Last [wo]Man Standing

 It's been well over a month since I last wrote. For the next day, I'd had a post all queued up and mostly edited to tackle the next chapter of my thoughts on grieving friendships when I got a one two punch I wasn't quite prepared for. 

In my last post, I shared an essay I wrote last summer exploring what it meant to grieve a friendship and its lack of finality. My intent was to followup with an examination of what that means when confronted with the finality of death. What happens when the door to closure is permanently closed before you can reach out and try to build a bridge to, if not reconciliation, acceptance. 

Perhaps you were wondering why I was choosing to post an essay that was nearly a year old, or perhaps you had already inferred that I was posting because there was more to the story. Either way, the truth of the matter is, that door permanently closed. That lack of closure joined with the loss of the last of my most significant childhood friends (leaving me the last man standing before I even reached 40 years old) sent me into a tailspin. "Probing the depths of loss I have experienced", losses in a relatively short amount of time. In my best friend's words "...being the last friend standing...that's a lot. You're very young to be staring at your own mortality through the lens of losing several people". I was absolutely unprepared for what the universe had in store for me yet.

The evening before the funeral, still numb from trying to process what it means to be the last one remaining, I received this text...

Distraught.

I have no eloquent words to sum up the past month. If we're being honest, I'm not sure I could piece together a timeline that makes any sense beyond April 14. My brain has been in a fog. Sleep-walking through an entire 6 week period I have only vague recollections to show for it. I haven't begun to process the regrets, the joys, the accomplishments, the setbacks that I had hoped to have neatly filed away by now during this rapid descent to my fortieth birthday this summer. Everything has taken a backseat to surviving in the wake of unimaginable grief. 

Like many children of the 70s and 80s, especially blue collar children with working parents, my grandmothers practically raised me. Suffice it to say my grandmothers were the driving female forces in my life. Their personalities account for the bulk of who I am today. Unsurprisingly, faced with the loss of the stalwart presence of the bastion of my childhood I've been left reeling. 

My Nana died 12 days after that text. Ever delusional, I thought we had more time.