How the Death of My Friend Changed the Way I Live
Yesterday marked two years since my friend died...730 days since I found myself sitting outside of a movie theater, tears in my eyes, listening to an unexpected voicemail from my her daughter. She had called to share the news of her mother’s sudden and unexpected passing. Just one day prior, she had been hiking in the mountains with her family to celebrate her anniversary. Now she was gone forever.
She was only 43.
Nancy wasn’t just a close friend. She was my oldest friend; someone I had known since grade school. She was a companion who knew me when I was a chubby, 10 year old girl with red glasses and a pink tie-dye shirt running around on a soccer field. And by the time I was a married mom of three in my early forties (still rocking the slightly more fashionable glasses), she remained a close confidante. We had a history of accepting and loving each other through our most awkward and elegant phases because we had grown up together. When she died, I felt the gravity of losing that uniquely shared history, a history that was the only one of its kind for me.
Some people have many close friends they retain from a very young age. For me, that number is very, very small. Growing up, before we could drive, Nancy and I would spend weekend nights at each other’s houses. From the days of her dad coaching me in youth soccer to Friday nights in high school spent at the local skating rink, there were so many experiences I carried with me from my formative years that involved Nancy. By the time she got married in 2003, I was in college living a couple of states away. So, of course our day-to-day interactions declined. But, we managed to stay connected and close through all of life’s big events and changes.
Nancy’s oldest daughter was the flower girl in our wedding in 2006. Over the years, our families would get together whenever we visited Colorado. I have pictures of us from when her daughters were very young, before Darren and I had children of our own. And then we did have our own kids…three of them. When we would talk or get together, though infrequent as it was, I found a certain catharsis in making new memories that amplified previous ones. It felt like belonging to something much bigger and more satisfying that only cumulative connections can shape.
After her death, I wrote about the profound impact I felt in losing a close friend so suddenly. Not to steal the spotlight from her family, who obviously felt her absence in much more powerful ways, but instead to highlight the nature with which I found myself processing the past, present and future. You can read more about it here, where I talk about just how much our lives were intertwined in the past, the effect the sudden loss had on me in the present, and a grieved loss of a future where we continued to build on our 30 year friendship.
But today, I want to pay tribute to my friend by sharing how her life…and death…has shaped me over the last two years. It came in ways I never anticipated, and it brought me to a place where my thoughts of her bring gratitude rather than just sadness.
If there was one phrase to describe Nancy it would be ‘Carpe Diem’, or ‘Seize the Moment’. Because that is what she did. She pushed boundaries and lived the improv adage of ‘Yes, and…’, always looking for the next adventure that would one day make a great story. And her stories WERE great. I loved hearing her narrate them, and simultaneously watching her daughters react and intercede to add color. She brought life to her household. She was the glue of her social network, the heartbeat of the party, the always dependable friend, and the fiercely loving mother and wife. She was the spirited neighbor and spontaneous coworker. She carved her own path, she knew what she wanted, and she overcame every obstacle that might hold her back. I admired her in ways I never understood until she was gone, because I didn’t fully grasp the brightness of her light until it dimmed.
Everyone who knows me knows that I do not have a high tolerance for risk. I am a planner, and I like to know what to expect. So much so that I often look up spoilers of shows and movies because I don’t want to be surprised or disappointed. While some of my methodical tendencies are natural, many are likely the product of my past experiences with circumstances far outside of my control. Regardless, I have always tended towards being a person who evaluates and then re-evaluates nearly every decision I make. I weigh the pros and cons, then I weigh them again, and then I do it one last time for good measure.
You might be thinking that this is where I pivot and tell you how I have suddenly started improvising all my life choices. Perhaps I find myself desiring to jump in the car for an impromptu road trip and pack nothing but the bag I can carry on my back? Or maybe I’m one self-help book away from Eat, Pray, Love-ing my way through my forties? Neither of those would be true, because the core of who I am hasn’t changed. I am still someone who builds excel sheets for family vacations and prefers to know the outcome before the journey.
However, what has changed in the last two years is my willingness to allow some degree of risk and improvisation into the equation, while trying new things that both challenge and exhilarate me. Hurdles that previously seemed either unfeasible or unrealistic are overpowered by the YOLO voice in my brain telling me there is no better time than the present because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.
So what does that look like for me? Well, in my daily life, it means being more animated, affectionate, and expressive with my family. It means singing loudly when I’m cooking dinner, because I can, and then showing my kids how much I unapologetically love them while smacking them as hard as possible with a foam blades as we play Hit Each Other with Fake Swords. (Yes, it is a real game and yes, it is a lot of fun). It means acting in a way that solicits the universal eye roll and smirk from my teenagers because I’m being ridiculous, but I’m also being fun. And it means not having to manage every detail of a party but instead planning imperfect and informal gatherings with my people - because they never really cared about the themed snacks in the first place - they just wanted to connect over laughs.
Sometimes, the manifestation of "no regrets" means doing something that scares me. Like riding Velocicoaster (twice!) this past summer when I haven’t been on a roller coaster in over two decades - just to prove to myself (and my family) that I could do it. And sometimes, it means trying something that appears random but actually satisfies my creative appetite, like signing with a talent agency in order to learn the foundations of commercial modeling and acting, and hoping to eventually (?) turn it into something more.
For the first year after Nancy passed, I thought of her every day in some capacity. Now, it may not cross my mind daily, but I do think of her quite often. When my kids hit a new milestone like driving, or I make plans to head back to Colorado for my dad’s surgery, or I audition for another commercial. If she were still alive, I would file all of these into the ‘tell Nancy about this next time we get together’ folder. But the truth is, I’m not sure I would have these exact same stories to tell. While I would like to think my proclivity towards seizing my own moments would have surfaced naturally, it would probably look a little different. Sometimes, I don’t think I can fully separate who I would have been without the influence her loss had on me. Perhaps the gap isn’t very big, and all roads converged at finding myself, eyes wide open, plummeting down an 80 degree, 155-foot drop at 70 mph in the middle of a hot summer day in Florida. Or, maybe not. I will never know for sure. But one thing I do know is that it would have made a great story to tell my oldest friend.
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