We will be crazy 70 year old women shouting out Cher tunes (her favorite) and swinging in hammocks made from the painted silk scarves she’d make. That’s what I promised Thuy-Anh in my letter when I found out her cancer had metastasized and she’d have two years to live. She never responded back. Two weeks later, she had complications and passed away.
This Saturday will mark a year since I lost my best friend. I had never felt so empty and disconnected when I heard those dreaded words coming through the phone receiver. The Kazakhstan hotel room I was in felt like it was more than light years away from reality. I went colorblind and the world felt black and white. Life. Death. Time. Finality. I felt a war going on in my head. Pain has a way of throwing hope to the ground.
I never thought Thuy-Anh wouldn’t get through it. She rang the bell at Sarah Lawrence, the hospital in Toronto she was being treated. You ring it when you finish your cancer treatments. The two of us celebrated with a trip to Cartagena – a place as colorful as the life she was building. Even through the painful treatments, she never lost her spirit. In fact, it made her stronger and her life even fuller. Strange thing, cancer.
For the first few months after she died, I would go to bed every night with my thoughts and my broken heart. A year later, there are still nights where I fall asleep to a memory and end up with a pillow stained with quiet tears, wanting to turn back time. When bad things happen, people are always saying you learn something from it, but all I could think of was how can there be a silver lining to your best friend dying? But, you try. I tried.
What have I learned in this past year without her?
You try to find comfort. I turned to friends and my family. I found solace in my daughter who was born four months later, whom I gave Thuy-Anh’s name. Through this, I have learned what it means to be a friend and a mother. One day, I found a letter that was on top of a pile of unopened mail. It was from one of Thuy-Anh’s friends, someone I had never met before. In this day in age when relationships, jobs, possessions, seem more and more disposable, there are still things out there, there are still people out there, that hold fast and are decent and true. Through the horror of losing one of my greatest loves (that’s what she was to me, a beautiful love), I found people out there who cared more about others than what was going on in their own lives. She lost Thuy-Anh too, but instead of thinking of herself, she reached out to me, a stranger really, to make sure I was okay. I think that was what was most comforting to me, seeing how we looked after each other. The company Thuy-Anh kept is definitely a testament to her character. It really made me look at the way I live my life and it gave me a magnifying glass to look at my relationships with other people.
This experience has given me a bond with my husband that we didn’t have before. When I was freaking out about the news of Thuy-Anh’s cancer coming back, he told me to educate myself about it. That’s just what I did and it distracted me from pain by finding a purpose. It prompted me to want to write the letter (which included a NY Times article on a woman surviving stage 4 breast cancer). When I was crashing, he somehow knew how to pull me out of the flames. There was a moment at Thuy-Anh’s wake when it was all becoming too much and he took me outside and we went for a walk. We talked, he listened. He took the reins and became my strength, reminding me of mine when I had forgotten. Even the most independent of women sometimes need a knight and he was mine when I really needed one. When something reminds me of her and I find myself welling up and people staring at me in a crowded room, I don’t have to explain myself to him. He knows what she meant to me. He puts his hand on mine and tells me something funny so that I can laugh again. When you’ve been with someone for so long, it’s easy to get lost and walk out of the bigger picture. If you’re lucky, you find out that love really can turn it all around.
I haven’t been able to read the letter I wrote. There is still a part of me that feels guilty for not being able to keep my promise. To go back in time, to read the words that weren’t fated, is still too painful. I think about all of the things we stayed up talking about doing. I think about all the things she put off and how she seemed like she was finally figuring out what made her happy in life. What would she be up to today if I called her right now? What we would give for one more phone call with someone we’ve lost.
I don’t think my life has changed that much externally. I haven’t given away all of my possessions and gone off on a year long sabbatical to find myself (however tempting just to appease my wanderlust). I do a lot of the same things I did before, but I think what’s changed most about me is what you don’t see. I’ve always been more of an optimist and this experience hasn’t changed that, but it’s definitely made me more of a realist as well. My rose colored glasses are now bifocals.
I never could get my head around religion. For Thuy-Anh, her Catholic faith gave her comfort. In Cartagena, we had a long conversation about her reconnecting to her past and the link she had regained to religion. At the beginning, I could tell she was uncomfortable talking about it, afraid I would judge her. I reassured her that I was just trying to understand. If anyone could give me some insight as to why she would believe in a god that would give a mother with three young children cancer, who better than an intelligent woman I respected and understood? Her passing has driven me even further from finding any faith in anything bigger than we know. What I do take away from it is that it’s okay to search for a little magic in a world that seems too harsh and hard to understand. Even though deep down I think Thuy-Anh is just gone and there isn’t an afterlife and she’s not “looking down on us”, there’s still a little part of me that would like to be proven wrong. It won’t be in the way of angels and harps, but in something more tangible, closer to humanity. Maybe the love we have for people beyond death is proof that they’re not just dust when the last breath leaves them.
There will always be a piece of my heart that will be broken for her and those that love her. Nothing will fix it (that’s the realist coming out), but we take a little of what we’re given and try to make it better. We become kinder, more aware. We take chances on things that we were afraid of, but may make us happy. We hope that what’s left of us when all is said and done moves the world perpetually forward to something beautiful.
On Saturday, I will light a candle at the little church in my neighborhood Thuy-Anh visited the last time I saw her. I will smile and imagine her singing at the top of her lungs the lyrics to Cher’s “Believe” and will be reminded that there is a whole lot of life after love.
