A Solid Sistahood

When I am with my good solid girlfriends -- women whom I have known for years and years and years -- I know I am blessed.

When we get together we may be going on about our children, our hair color, a new diet or some story we heard about on the news, but the under current of all of that warm wonderful and familiar chatter is the inner knowledge that we are sistas who have each other's backs and always will!

Through beautiful and great times, times of trauma and then those other ugly times when you need to just pull up your big girl pants and get on with your life as you heal and rebuild, my girlfriends have been there for me and I have been there for them.  Life is richer with my amazing friends for they are the glue that holds me together and in turn, I hope I do the same for them.

Whether you have girlfriends from childhood or adulthood or if you are extremely lucky you have a mix of friends from diffferent ages of your life, please read Ann Hood's compelling story recently published in PARADE magazine that takes us to her mother's house on a Friday night where a group of women known as "The Girls"  have gathered to play cards.

Photo: Tim Klein/Gallery Stock

Loyal, loud, tough-talking—these were friends impossible to replace.

The Girls
By Ann Hood

 

Every Friday night, they gathered at one of their houses in a cloud of cigarette smoke and Aqua Net. They came in twos or threes, dressed in velour sweat suits, skirts with matching sweaters, elastic-waist jeans, and shirts that said BEST MOM or DECK THE HALLS. In their hands: coffee cans filled with pennies that clanked as they walked. Some wore wigs, big bubbles of fake hair. Or wiglets or falls, bobby-pinned in place like the mantillas they wore to church on Sunday. There were 12 in all. The Dirty Dozen, they called themselves. But more often, they were just The Girls.

Most had grown up together in Natick, R.I., a small village in a small state. Their houses all sat within a mile of each other. Yet they arrived in station wagons, the ones they drove to and from school, the beach, and the park, overloaded with kids.

Their husbands were foremen in factories. Others worked on the army base or ran the produce department or the deli counter at the local store. One of The Girls—no one could remember how she came to join them—was married to a doctor. She wore a blond fall, cat-eye glasses, drank Chablis. She didn't fit in, really. The Girls married young and stayed married. This one had an affair and left town. Then they were 11 around the kitchen tables covered with plastic cloths.

My mother was part of this group. For as long as I can remember, Friday nights were sacred, hers. The hurried dinner—maybe tuna casserole, eggs in purgatory, fish and chips from the takeout place. Then her disappearance to get ready. She left my father in charge for the evening, which meant popcorn and Dr Pepper and staying up late. But never late enough for me to hear her come home.

Best was when it was my mother's turn to host. She began cooking on Wednesday. Marinating. Peeling. Simmering. Friday we were banished to the TV room so she could set up metal trays with small bowls of chips and dip, platters of cold cuts or fried chicken or meat loaf. Always a salad. Always cake or pie.

On my mother's nights, it was impossible to fall asleep. The excitement of The Girls, so many of them! All squeezed around our small table, laughing and smoking and playing poker. I would creep down the stairs and sit on the harvest gold carpet, listening. They shared worries: about husbands and children and money, always money because there was never enough. They told each other "I hate you" and "I love you" with equal passion and frequency. They were not like mothers on television. No, they were rough around the edges, high school dropouts, secretaries, and assembly-line workers. They spoke with a hard accent that dropped r's and added s's. Kmahts, they said, instead of Kmart. "Your deals" instead of "your deal."

Years of Friday nights passed. Three of The Girls moved away. Then cancer struck. Colon. Lung, twice. The Girls dwindled from 11 to eight to five. Alzheimer's dropped them to four. They broke hips and had cataract surgeries, knee replacements, and lumpectomies. Still, they met every Friday night.

After their families were grown, they took trips. To Atlantic City. To Foxwoods casino in Connecticut. Overnights and weekends and afternoons. They met for coffee and counted their pennies and planned more trips to more casinos.

Then one day, one of them was driving home from my mother's when she was hit broadside by a teenager in his brand-new car. She died instantly. That Friday was the first Friday that The Girls didn't play. The next week, another one was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer; she lived only four months.

Unsure how to help my mother heal, I signed us up for bridge classes with my 19-year-old son. I imagined finding a fourth player, setting a new routine. I imagined I could convince her that things weren't as bad as they seemed, even though I knew they were.

The day before the last class, the teacher announced that we were all bridge players now. "You can go home and teach your friends," he said triumphantly.

"My friends are all dead," my mother said softly.

I glanced over at her. She had turned her head so that no one could see her crying. How foolish I was to think that a new foursome, could replace The Girls. I realized in that moment that there are some things for which there are no substitutes. There are some things that we must mourn and cherish and say goodbye to.

