A Love Song for Lynn and Dar
Author’s Note: I wrote this piece in 2020 as a celebration for my two best friends as we turned 50.
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The Easy Years
Thirty passed by without so much as a backwards glance. Forty came along and merely inclined her head my way with a formal nod as though we were acquaintances who had met at Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So’s cocktail party a few years ago.
A Cruel Mistress Indeed
But Fifty. Fifty ground to a screeching halt in front of me and God and everybody and made quite a scene. She disentangled herself from her cherry-red cliché of a convertible, stormed up to me, and cruelly demanded my attention.
Wild, long locks of curly gray hair flying behind her, dark cloak wrapped around her wraithlike frame, she arched a dark, perfectly drawn eyebrow, crooked a skinny finger at me, and made me do her bidding. I had no say-so in the matter.
My will seemed no longer my own. Even my own body betrayed me, introducing new aches and pains each morning, disrupting my sleep, and replacing golden-toned and firm skin with matronly bumps and bulges. Matronly. She thought that was the worst insult she could hurl at my middle-aged body that had gone to battle with fatigue and illness, anxiety and childbirth.
But what did she know of such things? She had never dirtied her hands in the messy business of living and dying.
The humiliation Fifty wreaked in the beginning was not enough for her though. Not by a long shot. Her crowning achievement was yet to come.
The Ultimate Insult
Fifty’s greatest insult took root in the doubts and insecurities she planted under cover of the night, the ones that crept into my psyche like poisonous serpentine vines, entwining themselves with the firmly established stalks of self-confidence that I had so tenderly nurtured and cultivated over the last twenty years or so, until at last they overtook them.
My poise receded so slowly I hardly even noticed until one day I barely recognized the tremulously fragile woman who looked back at me in the mirror, the one who had previously commanded a party, a class full of students, a household, and who now second guessed everything — clothing, hair, make-up, simple decisions.
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Each choice left me susceptible to a thousand imagined outcomes that could result in my embarrassment or reveal my ineptitude. The carefully constructed façade of control and poise quietly disintegrated, exposing me to a thousand vulnerabilities I dreaded. Was I now talked about when I left a room? Was it noticeable to everyone that I was losing my edge?
Every day I questioned myself. I doubted and feared my footing on stairs and curbs. I thought of my hips as brittle markers of my mortality, ready to snap with one misstep, whereas just a few years before they sashayed of their own volition, enticing and sensual. And as I remarked upon the waning beauty of my face, I felt more and more inconsequential.
In the end, though, Fifty wasn’t a completely heartless mistress.
After she had taken up residence in the walls of my mind, I went to the sea for celebration and solace. When I stood on the shore and looked out at the vast expanse of turbulent blue-green waters, I drew the waves of nostalgia up and around me and covered my body with an inky quilt of memories.
This, this was what she left me, a gift: remembrance.
When everything else started to ebb and slip away, I turned to golden times to anchor me.
A memory of a beach trip long ago with my parents, both in the prime of their lives, came unbidden to my mind. I recalled them in their strength — my mother’s bronzed skin shining as she walked hand in hand with me on the shore, collecting shells. She was so light and free before the illnesses and deaths of others drew so much of the light from her.
And my dad. Strong and energetic. Eager to be out on the sea, fishing, living. A youthfulness that nearly makes me weep now when I think of his battered body at the end. But in that moment, they were golden icons of youth and health, and I was tiny and happy. Safe.
A recollection of my body giving life came next. Oh how the fear and excitement consumed me. Hours of worry and pain and joy that only intensified after she was born.
I recalled a moment in time when only my baby and I existed, both our lives hanging in the balance, completely connected and then physically separated, but ultimately sharing a bond that can never be severed. And since that moment, I have felt whole and complete, my scars and abused body worth every moment of pain I endured.
I let my gaze linger on the horizon a bit longer, savoring the light and comfort the dual-natured goddess had left for me. I realized in that moment that I had made my peace with her, for she hadn’t just taken from me.
She had given me everything I had, including a gift of a new day to open and savor. Without her, I would be nothing and have nothing.
I silently thanked her before I turned and walked away with a newfound lightness of step to my best friends, my sisters in spirit, who awaited me on the beach.
Dar (left), me, and Lynn, 2021.
