Into the Light by Beth Bartlett

I looked for my friend, Pamela’s email the morning after she died. Every morning I have looked forward to her email from the day before — the last one sent at 4:37 on the Tuesday afternoon before Thanksgiving. Did she ever see my response sent at 6 AM the next morning – my wish for her to know joy this Thanksgiving, my sending much love? The bulk of it was full of mundanities. How differently might I have written it had I known it would be the last she would see?  Our ongoing call and response email conversation — now without response, forever without response. 

Ours was a friendship of words — words in the cards she has given me over the years, in her detailed responses to my blog posts, in the thousands of emails passed between us over several years. I’ve saved them all.  They were too precious ever to delete. How we both loved words — their poetry, their capacity to communicate, convey, confound, console, comfort. I eagerly anticipated her words every day. For years I have entrusted my daily thoughts, worries, joys, activities, hopes, and the occasional dream to her tender care, always knowing her response would be a mirror, reflecting me back to myself, she reflecting on all I had written – giving witness and testimony, always with the deepest of care and affirmation. As Adrienne Rich wrote in the poem we both loved — “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” – I have never seen/my own forces so taken up and shared/and given back.   Yes, this – the immensity, the intensity, the profound reciprocity of our sharing.

A friendship of words, yes, but also of deep affection and concrete acts of care – of food shared, gifts given, flowers sent, her careful editing of my manuscripts, our encouraging each other to bring forth our writing into books.

She was the unexpected gift of my older age. Our lives already so full of good and long-lived friendships, we did not expect or need another so late in our lives.  Yet what a blessed surprise that there was this one more – and this one of such rare sympathy of minds of shared interests, ideas, books, authors. We grew into feminism in the same era of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, bell hooks and Carol Christ, and it was a deep grounding of our friendship. Our minds traveled in the same direction. So often at Christmases we would give each other the same books and smile. I basked in her brilliance – the questions she asked, the insights shared, the provocative thoughts – she challenged me to think more deeply, entertain different perspectives, explore a thought widely.  She made me better.

In the past four years of Covid isolation, our friendship only deepened. Because she was as careful as I, she was the one friend with whom I could visit indoors unmasked.  We were unmasked with each other — honest, vulnerable, open, sharing the deepest truths of our lives – such an exceptional gift, this intimacy of souls.

As a gift to her for her birthday last year, I wrote a post on friendship, and it was with her in mind that I wrote these words:

It is a rare gift – to have one’s words received, given back, with care and understanding; for someone to ask, “How are you?” and want to know; to ask “How can I help?” and then respond; to ask in order to know more deeply; to answer with the fullest measure of one’s honesty and be responded to in kind; to know there is someone to whom one can turn in tragedy, knowing they will mourn with you, or in excited joy, knowing they will celebrate your joys with you with a full and generous heart.  I have been blessed in my life to have known all of these.  I hope I have given in full measure in return.

What is it to lose such a friend?  As a culture we give our deepest sympathies to the loss of family members, but the loss of a such a dear friend leaves a huge, gaping hole in our lives — as Marge Piercy wrote – “a red giant gone nova, an empty place in the sky,” an empty place in the core of my being. I wailed when I read of her sudden and unexpected passing in her husband’s text — collapsed to the floor, pounded it, cursed the day, threw the phone that brought the horrific news. The immensity of my grief has surprised me – though I don’t know why.  We so often said we could not imagine life without the other. Since her death, the days have felt flat, without color.

Looking back over our thousands of email exchanges, the subject headings reflect our lives — “thank you,” “balm,” “despair,” “resilience,” “beautiful day,”” joy in the beholding,” “beginning again,” “wonderful to be with you.”  And it was – so wonderful to be with her in this life. It is fitting that the subject of our last email thread was “gratitude.” We were each so grateful for the other. In the last card she sent me she wrote: celebrating our friendship – the ways it is rooted, how it branches out, how it reaches for the sky.  What a gift.  I am so grateful.  And though she is gone, physically, I still feel how deeply our friendship is rooted, how it has branched out to the many friends we have in common as we collectively mourn her passing, and how it extends far beyond this earthly existence.

It is dark here in the northland this time of year. My friend’s death has added to the growing dark, both of this time of year and of the nation. The increasing darkness was always difficult for Pamela, but how she loved the winter solstice when we jump the fire into the new year and the earth turns back toward the light. I’d like to think she was so eager for it she just leapt toward it, passing joyously into the light.