Loss, Love
Pile Press, October 2023
This is a story about a friendship that flourished during a difficult season of life. This is a story about a connection formed long ago that still thrives, still sustains, thirty years later. This is a story about a time when I first learned that life’s darkness is inevitable, but that love stubbornly asserts itself, poking through in little slivers of light.
The summer of 1989 I was 19, living the dream working as a chamber maid at the Jersey shore. Every day, the maids gathered in an uncleaned room for lunch. One day, three young women from Scotland were introduced as new co-workers. Two had brown hair and one red. We immediately fell in together, discussing whether or not the RC brand of the cola I sipped stood for Roman Catholic. I knew nothing of Scotland or its people and lacked the Internet to expedite my knowledge base. I soon learned my new friends were friendly, fun, and hardworking. They hand washed their clothes and hung them on a line outside their boarding house to dry. They went to church every Sunday and drank copious cups of tea, even on the hottest summer days.
Out of the three Scottish girls, I formed the deepest connection with bright -blue- eyed Jen. We were both third year college students with summer birthdays. Stretching sheets across wide mattresses, we told each other about family, friends, our lives back home. We turned on the telly while we dusted nightstands, dancing around the room to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
There was a fateful quality to my connection with Jen. The previous December, my father came to Manhattan College to take me home to Syracuse, NY for Christmas break. On the way we heard that a plane exploded over Great Britain with a number of Syracuse University students on board, dropping from the sky over a place called Lockerbie, Scotland. We struggled to process the concept that young people, as young as me, could be snatched from their family, friends, their futures, in one instant. Jen’s hometown, Dumfries, was adjacent to Lockerbie. Her policeman father helped clean up the disaster. He returned home each night from the site, silent, traumatized. The cleanup went on half a year. A few months later, the spring before meeting Jen, my brother was diagnosed with a kind of cancer called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. When I travelled to the Jersey shore to work that summer, I carried my first load of major pain and grief, weighted by the fear of life’s fragility and unpredictability that has stalked me my entire life.
Coincidentally, Jen shared the uncanny information that her boyfriend Jim’s brother had also recently been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Just a few months before, I didn’t know any young person who had cancer, now I knew two.
So, the following January I went off to Scotland to study abroad. In Glasgow, I skipped all of my classes, haunted the bars, crushed on a nerdy guy at a bookstore, ate buttered toast every day and not one fruit or vegetable, served Guinness to old people at a bridge club, and bought pounds of clothes at the many charity shops. Conversely, my brother was at the University of Nebraska receiving a bone marrow transplant. Most mornings I stood at the mail table in the hall of my student house skimming my parents’ and siblings’ letters, trying to speed through them, skipping the bad parts. I wanted to block out the image of my brother’s young ravaged body, stripped of bone marrow, beaten with extreme chemotherapy, then radiation. I wanted to forget, so I headed out to Byers Road, where the charity clothing, chip shops, and flowing beer awaited.
Every week or so I’d show up at Jen’s flat despairing. She knew how to cook-something I didn’t do yet - offered me creamy mushroom soup, a hot slice of lasagna. I’d sleep beside her overnight, gathering strength before returning to my own wild existence across town.
Like a bad penny, I just kept coming back. Her three flat mates never seemed to mind my spontaneous arrivals at their front door or the fifth person queuing for the shower in the morning. Jen, Jim, and I often went out for nights at the student union, partying until wee hours under a sparkling disco ball to the beats of Depeche Mode and Erasure.
During spring break, I went home with Jen to Dumfries where I finally met her parents, sisters, dog, and pretty much every other relative in town. At the time I wore socks as gloves, a fashion choice that intrigued and amused my hosts. We went for walks in the forest, shopped in the town center, ordered Indian takeaway, and visited a pub frequented by Scotland’s poet, Robbie Burns. This was the first of a lifetime of visits to this place, this family.
At the end of the semester, the night before my departure for home, Jen, Jim, and I drank a lot, stayed up very late. The alarm clock shocked us awake and we staggered out of bed to gather ourselves and my luggage into Jim’s car. The photo of the three of us standing at the airport’s check-in still peeks from under the crinkly cellophane of my photo album. I stand between my friends, holding the plane ticket like a prize. We smile through exhausted young faces. Eventually, I pulled myself from Jen’s unyielding hug, walked to the gate without her. I cried the whole way back to New York. It felt like an ending, but it was really just the start. Jen has been with me through every loss and joy of my life. I don’t like saying things are meant to be, but that year I met Jen my universe shifted. Bad things happened too, but somehow she fell into my world and brightened and lightened my load. Was it magic or fate? I don’t know. Anyway, It’s much more than coincidence. It’s a lifelong friendship. It’s love.
