I Will Give You Rest

I haven’t been on here in quite a while. Not just not updating, but not even stopping by.

I had some bad news this past week and it’s been weighing on my mind. A good friend of mine passed away a week ago. I admit that we hadn’t been close in a long time. Sophomore year of high school, her dad re-married and she chose to live with him in Greenwich and went to school there. But we had been close to inseparable from fifth grade all the way through middle school. Yes, we lost touch, but she was still an incredibly important person in my life.

There are people who come into your life and only ripple the surface. You might remember them fondly now and then, but they’re the kind of people who could easily be replaced by others and it would not have made much difference. Erica was the other kind. She was boulder in the middle of the stream that sends it skipping down another path. She left marks for the world to see.

It’s impossible for me to begin to tell the myriad ways, small and large, that I would be different had she never been in my life. She was simply that big of an impact. She brought me out of my shell, introduced me to new things. There are movies I might not have seen and music I wouldn’t have heard. More importantly, there are people I wouldn’t have known, things I might never have experienced. In the great chain that is a life, it’s entirely possible that had I not met Erica, I wouldn’t have married Alan, wouldn’t have given him a second glance.

Because she’s the one who turned me on to Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, Alice in Chains… and the whole subculture that went along with them. She showed me a world of people with different clothes and funny colored hair and weird piercings. And I found that I really liked those people. I liked people who could play music and damn did I like me some drummers and bassists. LOL I still think that certain Marilyn Manson songs are some of the sexiest songs out there. And when I saw Alan for the first time, he was wearing Doc Martens, a leather jacket, and he had blue spiked hair. Maybe the Liz without Erica would never have given him a second glance.

Looking back at everything our group of friends went through, I can only wonder if some of us would have made it through middle school without each other. And Erica is a big part of that, because she seemed to connect us. She was the lynchpin personality and without her, we all sort of fell apart. I have to even wonder if one of us would even be alive right now. When she talked about suicide, Erica and I had a lengthy discussion about whether to tell someone and we finally did. I don’t know that I would have had the courage to tell someone on my own – I was so shy and self-doubting then. Erica helped me to trust my own instincts, even when it pissed people off. She never cared about pissing people off.

I remember gossiping with her in art class freshman year. Giggling about my crush on John Tyler. Listening to Steve because he was older and oh so cool. I remember her and Steve picking up Meghan and me for lunch during band camp my sophomore year, going to Dunkin Donuts where all the upperclassmen used to hang out. I remember the first day I met her – it was the first day of fifth grade and she was the new girl. I remember being excited when she walked into the room because there was an open desk in our cluster and I hoped so hard that Mrs. Vantine would put her there. And I was so excited when she did. I used to get in trouble with dad because I would go to her house after school and forget to call him at work to let him know where I was. We used to wander all over town on our bikes. We’d walk through the cemetery that was across the street from her apartment complex. We would laugh ourselves breathless over the littlest things.

She didn’t have an easy life. I know she struggled with drugs and alcohol for a while. She didn’t have custody of her son because of it and it had been a few years since she’d seen him. She was kind and sensitive and strong and so full of life. But she dealt with immune system issues her whole life, and that’s what took her.

It was a beautiful day here last Monday and Alan was in the field so I had the car. I was driving with the windows down while Pippa napped in the backseat. Suddenly the song "Angry Johnny" by Poe came on. It’s not a song that ever got a lot of airtime, even when it was new, and it’s definitely not new these days. But it was a song that made me think of Erica so forcibly that I felt like I needed to call her right then to tell her that it was on. I didn’t of course, mostly because I didn’t know her number. But two days later, I found out that was the day she passed. And if there’s any way that we can give our loved ones a sign after we’ve gone, I think Erica would be the type to do it. So maybe she did.

I’ve had a really hard time dealing with this and she’s been on my mind almost constantly since I heard. Stefanie has posted that her family is planning a memorial service in August and I’m tempted to go out of my way to get there. But logistically it’s not practical. Not when we’re moving at the end of September. But I will make a donation in her name to a farm animal rescue in Vermont, since for several months she was raising a baby goat in her apartment. That’s just the kind of person she was and I’ll miss having her in my life, even though her presence was only online and in my mind these days.

~Liz