Not yet

You must believe me when I say I'm tired of eulogizing my friends.  I want very much to be able to describe my friend to you, but words are leaving me as quickly as they come in my mind. I wonder where she is now. She really believed in heaven and I want her to have followed a bright light into a beautiful place, but I'm stuck here just wishing she didn't go.  Stuck thinking about her children and husband and her brother's despair and her mother's anguish and stuck worrying that getting the exact right words to honor her sweet life. I think mostly I do not want to write to you about her because as long as it's not really written, as long as we don't discuss it, I can continue to believe that she's just out of the country. It would be much better if she had not written to me to be honest and real in my blog.

I've heard there are several stages of grief and I like to spend the most time in the anger phase.  Rage suits me and I have a lot of good curse words in my vocabulary so usually my grief begins and ends there. I went to her memorial service yesterday and spent the whole time feeling like the odd man out because I have every intention of fueling my rage until the fight has gone out of me.  I do not want to hear about God's plan (he could come up with a better plan than plucking this wonderful mother of 7 out of our lives to be honest), and I don't want to participate in the "who loved her most" contest on Facebook. I don't want to be told that my anger is the Devil talking and I sure as hell don't want to be told I ought to celebrate just yet.  I know that Melinda could have done that.  But my grief is mine and it's authentic and my honest relationship with her demands that I honor her by just feeling whatever I feel for as long as I feel it.  Can you imagine a worse thing than going into a house of God and LYING about how you feel?  Surely God could handle my wrath? And if his own son can ask why God had forsaken him, is it a show of lesser faith if I do the same?

Or if I write about it?

I was not Melinda's best friend. I mean I was as a child - since we were 2 in the nursery at church, but as adults we did what most adults do and drifted apart. Some of that was because she was a home-schooling missionary and I am generally just offensive to both of those populations. What's left to talk about?  My sister and I ran into her and David during her most recent furlough in Rome and her sweet conversation made it the simplest thing to rekindle a friendship.  She was still the funny, generous, creative person she'd always been, just better.  We spent a few hours here and there trying to drink each other's grown up selves in and she had the idea that we should swap paintings - her water color birds for my little birds on canvas.  In her painting I made her blue because she said that's her favorite.  I tried to pray over each little birdie in her family because she would appreciate the sincerity.  Her work was lovely. Mine was at least from the heart.  We swapped them in another marathon coffee shop visit just before she left again.  I sat there yesterday in my car looking across the street at that table and imagined how her eyes always disappeared when she laughed.

Melinda was the only missionary I ever really liked.  I think I liked her mostly because she had legitimate reasons NOT to be nurturing and generous and open and yet she still was.  Who doesn't like that?   It's not my story to tell, but you can trust me that she probably considered herself to be the least fortunate in our group of church friends and yet she had the magnetic personality that made those things insignificant.  I am not kidding you when I say that her laugh could disarm a prison guard's doberman.  Some things folks learn in order to move more easily in the world, but Melinda's ability to warm the people around her was innate. I swear I don't remember a time when she didn't exist joyfully.

When you have every reason to dwell on your miserable adolescence, the abandonment, the worry, the necessary angst and self doubt, you can get your circle of friends to kind of give you a pass and you can just stay in that misery your whole life. We would have given her one because Melinda had legitimate reasons to be self absorbed and mistrustful, but she just wasn't. She didn't even consider that as a hat to try on - instead she built her life as big as she could think to make it. She built a life that involved only creating - she painted, and sculpted, and made things with her hands and she didn't take a thing from the planet. She built a marriage that was safe and trusting and she home schooled because she was smart and knew she could nurture. She adopted because she could love a few more and she became a missionary for the same reasons - she just had more to give and she believed - really, really believed - that God would make everything possible.  Her day was full of people who needed and it was no burden to her to give whatever came to her. She was grateful that it was her position to fill people.

She told me before she left that she could fit all they needed in 6 or 7 boxes and she was so happy that it made sense.  She looked as youthful as ever, I think because her delight in the world was so evident.  Maybe she would not have been as angry and flattened as I am over a loss of a friend. Maybe she would have seen something in a tragedy born from a mosquito bite that I can't find, am not even willing to find.  I know she would have. She lived faithfully and she would have arrived at the positive side of it within seconds, but the same God who created us differently in a billions of years old universe can just wait a relative minute while I get my shit together. My grief is mine, and it is sticky and clings to me like a spider web. It is infectious and inflamed and causes me to want to set everything on fire and when it finally leaves me drained, I will allow myself think about singing Hall and Oates together and remember boy crushes and church youth lock-ins and I will smile at how long we had to know each other. Just not yet.

I emailed her last when I saw a post she'd written about her youngest baby's distressful trip to the dentist.  She dreaded watching her newest little adopted bird's anxiety and pain.  I wrote, "To our new sweet girl: 'His eye is on the sparrow and I know He watches me'."  She would imagine the First Baptist Church's soloist Bonnie Nipper singing that all through the 1980s and hear it in her head I hoped.  I hoped it would calm her all the way across the ocean in China.  She had a heart that wouldn't wish sadness on me and when I can, when this sickening despair turns me loose, I'll accept what she offered me in her response, "Peace," she wrote, "to my lifelong friend."