Dear Friend

Dearest Joanne,

I know you will never read this, though I wish desperately that you could. There’s so much I want to tell you about Tess, and putting it in this form makes me feel closer to you than any of the intentional thoughts I’ve directed toward you, or the idea of you. I need to be able to hold these words in a tangible form, and putting pen to paper makes sense after all the letters we shared over the years. Plus, maybe one day this will be something Tess rediscovers in the basement, a reminder of both of us and how we came to be here.

I wish you could see her, Jo. Maybe you can. She’s so tall, like she turned into a baby giraffe this summer. I had to buy her all new clothes for school, and I cried in the dressing room at the mall looking at your big girl in the mirror, literally a reflection of the You I met at summer camp all those years ago. You were always the pretty, popular one, with perfectly permed hair and a smile that drew the boys like gnats. I have still never quite figured out why you chose me as your sidekick: maybe you knew I would never compete for your glory with my nerdy tortoiseshell glasses and bowl cut. 

My mom always claimed that the jeans I so desperately wanted wouldn’t fit me because I didn’t have any hips (Who has hips when they’re 10?), so I never had anything close to the latest fashions and probably shouldn’t be entrusted with dressing the next generation. But I know you would have wanted your daughter to fit in, so I let her direct the expedition. Of course I didn’t let her get anything indecent or anything with words across the butt – thank goodness her new school has a dress code that forbids logos or showing too much skin. You’d be surprised that some of our childhood fashions are starting to come back around – not the acid-washed jeans, but leg warmers and neon sneakers seem to be experiencing a revival. In the natural order of things, you would have returned from this back-to-school shopping trip and texted me to joke nostalgically about how we collected Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts and paired them with multiple colors of expertly slouched socks: purple and teal for me, hot pink and fluorescent yellow for you. 

Anyway, Tess has inherited your good looks and aspects of your magnetic personality, but she doesn’t like to draw attention to herself the way you did. Like most kids her age, she just wants to blend in and look like everyone else, and I think her new wardrobe will be acceptable camouflage. She has spent all summer in your old Agnes Scott sweatshirt, hood pulled up most of the time as protection against chilly Bay Area mornings and the world in general. Her therapist says this is normal, especially after enduring unimaginable loss and moving to a new place and situation only a few months ago. I only hope she won’t blend in so much that she gets lost, because my fondest wish is that she will meet her You, the best friend forever who has the other half of the interlocking heart necklace from Claire’s, the one whose letters would fill several shoeboxes in the attic.

I mean that metaphorically, of course, because kids these days don’t write letters. I’m not sure Tess would even know how to address an envelope, unless you taught her. It’s all texting and messaging, she doesn’t even use email except for announcements from school. I’m not a total Luddite, but I seriously doubt my ability to keep her safe in an ever-changing digital landscape. I know you weren’t planning to let her have a phone or get on social media until she started middle school, so I have retained that policy, which gives me one more year to figure out how the hell we will navigate that. Of all the things that have kept me awake at 3 a.m. over the years (Will I ever kiss a boy? Will we ever get pregnant? Will my best friend’s cancer treatments work?) anticipating caring for a teenager is the one that causes my heart to race the most. They say that worrying is like praying for what you don’t want, and I’ve been in California long enough to wonder if I “manifested” all of this, because so much of what I haven’t wanted has come true.

Of course, you were the first to know, in a long letter ecstatically scribbled the next day, that I did eventually kiss a boy. I remember how happy you were for me, even though by then your first high school boyfriend was old news and you were on the homecoming court at your school. You were my cheerleader (no pun intended) through the highs and lows of our first crushes and loves; you were my maid of honor when I married Jeff; you were on the other end of the phone after every failed fertility treatment.

When the pain was too much, we always returned to pen and paper. It’s how you told me about your diagnosis – frankly, how you downplayed its seriousness, telling me not to worry, when of course I would. I always appreciated that you told me you were pregnant in a letter, knowing how many times I’d been side-swiped by well-meaning friends who thought it was a gift to tell me in person, when it really meant I had to swallow my tears and feign happiness for an hour or so before breaking down in the car. I was never jealous of you in the way I was with other people, partly because it was all a big surprise for you and not something you had casually assumed you were entitled to, and because I knew you needed my support with your parents both gone and your brother out of the picture. Both of us were always too realistic to think you were stepping into your own version of Gilmore Girls. We knew it would be both the hardest and the best thing that had ever happened to you, and I promised to be by your side as best I could from across the country.