Every so often now, on a Friday night, I drive to my mother's. I bring her treats that make her smile: a bouquet of zinnias, an apple pie warm from the oven, a bunch of flat-leaf parsley. I drink coffee with her and talk about things that don't matter. She'll look around the empty table and say, in a voice filled with wonder, "Just yesterday, we were all here playing cards." I take her hand, bent with arthritis, rough from hard work, and I hold on tight. Or as tight as I can before I let go.

Ann Hood's new novel, The Obituary Writer (W. W. Norton & Company), will be published this week.

Do Not Look Away

 

 

Courtesy of CNN.com

  

Holding a hand.  Giving a hug.  Opening your heart.

 

We must not be afraid to offer comfort and empathy.

 

I know it's hard to step outself of yourself and reach out to others in pain. To empathize requires introspection which is not a very popular exercise these days.  Introspection requires you to stop thinking about yourself and imagine what another person is feeling in a situation you would not want to happen to you or anyone else.

 

I know it is only a few days until Christmas, a time when Christians traditionally celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and people would prefer to surround themselves in the comfort of a commercial Christmas, a Christmas of unending presents and idyllic settings full of twinkling lights, freshly baked cookies and smiles and holiday joy.

 

But there is also another Christmas, equally as powerful: a Christmas belonging to those newly bereaved, a Christmas belonging to those whose child has died. 

Please pause this Christmas and think of these people who are desperate in their sorrow.  No matter what the reason, a shooting, a disease, an accident or a medical condition, these parents should not be ignored because they may make us feel uncomfortable.

 

To truly be filled with the spirit of Christmas, we must give of ourselves.  Though it truly is every parent's nightmare, please do not look away from those who are grieving the loss of a child.  Besides the deep pain they are experiencing, there is also an outrage that they are feeling; an outrage that they will never know what the child might have become.

 

They need our help.  They need to know they are not alone.

 

Please read the following Washington Post story written by a mother who writes of her raw feelings following the death of her child.  May it inspire all of us to be courageous in the face of grief:

 

Courtesy of CBS News

 

The death of a child: A parent’s worst nightmare

By Ann Hood, Published: The Washington Post, December 21

Ann Hood is a novelist and short-story writer living in Providence, R.I.

We are stunned. We are outraged. As a nation, we are questioning laws on gun control, questioning how such a thing can happen. These are all appropriate responses to the tragedy in Newtown, Conn.

 

But there is a repercussion to all this that will continue long after laws are changed and life, unbelievably, gets back to normal: the grief of the parents of the 20 children killed. How many times have I heard that this is a parent’s worst nightmare? As someone who has lived the nightmare of losing a child, I know that the enormous hole left behind remains forever.

My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, “I’m going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.” Well, good for you, I thought. I’m going to go home and scream.

What can be said in light of such grief? What can you do? The problem is that no one can give the parents what they want most: their child. Long after the memorials fade and the casseroles stop coming, that child is still dead, and those parents are still grieving.

I offer here what I have learned about grief in the 10 years since my Gracie died:

I learned that platitudes don’t work. Time doesn’t heal. She is not in a better place. God does give us more than we can bear sometimes. I have learned that there is more power in a good strong hug than in a thousand meaningful words. I have learned that even in the face of loss, clothes still get dirty and bills still need to get paid. Friends who laundered our socks and answered our e-mails, who mowed our lawn and put gas in our cars, helped us — a lot. The friend who came one afternoon and went through Grace’s backpack, carefully storing her kindergarten workbook and papers, hanging her art on the refrigerator and her raincoat on its hook in the mudroom, had more courage than the ones who told me to call anytime.

Some friends sat with me day after day, week after week and, yes, month after month, and let me talk while they listened. I told the story of Grace’s last day over and over, as if by telling it I could make sense of what had happened to her, to us. But there is no sense to be made of such tragedy, and when I realized that, they let me wail and bang my fists and curse.

As time passes, people return to their ordinary lives, while grieving parents no longer have ordinary lives. They are redefining themselves, and they are at a loss at how to move forward. There is a woman who still sends me a card on Grace’s birthday and every Mother’s Day, who sent cards weekly for more than a year, a lifeline to a grieving mother. The people who even now, a decade later, still say Grace’s name, still comment on her quirky style and artistic talents and love of the Beatles, continue to help me through my days, simply by remembering her.

How easy it is to look away from grief, as if it might be contagious, or too frightening to face. But the Newtown parents have a difficult, lifelong journey through grief ahead of them. Somehow, the seasons will change, the anniversaries will stack up one after the other. They will, unbelievably, smile again. They will make dinner and change jobs and buy clothes and celebrate and travel. They will go on. But there will always, always, be this grief, softened and dulled but present every minute of every day.

Do not forget that. Look them in the eye. Take them in your arms, and do not let them go.