I Know a Woman

I know a woman in her early sixties who prefers to be barefoot on grass, has a mind that wanders happily into the far reaches of the universe and, although I have no actual evidence of this, probably howls at the moon.

She is an artist.

Her work is not pretty little paintings meant to match somebody's sofa. She experiments. Studies. Takes risks. Sometimes steps so far outside the lines that I wonder where the hell she's going. Then I watch her create something I never would have thought to create.

She reads a lot. She can take an idea about consciousness, energy, the universe, or the power of the mind and toss it into one of our conversations like it's perfectly normal. I've learned to listen to her more far-out ideas. More than once I've gotten off the phone, started researching, and found myself halfway down some rabbit hole, thinking, "Wow. Maybe she's onto something”

Deidra may be my closest friend.

I have watched this woman do something over the last several years that I don't think we talk about enough.

She has learned how to be herself and be with herself.

It didn't happen because Dei went to a workshop or read the right book or finally learned to "love herself." God, I wish becoming ourselves were that simple.

It happened because life blew apart.

The man she had spent her adult life with died suddenly.

He was someone I loved too.

Their relationship was complicated. There was love there. There was also pain. I knew enough about his life to understand some of what molded him. Understanding gave me compassion for him, especially in his later years when he and I found our way back to each other as brother and sister.

Other parts of their relationship that belong to the two people who lived it and the family who lived around it. So I'll leave them there. 

What I can tell you is that Dei loved him immensely and grieved him terribly.

And while she was grieving, life handed her the keys and said, Drive.

Sometimes literally.

Driving scared her. Traffic scared her. Going places alone scared her. So did bills, paperwork, budgeting, household decisions, and all the other boring grown-up things that don't sound particularly courageous until you've spent most of your adult life with someone else handling them.

Suddenly she had to learn.

I can't imagine how frightening some of those first years were for her. I was close enough to see the fear and second-guessing. I also saw how hard she could be on herself when she didn't get something right. 

Her transformation took a little time, and it wasn’t always easy

If she was lucky, she learned one difficult thing at a time.  If she wasn’t, a bucket of challenges rained down on her.

When she didn't know something, she researched it. She asked questions. She figured out where to find the information she needed. She made mistakes and learned from them. She slowly became better at figuring out what was hers to take on and what wasn’t.

And the questions began to change.

Instead of "Can I do this?" it became "How do I do this?"

There's a hell of a difference between those two questions.

I had the privilege of watching it happen.

There have been so many moments over these last few years when I've thought, Holy shit. Look at her.

She's driving herself somewhere that used to scare her. She's handled something complicated. She's made a decision she once would have been terrified to make.

Her decision.

Dei also began looking back at her life with different eyes.

That's one of the complicated things about grief. You can love and miss someone terribly while slowly coming to understand parts of your life together that were difficult to see while you were standing in the middle of them. Somehow she made room for both.

And while all of this was happening, something else was happening too.

Our friendship deepened to the level of the soul.

We had started building that friendship before he died. We painted together. Talked. Laughed. Even took a few short adventures. But over the years since, our friendship has become one of those relationships where very little is off-limits, and trust runs deep.

We've talked about grief and relationships, our families, things we've screwed up, things we're trying to understand, and the people we're still becoming.

And the universe.

My goodness, we've talked about the universe.

She has brought some pretty far-out ideas into our conversations over the years. Mind over matter. Energy. Consciousness. Things I studied years ago, but life and responsibilities pushed aside.

Deidra sparked my curiosity again.

I started reading and exploring some of it myself. Some ideas I kept. Some I didn't. But she expanded my thinking by inviting me back into places I find fascinating.

I hope I've done some of that for her too. I know I've helped her with lifing.

Yes, lifing. It's a word now.

There were times she needed somebody to remind her that she could figure something out. Sometimes she needed to talk a decision to death. Sometimes I helped her separate what she was responsible for from the things she was carrying that belonged to somebody else.

But I don't want to tell this story as though I was the wise friend helping her find her way.

That's BS.

We've grown each other.

She encourages my writing. She believes in what I'm creating and reminds me of it when I forget. And now that I've fallen in love with painting, guess who's coaching whom?

Deidra is.

I ask her questions. She gives me ideas. She sees things I don't see yet because she has spent years developing an eye that I'm only beginning to develop.

We also make each other laugh.

We occasionally make good, healthy fun of our adult children (please don’t tell them). We create possible responses to them that responsible mothers should probably never send and then giggle about them instead. We send each other ridiculous memes.

She's funnier than hell.

She's also sensitive as hell.

That part of her hasn't disappeared as she's become stronger. I'm glad it hasn't.

Dei feels deeply. She needs solitude. She loves books and music and her dogs and her family. She notices things. She creates magic. She gets scared. She questions herself. Then she remembers the magnificent human being she is.

And then, more often than not, she does the thing anyway.

Which brings me to the house. This year she decided she wanted to buy one.

Her own home.

For a while, it seemed impossible. There were finances to figure out and things she didn't understand. There were plenty of reasons to be afraid of making such a huge decision.

A few years ago, I think the impossibility might have stopped her.

This time she did what I've watched her learn to do. She figured out the next step. Then she took it.

She researched what she didn't know. She asked questions. She took the initiative and worked her way through it.

And Diedra bought the dang house! 

I can't adequately explain how happy that makes me.

Owning this home means security to her. It puts her closer to her daughter and family. And for a woman whose creativity has been stretching farther and farther outside the lines, she's about to have a whole house where she gets to decide what the lines are.

I can't wait to see what she does with it. I expect she'll surprise me. She usually does.

Of course, there's one significant flaw in this whole wonderful plan.

She's moving away from me. I hate that part.

I'm going to miss having her closer.  Dei is a safe place for me.

But I'm also incredibly excited for her. Because I know what it took to get here.

I've seen her frightened and grieving, unsure how she was going to handle everything that had suddenly landed in her lap. And I've had a front-row seat while she figured it out.

She didn't become somebody else.

More and more, she became herself.

And through all of that, my friend's growth became tangled up with mine. We learned from each other. Challenged each other. Encouraged each other. Laughed at each other and ourselves.

I used to help her quite a bit with lifing. She doesn’t need me for that anymore.

I love that.

Dei just arrived in another state, to the home she once thought might be impossible. She took her paintings, books, dogs, music, sensitivity, strange ideas about the universe, and that wonderfully creative mind with her. Now, she'll start making the place hers.

And when I go visit, I fully expect to find something on a wall that makes me say, "Dei, what the heck is that?"

She'll explain it.

I'll probably end up loving it.

And later, if the moon is full, maybe we'll both go outside barefoot and howl.

Love is ALL there is,

Diana