As I’ve mentioned, my parents moved around a lot when I was growing up. The shortest period we stayed in one place was three months and the longest was four and a half years.

When we moved to the city, where we ended up living for four and a half years, my parents told me and my two older siblings that it was “from here to the grave” for them. They would not be moving again.

I took them at their word and put down roots. I joined the choir, took drama, starred in the school musical, continued to excel in academics and played hockey. My Monday morning lessons started with English, Afrikaans, French and Latin. I dreamed of working as a translator one day.

Then, when I was 14, my parents informed me that we were moving. I was pissed. Betrayed. Reminding them of their promise was as futile as trying to drink the ocean through a straw.

Moving Again

I just felt wrenched. Again. I was going to have to give up everything I’d been working towards. I was gutted. 

Resistance was futile, but I decided that I didn’t have to collaborate with my betrayers. For the first time, I rebelled. 

I told my parents I would not participate in their decision. They hadn’t bothered to consult me, or take my feelings into consideration, so why would what I think matter now. 

I informed them that I wouldn’t look at new homes. I wouldn’t look at schools. 

My sister, at six years older, and brother, at four years older, were already working and studying so weren’t as affected. They had already moved on. I felt alone. 

Saying goodbye to friends, clubs, roles that I’d played in the microcosm of my youth was hard. 

I begged my parents to let me stay in the hostel at the school I was attending. No. The parents of my best friend spoke to my parents. They offered for me to stay with them during the week and travel to the city my parents were moving to, which was an hour away, on weekends. No.

My one-person resistance army was being bulldozed. I was crushed.

At fourteen my female friendships were knotted with shared experiences, interests and coming of age journeys. From too many years of experience, I knew that these ties would not survive the move. I felt like I was betraying our bond and there was nothing I could do about it.

My parents decided what school I would go to with no input from me. The school they chose did not offer French or Latin. Just another one of their awful decisions, I thought. I had to let go of the romance languages and accept the death of my dream to work as a translator.

This would be the eighth school I would attend.

I had left behind history, ties, friends, shared interests, a knowledge of how everything worked, where I excelled, where I fitted in. Here I was the outsider in a school full of girls who’d been at school together since they were five years old. 

Starting At Another School

The days rolled on with an inevitability that crumbled my fight. 

Eventually, I discovered that humour is a currency that is easily traded and started to make friends. 

Over time, I settled into a friendship with two girls. We shared a love of poetry, books, Merchant Ivory movies, singing loudly together and collapsing into giggling heaps when we wandered off-key and forgot the words. 

We dreamt about our futures and what they would hold. Living in a world where we controlled so little in our lives, we tried to imagine a world of our own making.

I told them stories about all the different schools I’d been to. They told me how they craved texture and adventure.

In our triad of friendship, we got to block out the rest of the world and speak the language of intensity that burrowed in our teenage hearts. We were fascinated by ideas. We read and debated, enthralled with concepts and words. We feverishly connected through art and our longing for depth. We yearned for an explosion of exploration.

Making New Friends

In what felt like an emotional and cultural desert, I had found these two gems. Our friendship was anchored in our perception of the world we inhabited and our shared desire for more was the rudder that steered us as we made our way into the world.

Me travelling to foreign countries and the two of them off to two different universities far apart. When I returned from my second year of travels, I settled in the city where one of them was studying medicine.

Our friendship survived her 36-hour shifts working in hospitals and the demands of the career she’d chosen.

We must have been 25 when she was officially entitled to call herself a doctor. About 3 weeks after the celebration, she arrived at my home in a state. I thought something terrible had happened at the hospital.

Over tea, she told me she’d walked into a store and quickly noticed that there was a group of people standing around a man who was lying on the floor having an epileptic fit. In her most authoritative voice, she declared, “stand back, I’m a doctor”. Everyone turned to her perplexed and informed her that the man had been caught shoplifting and was trying to escape.

I laughed so hard I snorted tea. That broke the spell of mortification, and she was soon laughing at herself too. It became our habit thereafter to randomly declare “stand back, I’m a doctor” as a shortcut to real belly jiggling laughs.

After over a decade of friendship, our friendship faltered. We tried to discuss it, but our perspectives were too far apart.

With neither of us sure how to proceed, convinced of our positions, our friendship stalled.

Soon after, she asked me if she could pop round to pick up some of her things from my home. As she was walking out, she told me that she was leaving the country. It was the last time I saw her.

More Than Two Decades Later

More than two decades later, she reached out to me on Facebook, and we reconnected again. We shared the highlights of our years apart. She had specialised and became an anaesthesiologist and had two beautiful boys. And our lowlights. We both shared failed marriages, and she shared she was battling alcoholism.

It was great to reunite, but over time I wasn’t sure if it was too many years apart, living on different continents, or her ongoing battle that prevented sustained connection.

Then a couple of years ago I received a message from another girl we were at school with who told me that my friend had passed away. I was in shock. Not only were details lacking and disconnected by messages travelling from one continent to another over different time zones, but it had apparently been some months since she’d passed.

A quick Facebook search revealed that indeed she had died, and it had been some months ago. By some time zone glitch, it seemed that many of us had not seen the posts about the memorial service or funeral.

I woke up at midnight the day I found out, sobbing so deeply that I felt like I was drowning in my own tears and battling to catch my breath. When the news of her death reached me, my world tore open a little. But now, as I sat keening in bed, my world knocked off its axis, my stuffing burst through that tear and ripped my heart apart. 

After hours of crying, I realised I had to write. In the darkness, as tears and snot mingled on my chin, I wiped it away like a child to pen this.

Anna

I want to be eloquent. I want to be respectful. I want to honour you.

But I do not know how to do that when I am swimming in memories and drowning in grief.

With no ritual to participate in to provide some relief.

My friend, my friend, my friend, how is it that we are separated again?

Dead? No surely not. Impossible!

The news of your passing, somehow delayed like a wayward letter,

has sliced through me. 

Only hours later and I realise it is not a cut.

I have torn open because I cannot contain my grief.

I want to be eloquent. I want to be respectful. I want to honour you.

But I do not know how to package my grief.

I do not want to put on black and sit in a church.

I want to bleed and march and curse.

I want to be eloquent. I want to be respectful. I want to honour you.

But you are woven into the DNA of my character and I am falling apart.

Like a wounded animal, a witch, a crone, I want to take territory of your memory 

And curse and growl and shriek and howl. NOT YOU! NOT YOU! NOT YOU!

My friend, my friend, my friend, please promise you will never leave me again?

For me, when I think back to that time in my life, that move to yet another school. It felt like an emotional move from summer into winter. 

What first appeared like a winter wasteland was the place where I discovered a depth of friendship, an intensity of connection that can happen when you share your full self - the good and the bad - with another being.

Part of the patchwork of who I am today is made up of that friendship.

When I emotionally finger the ridge of the scar of Anna’s passing - the loss of the potential for another season of friendship, the loss of the incredibly accomplished, sensitive, loving, hurting person that she was - I know that that ridge is formed by the knitting together of the halcyon days of our youthful friendships and knowing that our ability for depths of happiness means we also get to sink into depths of grief.

We can’t have one without the other. But the purpose of this human journey is not to dance to one happy ditty over and over again as the years pass. It’s to move through the stages and tempos because we never know when the music is going to end. 

The shared connection we have with people as they move into and out of our lives adds harmony, crescendos and ballads. It’s all part of the human experience.

I process the notes of the music, the happy sing-along and the mournful cry of the lost lone instrument through writing. 

How do you process loss, your grief, death of a dream or death of a friend?