#MissingAmy, birthday edition

Hi Amy,

I\’m not really even sure how to write this to you.
I mean, I talk to you all the time. But I don\’t often write to you, like I used to.

Today, you would have been 51 years old.

But forever, you will be 31 years old.

Right?

that\’s actually a question I have for you, wherever you are now. What happens with birthdays after you die? I mean, it\’s still the day you were born. But you\’re not getting older-at least not on this plane. So what\’s the deal?

So I choose to honor you and remember the Amy I knew when you were alive. God-I kind of wish I had known it was coming. KIND OF, I said. I don\’t know that if I knew FOR SURE that my bestest friend, my person, my \”insides\”, would die unexpectedly of a heart attach a month after her wedding–how I would have handled that? I mean, I can\’t even imagine.

And yet, I feel like I want to go back, and savor more. I want to be super present for every moment I had with you….knowing now, in retrospect, that they were numbered. I almost feel like I wasted so much time I had with you, not taking in EVERYTHING.

I kind of hate this-but your death woke me up to that fact. I now know in every cell of my body that the last time I see someone may be the last time. When you first died, it was too much, like a tidal wave. I felt like I couldn\’t catch my breath. A strong undertow of anxiety, waiting for someone I loved to disappear without notice. And like when you are caught in an undertow, the water-the grief-just kept going over my head, enveloping me. For you to be there one moment, and then, just NOT. It\’s been almost 20 years and I still have not reconciled myself with how that happens. I\’ve accepted it, I live with it, but I still don\’t GET it.
After you died, I used to leave work and the receptionist would say \”see you tomorrow!\” and I would think: \”Maybe. Maybe not.\”

This is you in NYC. I think it was the first time you took me there, so 1990-something. You were about to hail a cab, and you struck your signature pose. I wanted to capture a picture of you in the city, since it was all so new to me. I know, it wasn\’t to you. You showed me New York. You made me fall in love with it. And–you hailed a cab like a motherf*cker. You would literally step one foot off the curb, and extend and arm, and BOOM.
You had that effect on a lot of people. But you didn\’t even realize it, and blew it off when we pointed it out to you.

I love this photo of you.
It\’s in your apartment, the one I moved across the street from a few months later. I think this was your housewarming party. This picture is so YOU: happy. smiling. Not showing what hurts. sitting on your sectional couch for which you made a matching window treatment (the edge of it is hanging down there, on the left). You were like the love child of Martha Stewart and MacGyver–you could make anything out of anything, and it *always* looked great.
And though it\’s been many years, and now I cannot remember why I walked into the kitchen most days, I clearly recall that you had just emptied that bowl of popcorn. Yourself. For the second time. Man, could you eat popcorn.
I so treasure these photos-not only because there are no more taken since 1999, but because we didn\’t have smart phones back then. I have literally THOUSANDS of photos of….say my kitties. And I can access them any time. I can upload them and save them, print them out, take photos and immediately delete them if I didn\’t like them. I can post them on social media-something we didn\’t have yet when you were alive, oh MAN you would have gone crazy with that!–and show them to hundreds of people in a moment.
But back then we didn\’t know how they\’d turn out. We put film in a camera, had to finish the roll, and then take it to the drugstore and get them developed. So these photos are literally priceless to me. And you\’ll have to forgive the resolution, I had to take a photo of these photos, well….with my phone.

Beautiful, right? (well, you never saw this but you would not have liked your expression :-)) But what is more beautiful than a bride on her wedding day? I love this photo because you look stunning, and the face and the way you are sitting is classic Amy. Like, \”WhatEVER, let\’s get this going!\” I\’m not sure, but that may be my ear and the top of my corsage bogarting the foreground.

And we had no idea. None. Twenty-nine days later I would get a phone call that you were gone. Dead. The breath was sucked out of me, as if from a cosmic vacuum cleaner. I don\’t know when I started really breathing again. It was a long time. I can\’t say I\’ve ever breathed the same since that day.

And although I miss you every single day…. on days like today, when my heart feels extra tender, and gets poked, and I experience a whole different level of remembering you are gone, of missing you…that breath feels a bit sucked out again.

I want you to know that loving you, being loved by you, and losing you was one of the most important and impactful experiences of my life. (I hear your voice, somewhere, saying, \”I know, Bets. I do. Really.\” ) It has informed my life for the last almost-20 years and will continue to. I love more and harder now, and even though it\’s not really possible, I don\’t think-I try to be as present as I can to all that love, like I don\’t know if it will be the last time I see someone. And, present to the pain. All of it.

Because we never know when we\’re going to get that phone call.

I love you deeply, my friend. I am so deeply grateful for having known you, for learning all I have from loving and losing you, and for continuing to learn as I carry the loss of you in every fiber of my being. I hope somewhere there are angels giving you strawberry shortcake with candles! (and that by now they know that you don\’t like chocolate!)

Love,
me

#MissingAmy