Wrenched

 These past few weeks have been terribly difficult. Yes, I have deadlines looming  but that hasn't really been why things have been so difficult. I wasn't at liberty at write openly before, but nothing is stopping me now.

I know that I'm not in elementary school anymore when one keeps a careful tally of who is your first best friend and who is your third best friend.  But  six months ago when I learned that my friend Shawna was very ill, I broke down sobbing. My husband commented that he thought that she might be my best friend. 

Shawna and I met when we were nine or ten. Her older brother was having a bar mitzvah and my father was invited back to Halifax to officiate. The rest of the family was invited along. I met Shawna  and her younger sister Amy at an elegant tea held in a beautiful home. We were  girls  the same age and we hung out together through all of the festivities. Both of us remembered the menus from the events of that weekend decades later. (The Friday night dinner included baked salmon fillets served with lemon wedges encased in muslin for seed free juice for our salmon, heavenly twice baked potatoes with the perfectly mashed potatoes mixed with lots of sour cream were piped back into their shells and then re-baked to crispness with a sprinkling of paprika and parsley and  beautiful lightly cooked fresh peas on the side).

Uncle Frank got married about a year later and we were reunited. (Sweetbreads were served as the first course). I remember sitting next to Shawna during the wedding dinner and laughing together. We exchanged some letters for a while but we were both little girls who wrote boring letters and eventually the correspondence dwindled away. My parents were in touch with Shawna's parents over the years but we had no contact.

The Rosh Ha Shanah right after 9/11 the whole world felt a bit broken. In New York we felt especially battered  and bruised. I walked into services on the first morning of Rosh HaShanah and two women, one older, the other just about my age, were sitting my my family's seats. I greeted them and said that they were welcome to sit there until the rest of my family arrived. The older woman regally replied that they would sit where they were until my family arrived. I sat next to the younger woman.

During the reading of the haftarah the younger woman mentioned that the man chanting sounded remarkably like the man who chanted haftarot at her home synagogue. I asked her where that might be. My seatmate replied, "Canada." I asked where in Canada and my seatmate replied, "OH, in Nova Scotia.". Again I asked where. My seatmate responded "In Halifax." I turned to my seatmate and demanded, " WHO ARE YOU???".

As the name Shawna was halfway out of my seatmate's lips we recognized one another...and in the middle of Rosh HaShanah services we both screamed and then ran out of services so we could talk.

I no longer remember if there were tears. But there was a rush of talking. Since then, and more and more often as the years have gone by, our friendship had been rekindled and deepened. I can't count the number of meals that we have shared together, Rosh haShanah dinners, Passover Sedarim at my house and gorgeous Thanksgiving dinners at Shawna's. I am not a bad cook but Shawna is a truly elegant cook. I set a nice but funky table. Shawna's tables are carefully composed for the event. Each of those many Holiday and Shabbat meals were a kind of Brigadoon of lost Halifax Jewish life of the 1950's.

I am not in touch with very many people from my childhood. Shawna is one of the few where the connection isn't just between the two of us but is also about my parents' relationship with her parents and grandparents and the entirety of the Halifax  Jewish community of the 1950's. 

The two of us had moments over the years of deep, deep closeness but Shawna also needed time for our relationship to go quiet. Shawna was one of the most private people I know. Some of those quiet times were periods of illness. I knew enough to not pry.

Over the past few weeks we have been getting calls not from Shawna but from her dear husband Charley.  There were calls when much of the call was silent, both we and Charley just crying together.

Charley called us last Wednesday evening to let us know that Shawna had died. I sobbed and sobbed. Since then, all of us who love Shawna have been gathering and comforting one another as best we can.  Our circles of love have shifted to include people because they were important to Shawna. I feel the need to be in touch with Shawna's mother, her sister, her mother in law, her brothers in law because it keeps a bit of Shawna's presence alive.

I realize that while I have been writing about how much I loved Shawna and how terrible I feel that she is no longer alive. I haven't written about how crazy smart she was, ( She passed her medical boards just BEFORE she had a giant brain tumor removed). Or how Shawna was  the best deployer of the raised eyebrow, or the most generous friend. I haven't written about how she took on my kids as if they were her niece and nephews. I haven't written about how she took care of us when my in laws died making mountains of tea sandwiches to comfort us when we returned from their funerals.  I hadn't known that a watercress sandwich could  be so healing.

Perhaps it is the fact that I am over sixty. It is also because we have just lived through COVID. I have experienced several losses of dear friends over the past few years. This loss though just feels the hardest.