Losing a friend

I’ve dealt with death many times in my life.  I’ve written post about it before.  From a very young age I’ve had close friends and family members pass and I guess I’ve been able to somehow deal with it and move on.  Till now.

Last year my husband’s best friend passed away. Since then I haven’t been able to shake the loss.  From the moment I met my husband she’d been in his life.  She was beautiful.  And she welcomed me into her and her now widowed husband’s life with love and open arms.  For the past 6 years we celebrated milestones, comforted and cheered each other on.  And though life often got busy like life gets, we somehow made time to have dinners, lunches and even a sleep overs.

My husband doesn’t have many friends but she was a constant in his life and now she’s gone.  Because I knew how much of a presence she was in his life she became just as big in mine such that I considered her my friend too.  She was kind, softly spoken and super generous.  Just before she passed, she insisted we borrow her son’s bassinet because we hadn’t yet got a crib.  She sent me a text telling me not to worry when I had concerns about my pregnancy.  She gave me advice about motherhood.  The last image I have of her is us sitting in my room while she was breastfeeding her son and just confiding in each other.

We visited her husband last weekend.  Her son is a replica of her.  I could feel her presence all over the house: in the pictures on the walls, in her son’s room, in the kitchen, in the living room amongst his toys.  It’s almost as if she was there, except that she wasn’t.

In typical fashion she’d put together a gift for our kid. Classic Tasha.

Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her, her husband her beautiful son (who is my husband’s godson). Every.single.day. And I pray for them everytime I say my prayers.

Her death has left me, almost crippled.  Crippled, with fear.  She was barely 30, was just a few years into marriage, had just bought a house and had a 1-year-old son and her life ended so abruptly.   What if that happens to me?  What will happen to my kid?

They say when people die it’s because it was God’s will or it was their time.  I don’t know if I fully embrace that idea.  I’m still trying to figure out what her death is supposed to teach me because honestly it just doesn’t make sense.  I wasn’t able to attend her burial, but the day she was laid to rest, the sun came out and call me weird but I feel like that it represented her, like it was her going up to heaven.

In Jay-Z’s edition of Oprah’s MasterClass he talked about his nephew passing away and how he couldn’t understand it.  And like he said, maybe somethings are just left unexplained.

(Na)tasha, we love you and we miss you so much. This song is for you.