My biggest fear then was that you would be one of those friends who stepped into motherhood and left me behind, gradually making new friends at playgrounds and PTA meetings and getting absorbed into a world that didn’t include me. I don’t think I ever voiced this to you, but you were my best friend, so you already knew, and you needed me as your chosen family, though I don’t think either of us ever would have believed what that would come to mean. When I flew in to be your Lamaze coach and you made me promise by your hospital bed to take care of Tess if anything ever happened to you, we thought it was just hypothetical. But a decade later, beside another hospital bed, you asked me to reaffirm what you had by then written into your will, and this time it was all too real.

So here we are. You have stepped into another world after all, leaving your bereaved daughter and best friend. (And poor Jeff, who is trying his best to help us all stay afloat.) If Tess wasn’t here, I know I would have drowned in grief by now, but there are things like school registration and tracking down her vaccination records that have forced me to get out of bed in the morning. I managed to get her to the regular doctor and the eye doctor and the dentist. I mean, if your heart has been broken into a million pieces, your teeth may as well be clean, right? We take the wins where we can.

Jeff has been keeping us fed, and he has been trying different oatmeal cookie recipes, hoping to come across one that tastes as good as the ones you always made. He hasn’t found it yet, but the steady stream of sugar has soothed our weary souls. I’ve mostly finished sorting through your boxes of belongings – I claimed a couple of your hand-knit sweaters and saved some of your clothes as a time capsule for Tess for someday when they fit her, which may be sooner rather than later the way she’s growing. I’m organizing our letters chronologically so I can scan them and put them together in a scrapbook. It’s slow work, and I never know whether it will make me laugh or break down sobbing, but I’m trying not to procrastinate, now that I know exactly how precious time is.

Much of what we do each day seems comically frivolous given what we’ve all been through this year. I made a chore chart because the therapist said we all need to find some sliver of normalcy in a world that is all upside down. Tess’s jobs are unloading the dishwasher, taking out the trash, and making her bed every day. My job is pretending I care whether any of these things get done.

You’ll be happy to know that we’ve been listening to the Anne books in the car. Tess has asked me a bunch of questions about life in the 1800s. Google has been able to answer where they went to the bathroom and what a “russet” is (an apple). Others are closer to home and harder to answer, like whether Anne’s parents had hospice care and whether the Cuthberts had a court date to legally adopt her. Anne was always my patron saint, but now I’m Marilla. Sigh.

I’ll be honest, Jo. I am so fucking angry some days. I’m mad that Jeff and I already lost so much of what we had hoped for in life; mad that now I’ve also lost my best friend; mad that being a parent has come at such a cost. I try not to let my anger affect Tess, because I know she has her own fair share of feelings and she’s still figuring out how to express them, but I bought a set of Nerf guns. Someone in my grief group recommended it, said it’s a healthier outlet than punching walls or developing a drinking habit. We agreed as a group (a family? not yet) that whenever we need to Nerf we can step away to the backyard, no questions asked.

I don’t know if dead people worry. I hope not, but isn’t that why their ghosts haunt people? You do haunt us, Jo, but not in spooky ways. I think of you hundreds of times every day, mostly wondering if I’m doing what you would have wanted. Sometimes I really think I’m screwing that up, but other times I am able to trust that thirty years of friendship gave me pretty good insights into how you would approach things. I guess I just wanted to tell you that Tess is okay, wanted to tell myself that she’s okay, wanted to write it down to convince us both. These past few months have been excruciating, but we are starting to come out the other side, we are starting to see some glimmers of light. Your daughter has your kindness, your resilience, your quick wit. I have always loved her – your child, my namesake – but I love her with new depth every day. You live on in both of us in so many ways.

We miss you more than you can know. 

Love,

Teresa