Losses and Friendship

Last night, Freda hosted a potluck dinner party for Barbel--just  back from Germany and her mother's funeral.  Her San Antonio friends gathered to see her for this short Texas visit before she goes back to Albuquerque.  We sat on Freda's porch (until a yellow jacket landed on my hand for a nibble) and talked about loss and grief.

This morning, I got this from Freda:

Here is another quote from a very good memoir I just finished called "H is for Hawk" by Helen MacDonald.  She is a historian who lives in England and trains hawks and falcons. She wrote her book after the sudden death of her father.

"There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things.  And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all.  You see that life will become a thing made of holes.  Absences.  Losses.  Things that were there and are no longer.  And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are."

Barbel's mother was 96.  They knew at their last visit that it would probably be the last, and Barbel's mother sang to her.

I noticed--as I have many times before--the care that friends give to each other in hard times, reflecting on their own losses and telling how they got through them.

I also noticed in a group of women sixty-something to eighty-something how authentic and beautiful women can grow as they age.   We may not be as vivacious as we were at forty, but there's something rich in the quiet softness that comes with age and losses.