Home Again

I'm home from visiting my former roommate. The trip was hard, as I expected it would be. It was just hard to see her hurting so much, and I still can't wrap my mind around the fact that she had a baby and now she doesn't. I also found out that there is a lot of negative stuff going on in her life that I wasn't aware of (that no one was aware of, actually, even friends that live in the same city as her and see her relatively often). I'm not going to write about it here because, again, it's not my story to tell. That, and I have already written quite a lot about this situation in my personal journal and I just don't have the energy to rehash it here. I'm sorry. The short story is that she has a lot of problems to solve and an uphill journey ahead of her, a journey she was facing even before the death of her son. I'm hopeful for her, though. I hope that this is rock bottom for her and things can only get better from here.
I learned a couple of lessons from all of this. The first is that I need to reach out to her more. I think we all learned that, actually: me, her, other friends that were visiting. None of us are great at keeping in touch on the phone, and we realized that life is too short to neglect friendships you care about. It's hard to find time to talk to one another outside of quick messages on Facebook, but I feel inspired to at least try to make time in my life to make at least a couple of real phone calls to friends every week.
The other lesson that was reiterated to me is that, as a whole, people are good. On the morning the baby died, my friend and her husband were completely alone. Both of their families live out of town, and my friend called a couple of local friends but it was a Tuesday morning so everyone was at work and no one could come over right away. One of the police officers who responded to the 911 call asked if they had anyone he could call to be with them, and they said no. So the policeman called his own pastor. The pastor showed up immediately and stayed with my friend and her husband that entire day. He also recruited members of his church to bring food as my friend's family members and friends slowly started to arrive to grieve. Since then the pastor has called every couple of days to see how they are doing and see if they need any help. The cynical part of me thinks, "Well, that's one way to recruit church members." But mostly I don't want to be cynical about this. I think this pastor and the members of his church are genuinely good people. It made me realize what Penn and I are missing by not having a church family. There are many, many things that I don't like about religion, but I do miss feeling that sense of community that I saw in this congregation reaching out to my friend. In addition to the church community, my friend's neighbors reached out in an amazing way. That first morning my friend was in shock, so she was prescribed valium and all sorts of anti-anxiety medication and sleep meds and who knows what else, just to help her be zoned out enough to somehow get through the initial days of shock and grief. The pastor who had come over to help went to pick up the prescriptions at the drug store. When he came back he said that the woman filling the prescriptions was my friend's next door neighbor. She had seen the address on the prescription and, remembering the ambulance outside her house that morning, she put two and two together and realized something bad had happened to her neighbor. She asked the pastor what had happened and he told her that they had lost their baby. So she got online that night and posted a message on the neighborhood message board asking if anyone wanted to help by delivering food. It has been almost two weeks now, and every night a different neighbor shows up with a meal. When I left they still had food scheduled to be delivered for at least another week. I don't know if that's a testament to the neighborhood or the power of the internet (I think the internet, really, since without the internet I doubt that many neighbors would have known to pitch in), but either way it shows how good most people are.
The other bright side to the whole awful situation is that I got to spend three days with my friend. And although she was sad, she was also herself, and we spent a lot of time reminiscing about our life before boyfriends and husbands and children and careers. It was good for both of us. I just hope that next time I see her it's for a happier occasion, and I hope that she can pull through all of this and end up a stronger person. Hoping and praying is all I can really do at this point.