On Being Fine

Another friend dies, and I dye my hair

My son came home with an old red Chevrolet pick up truck, only a bit of work needed, he says, the rumble of it deep but not in a purposeful way. I hear him talk about fixing it up and flipping it but all I see is covering the bench seat (enough room for another person and maybe a scrappy dog) with a thin patterned Mexican blanket, 99% surely made in China and not in Mexico, and adding something of wire and rock to hang from the rearview mirror, and then sliding myself into it, putting it into gear, and finding out how fast I can drive it on the interstate before it starts to rattle, and how far I could go before it lunges, devoid of gasoline, and drifts to the shoulder where I could then sit, and after a time or a time and a half of watching the grasses whip behind the suction of vehicles zooming by in staccato, I might give myself permission to walk, plodding until I, too, am devoid of fuel.

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I should write.

This is what I think.

But I do not.

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I consider my hair, instead.

And because I am bored of the strip of purple I got for my 50th birthday (almost six years ago), and also of a decade of nonchalance, I talk my hair dresser into coloring my hair completely.

“You won’t like the upkeep,” she says.

She gets me.

“You are right,” I say, as I finger and choose an auburn brown that matches closest to the photographs I bring, the ones with my natural color, a color I haven’t grown in thirty years. My face is more pale now, too, and it sags in all the right places for a woman my age.

Still.

Later, as I look at the back of my head in the mirror and brush my fingers through the layers of brown, I can’t help but think, “This is very……pretty, actually.”

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My friends offer me advice, and share their own experiences with hair upkeep. I schedule a date for a root touch up party, and purchase a green baseball cap to cover the skunk stripe when it comes. Two weeks later, I pick up a fresh pair of eyeglasses that won’t clash with my new coloring.

I’m amazed by lack of comment from people who do not think it would be polite to even notice anything was different at all. If it were me on that other side, I’d definitely reach out to my friend for a big handful of hair and ask straight out, “What did you DO?!”

But that’s just me.

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I’m on a street side corner vacationing in Oceanside sipping iced mocha in 70-something degree sunshine that is blessedly blinding when a call buzzes my phone.

Five minutes later, my vision slowly begins to expand again to the crosswalk, the people laughing as they walk by, the towering glassy buildings. The air feels colder, my coffee is flat, and all I want to do is get on an airplane and go home.

My friend Mary died.

Another one to bury.

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Mary had been diagnosed with cancer perhaps six months prior, but she declined to battle as Sara had done, with chemo and vomiting and wigs. Instead, she chose acceptance, even while experimenting with treatments outside of conventional care. Although her markers were good, improving even, she did grow more tired.

She still played piano every Sunday, and we still met and talked and went to the museum downtown a couple of weeks prior. I wanted to show her my favorite exhibit, the one with the artist who made images from cutting small birds out of the feathers of birds.

“I’m fine,” she insisted, declining any sort of support to walk with and swaying her hips as if to make the point clear. This was the same woman who purposed to go zip lining with me last summer, and she did.

And she was fine.

And, then, quickly and quietly, she left this world.

Now, in Christ, she really is fine, fine in every way possible.

I can hear her and Sara laughing boisterously, a joyous reunion in the presence of the Lord.

I am a little jealous.

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The snowdrops have bloomed, their little antifreeze bodies bobbing their heads at winter’s last stand of hail and bluster. The violets, too, have bloomed, and today I pinched the small amount of their wee flower heads into a jar, relishing the intoxicating scent.

“It smells like soap,” my 13 year old daughter says.

“It smells like hope. It smells like spring,” I respond.

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Later, I weave on the loom with a mad flourish, throwing my shuttle and letting it fly left and right, left and right, my arm as a violinist working the bow, marking time with the vinyl record behind me playing the soundtrack from LaLa Land. The heddles clack up and down and the beater beats back and forth and my feet march upon the pedals and I am thinking of nothing, nothing at all, just moving moving moving moving.

And, then, just like the stylus scratch-hitting the end of Side B, it’s suddenly done and it takes me a moment to acknowledge it.

I stand up and pull the cloth slowly from the beams, yard over yard over yard.

I feel a slight frown. I can’t share the picture of the finished project with Mary, who knew I had begun weaving again and showed an interest in what was on the loom. I also wonder who will finish all the quilts she left behind.

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Both Sara and Mary were inviters and “askers” in my life:

• How are you doing?

• What are you working on?

• How are things with the girls?

• How can I pray for you?

• Can we get together?

On and on over the many years, questions of drawing out and drawing in, scriptures offered and cards in mail boxes and wee little surprises and insights shared and whooping laughter at my table between us all. It’s quieter now but for the squeeze on my heart and the tender whoosh that parts from my lips or the tear that slides from my eyes.

“I’m fine,” I hear them each say.

I believe them.

So I sigh, stay home and out of the red truck, bless the Lord for the utter privilege of having ever been called their friend, and tenderly begin to pick out yarn for the next weaving.

There is no pain in death, the pain is in life.
When a man dies, there is an end of life’s pain.
Death is the pain-killer, not the pain-maker.
It is not a loss to die--it is a lasting, perpetual gain.

Charles Spurgeon

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rough draft