Today is the Yahrzeit – the anniversary — of my sister Lorraine’s death. She died 24 years ago, just two weeks before the 9/11 disaster that she did not live to see, small compensation for the tragic loss for her husband, her two sons and me. She was five and a half years older than me, a large enough gap to preclude real closeness, despite the awkwardness of having shared a bedroom until she married and I went off to graduate school.
In our adult years, I came to recognize her many virtues that I had only dimly appreciated earlier. She was smart, funny in a wonderfully wry way and a dedicated wife and mother. In spite of the diabetic weight she gained in her later years her face was always attractive. We only lived in the same city for three years of our adult lives, but we talked regularly on the phone. Her unmistakable and unchanging Brooklyn accent drew me back to my roots and I found myself dropping back into the speech of my childhood as we spoke.
Lorraine was a people person. She had a large circle of friends, kept better contact than I with our relatives and had an uncanny recall of the details of the lives of every person who passed into her orbit. Although we often had different spins on the events of our childhood, she was the only person in the world with whom I had shared those experiences and her loss left me grappling with memories I could not validate, uncertain of the extent to which they were fabrications and embellishments on the “real” events.
My parents preceded her in death, as obituary writers like to say, by many years – my mother by 24 years and my father by 15, so her death was the ultimate orphaning event for me. Because both my parents were the youngest of long lines of siblings, almost all my first cousins were considerably older than I. To my knowledge, only one of them is still alive, a woman in her early 90s who found me on Ancestry.com. She was less a contemporary of mine than of my sister’s. All those losses leave me floating in an expanse of ether that could produce a deadly loneliness were it not for my wife, my children, their spouses and my granddaughter. It’s also a great gift that Rosellen’s family is such a strong and welcome presence in our lives. I have adopted them as my own.
You may have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot about friendship in my recent postings. What I’ve just described here goes a long way to explaining why. As the blood relationships have diminished, the void has been filled by the accumulation of friendships, some dating back 60 years or more. As family roots have receded, they serve as an increasingly more critical validation of my own identity and history.
Which brings me to our two weeks in New Hampshire. When people ask me how our vacation was, I struggle to create a narrative that captures the pleasures of our time there. The only one that passes as a “story” is the scamming incident I wrote about last week, arguably the least pleasant moment of the trip. Otherwise, it was an almost unbroken string of eating and talking events with friends, most of which had been booked ahead of time to ensure the most efficient use of our limited time.
Even though we see most of these friends for a ridiculously short time, often only a few hours each year, these relationships live inside us until the following summer. They are part of the bedrock of who we are, and they endure, as the marriage vows say, “in sickness and in health.” In a few cases, the friend is no longer who he or she was through our many years together. This does not grant us license to step away from our commitment to them. You hear occasionally about people who withdraw when they learn that a friend has a terminal illness or a serious cognitive impairment. That isn’t the way it should work.
This paean to friendship is getting a bit too sappy. You’ll have to trust my word that it’s all heart-felt. I’m not even sure the intensity of our commitment to these relationships is reciprocated, but that doesn’t diminish their significance to us. Adding the NH crew to our rich mix of Chicago friends and to the others in more remote locations whom we see even less frequently than those in NH, it makes for a dense web of support. And what better way is there to honor Lorraine, the ultimate friend maker today.
