Learning to Trust Myself the Way My Favorite Friend Did
The last time I hung out with my favorite friend Mary before the day she died, I blurted out that I was getting divorced. My son was two. I had been with my now ex for over 10 years at that point.
Over the years Mary, my ex and I had all done a lot together. We went to Mexico on a volunteer trip to an orphanage, saw so many live shows together, they even threw me surprise parties together. Once they made me a cake for my birthday and set it on the porch outside on a warm fall day in Chicago to cool. One of those city squirrels with a not bushy enough tail ate top of the cake off of half the cake. Mary and my ex decided to cut off the squirrel-touched parts and just put frosting thicker on that spot. We all laughed about it for years after. They had always liked each other. We let him be a part of our friendship.
So when I mustered up the nerve to tell her in a cab outside the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on our way to see (her favorite) David Sedaris’ show, “I’m leaving him, I’m going to ask for a divorce.” I know I stuttered and I know it felt super awkward for both of us. I needed to tell her then and there, I didn’t know why, I just knew I needed to. We were about to step out of the cab so I put her in a pretty weird spot. She paused and asked me something like, “you’re sure about this?” I said, “Yes.” She replied “Ok.” and she sighed and nodded her head.
A few weeks before that cab ride, she was insisting on waiting for the bus in the sub-zero Chicago winter. She was fiercely independent and seldom accepted help from anyone. While she had explicitly told me she never wanted to talk about her cancer, I decided in that moment to holler out the window at the top of my lungs, “YOU HAVE CANCER GET IN THE GOD DAMN CAR!” We were both howling laughing. I kept yelling until she got in. She may not accept help easily, but she would avoid embarrassment and public exposure of her cancer at all costs. We giggled the whole way home, still not talking about cancer but thawing out together on my heated seats and warming our hands on the vents. It ended as every encounter did - the tightest squeeziest smiley hug and “Bye Rachel Newhouse!!!” and “Bye Mary Howard!!!” We always used full first and last name every time we said hello and goodbye. It makes me sad that I’ll never hear that again.
I can’t be sure of who I was to her, but to me, she was everything I wanted to be. She was so smart, bright, confident, bold, adventurous, patient, funny, fun, and had the brightest future ahead. She was in the process of applying to do a master’s program in international relations in DC. She was sure for her career she would need to live in DC for a while. For a girl from Lincoln, Nebraska, those were big dreams and I was so damn proud of her and inspired by her.
And for all of those reasons, I needed her blessing to actually leave my torturous relationship with my now ex husband. I asked for it that night and she gave it. The last time we hugged outside the Red Line train station that night was the last time I would see her outside of a hospital bed.
I never told her what happened, I never told her why I was leaving. I had kept everything about my relationship a secret. I had a hard time accepting that the person I loved so deeply did not love me anymore. Or maybe it was that I had finally learned that what he gave wasn’t love. Whatever it was, there was no love from him toward me anymore. And a lot of ugly, harshness and callousness. When I was seven months pregnant with our son, I woke up with difficulty breathing and woke him up gasping for air. He rolled over. I shook him harder and said, “I’m having trouble breathing.” He (a medical student) said, “I have my boards on Monday, I need to sleep” and he rolled back over. I crawled out of my bed on my hands and knees with my belly dragging beneath me. I called the emergency number at the hospital, they told me to come in immediately. My now ex reluctantly but finally got out of bed and huffed and puffed the whole way to the hospital. One of his teachers was my doctor in the ER and he verified I had a spasmodic airway. I was treated and released and my now ex confirmed that he didn’t believe me until his teacher told him something was wrong. While I knew I held little value in his eyes, his callousness toward our son’s life was heartbreaking.
I never told Mary that. I told a couple people and they seemed unfazed, so I stopped.
A short two months after seeing David Sedaris, it was Mary’s birthday, which that year also became her death day. I walked into her hospice room at Evanston Hospital and pulled a chair up to my friend’s bed. She had her eyes closed and had deep rhythmic breathing, the kind you have when you are close to leaving this world. I had seen that in my first patient as a nursing student, so I knew what I was looking at. I took a deep breath and started whispering to her all of the things I love about her and all the ways I’m so grateful for her. I sat down and held her hand. They told me she was unresponsive, but she squeezed my hand back and held on as I played music from Rent (her favorite musical). As Seasons of Love came to an end, her grip on my hand loosened and her last breath left her body.
The weirdest thing when someone dies is to go back immediately to normalcy. Your world is completely rocked but the rest of the world just keeps spinning and you have to navigate traffic and parking meters and weather while everything feels like it should stop at least for a moment. I had hoped that I would get moments of the world stopping at home, but I did not. I went home and took care of my son and took him to the park so he could play with his friends, with the image of my friend’s last breath playing on repeat in the cinema of my mind. Small talk with parents. “How was your day, Rachel?” Staying true to my blunt style I said, “Pretty weird actually. I just sat with my best friend until she died.”
I told my now ex husband about the memorial planned for her, his response was “Do I have to go or can I go to the Starbucks close to there and wait for you?” I don’t need to explain how callous that is. You get it. I knew firmly in that moment that this is who he was. I had to grieve the loss of Mary and needed time. A year later, I filed for divorce. And I’ve never, ever looked back.
I miss so deeply having the kind of friend that knows and trusts me so much that they believe I have a really fucking good reason if I’m leaving. Even when I’m leaving someone that she loves. Even when I told her nothing. She believed me. She trusted me.
While I thought it was her blessing I needed, what I actually needed was that same kind of faith in myself. And for the last 12 years, I’ve been learning how to listen to that thing in my gut that already knows instead of relying on others to confirm it for me. I am the only one who lives every joy and every pain of my life, so I’m the only one who can fully understand the rightness of my choices (although it might not be bad to be able to blame my poor choices on her from time to time). No one else can know where my life needs to go, not even Mary.
Please note that the blogpost above does not represent the thoughts or opinions of Fresh Start Registry and solely represents the original author’s perspective.