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13 years ago, my oldest and best friend passed away. I was chalk painting at a noisy outdoor event and I felt like I should take a break and check my phone. It rang while I held it in my hand, and it was another mutual friend calling to let me know they were taking her off life support, after her 5 year struggle with a very rare, aggressive cancer.
In alaska the solstices and equinoxes take on real importance because the whole land is tied so intimately into the seasons and the availability of daylight. So my friend died on the summer solstice and every time one of those seasonal markers pass, I remember her, and I know exactly how long its been. I don't know how to describe the feeling anymore, because the grief doesn't hit hard like it used to. Bittersweet. I have an unshakable belief that even though life can be brutal and unfathomably cruel in the short term, in the long arc over lifetimes it balances. It is fair. We just can't see all the pieces. I believe my friend will get the long, gracious life she deserves. It just wasn't this lifetime.
I like the poem by Kahlil Gibran - "On Joy and Sorrow". He says, "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." I like to think of my friend's death like that. Maybe it is a clumsy human attempt to wring meaning from the meaningless, but I don't want her to have gone through all that suffering for nothing. The course of my life changed because of her death. How I approach experiences and emotion changed. I look back on that grief and am I sad? Yes. Am I profoundly grateful? Yes. Like the poem says, "Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed."
So it's the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. I remember my friend, and I remember what sorrow felt like, and I tune myself more carefully to the joy currently in my life. I think I'll go out and look for fireflies.