We last saw each other when we were quite young. She showed me photos of herself frozen in time in my childhood cottage. It was definitely her, but I had no memory of it. But there’s something about family ties that makes it not matter. For some reason my mother had rebelled against her upbringing, raged against her own family machine that made her turn her back on blood relatives and pay more attention to her friends and like-minded folk who crossed her path once she left the area she grew up in. She basically slammed the door on her youth.
When we were young there’s photographic proof that we spent time together — always in my house not hers, but all that lost time made me a bit sad. She is the only nursing connection I can make in our clan to my daughter being a nurse her whole working career.
And here we were, finally, cousins united after all this time in her home in the north of England. We drank gin and tonic together and poured over old albums until very late at night. I wished I could stay longer and learn more of her life over all these decades long gone, but the reconnection had been made and it felt sound. I invited her and her lovely husband to come and stay in Cali, worlds away from their cute English village, and I just think they might.
I have your Mum’s painting, she tells me. It was a very old oil painting, rather dark. I think it was painted from the pub where she lived and grew up. She had given it to my cousin Caroline’s mother Joan in the 1950s. Despite my mother’s scorn of her heritage, the cousins were obviously very good friends throughout their lives. And there the plan was created a few years back, that I would go and visit my cousin and claim my Mum’s old painting, bring her home, as it were. The howler was that, years later, when we finally made the visit happen, the picture didn’t fit in my suitcase and that made us both laugh out loud. All that way to collect a special family piece and I hadn’t even thought to ask for measurements.
But maybe that wasn’t even the underlying point of the visit. I took a photo of it, nicely unwrapped so it could be wrapped again and thought of how my mother would smile just a bit at the rather lovely, a bit fatalistic edge to our meeting. She promised to send it on to me, we promised to stay in touch. I was so happy I made the trip. I learned things about my Mum I hadn’t known, took photos of the two cousins together that I hadn’t recognized, never seen, revisited once more with Mum’s sculpture of Penelope she had crafted for her cousin’s wedding many moons ago and I felt comforted by all the encounters — both real and perceived.
Talking of connections lost and reconnected, years ago, I had painfully lost touch with an old school friend of mine. It had felt at the time that I had made numerous efforts to connect, remind her of our long friendship, try and bridge the gap of what felt at the time as a friendship blackout. I could never understand it; we had last seen each other when our kids were young. We hadn’t fallen out, had we? We had been friends for decades. I couldn’t recall any reason why the cards and letters stopped from her to me, though I maintained a rather concerted effort for my part, until I could no more. I really grieved our lost connection for a long time.
I found her again briefly when it was time for our class reunion several years later. Despite her cold treatment of me, I felt as if here was a chance once more to connect. I was sure there had to be good reasons for her cutting me out of her life so abruptly. We emailed each other a couple of times, I told her about my sister Rosie and my own adventures in cancer, and she didn’t reply back. The wound was reopened. She had known my entire family, loved us I thought. Here was proof yet again that she cared not at all. And so, I made my peace with the past, I let her go again and I was much more accepting of it this time around.
And then I received a message recently on Instagram. She’s back. She was wondering if I was home in Cali because she was in the state. Like what? I told my friend who was with me at the time how confusing this all was and why. I felt the need to tell this old blast from the past how much she had hurt me and ask her why. We had some honest dialogue for a bit via email and then she was gone again. Friends since 9 years old and here we are. The only way I can get my head around it is to accept that humans have different levels of connection, and though I was important once, I wasn’t that important. She may pop up again down the road and we shall see how I feel about that if it happens.
One thing I’ve noticed about aging is the ability to care less pretty much about most everything. At this point in your life, you have experienced loss in many ways, and you are not immune to it, per se, but you are a little numbed. Time is short and you have little of it left to spend on less than connections and people who disappoint. You just don’t care that much anymore to go seeking. And there it is. With connections found and lost, it is all part of life’s great balancing act and I’m OK with that these days.
Now back to how I’m going to get Mum’s picture back from my sister’s house, where it’s now arrived, to my house in California. Better measure the suitcase.
