my time thinking of the friendship we shared--the love and laughter and kinship we immediately felt over our love for animals and life. Her laughter fills my heart and I can still hear it. The hours of talking or just sitting together in the sun on lawn chairs as the fresh country air soothed our spirits and bonded us together forever.
I was (and still am) honored to call Julie my friend, this kind soul who chose her friends carefully as do I. I think of what I learned from her and how my life would not have the richness it has from her being in it had she not been here for me to know. And I cry. Finally allow myself to cry from deep within.
I know deeply, ever so deeply, it’s not fair nor will it ever be that she’s gone, leaving her beloved husband and daughters and granddaughters and parents and others behind to carry on. Her family was her first love and her love for them overshadowed everything else in her life. It was who she was with every fiber of her being and then some.
Though she’s been gone from my sight since September 21, 2020, I haven’t been able to really speak too much about it except with her family. It’s too raw, too painful, too much to bear at times except in those times I can still see her across the acres of farmland waving and jumping up and down laughing and telling me hello.
I wanted more, much more. More time. And so I will continue to include her in my life as I live it whenever and wherever I can. Like right now, as I look up to Heaven and ask…
“Julie, I heard the Peepers yesterday did you?”
I’m sure she did. I’m very sure.
Jackie Deems copyright 2021