This year I lost a lifelong friend who entered my life by chance when she was 5 and I was 7. My father, who was a widower, married her mother’s sister and we just clicked.
We spent decades by the sea, combing beaches and rantom scooting through the moors, Newcomb’s field guides in hand. We fished and picked blueberries for supper. We collected surf clams, sea glass and lucky rocks with stripes. We made lightship baskets. We went birding. We went to college together. She danced at my wedding and was a godmother to my children. We loved dogs, coffee, cardinals, snowmen, fairy lights, jigsaw puzzles, kindles, sea glass and starfish. We spent New Year’s Eve together with a cup of chowder, a Fondue Pot and Cheesecake.
Whenever I woke up in the hospital, which I did a lot,over six decades – she was there. We survived cancer treatments and surgeries together and parental losses. The sisters that brought us together developed Alzheimer’s . We cared for them and managed their affairs while we went to weddings, baptisms, birthdays, graduations, funerals and burials. Just this past summer we buried my sister and her mother.
We had nearly sixty years of memories. We felt lucky that fate had brought us together and we could count on each other. It wasn’t just me, everyone who knew her loved her.
Our luck ran out this fall when her cancer returned with a vengeance. She went from thinking she might have Covid to hospice care in our house within weeks.
I tend to be one of those mourners who can be grateful rather than grieving, who can smile because she has lived , but when I unexpectedly came across the scent of seaweed and sea salt while Christmas browsing – my eyes welled with tears.
Grief can be funny that way. One minute you’re coping and the next you have to leave the store.
Of all the things that have reminded me of her, daily, since her death, she would laugh to know that it was this scent that undid me. We discovered it together in Padanarum one summer and our eyes went wide- when we had a whiff. It will always be my favorite. Even though now , it is a reminder of how much I miss her, but our hearts will always be in a cottage by the sea.