The Deafening Silence

 It’s 3 a.m. and I’m wide awake. Probably the steroids the doctor put me on for my post-COVID cough. I was lying in bed and naturally, my mind went to Cindy. It’s been 56 days since I lost my best friend…but who is counting.

Grief is a funny thing; you react differently each time.

My parents passed away when I was a young adult, my dad when I was 19, and my mum when I was 26. I mourned both differently. I was much calmer when my father passed away for many reasons. For one, I had been having dreams and predicted his death. It happened almost exactly how I dreamed it. At the time I was living on the other side of the country and I had a guilty conscious because I was mad at him over stupid 19-year-old things and wasn’t speaking to him. The day before he died, I had a phone conversation with him about the boat he had bought. I just knew. He died the way a Newfoundlander wanted to go—he had a massive heart attack on the deck of his boat, his favourite ballcap on, and a beer in his hand. I was sad but not heartbroken. I also knew that he was getting COPD and wasn’t going to have a good quality of life. He was only 62.

My mother was different. She passed away from cancer when I was 26. I was lucky, the Navy sent me home on a compassionate transfer so I could take care of her for the last two months of her life. This was not a sudden death and I was very much in denial. For one, she was the healthiest cancer patient I’d ever seen up until the end. She wasn’t gaunt or looked like she was wasting away. She just quickly let go the day my siblings flew down from Canada and all her children were finally together in the hospital room. She was only 61.

I was utterly lost and Cindy came to my rescue. I had to go back to my command in Connecticut and she decided she was going to move up there with me. She sold her condo and came north.

I was a wreck though because I really hadn’t come to terms with losing mum. I remember the guilty feeling the first time I laughed over something. The pain would just overwhelm me. I felt like an orphan. But I had to work, and I was driving boats, a dangerous job if you don’t pay attention. So, I held everything in. Then one of my petty officers came to me because her mother had cancer and she was overwhelmed. In consoling her my pain came to the forefront and I started having medical issues due to the stress of that and the horrid department I was in. I still tear up when something important happens in my life and I can’t call my mother.

With Cindy it’s different. The Grief is a blanket. Nothing that interferes with my life like with mum, but just something that’s in the background…always. I don’t have the gut-wrenching sobbing I had with mum, it’s a little tear that leaks out of the corner of my eyes when I see the flamingo glasses she bought, the flamingo fabric I bought to make her a pair of Bermuda shorts when she was finished with her treatment, the shells on my dresser that we collected so many years ago, the “friends” bracelet I wear, or the puzzle I bought and hadn’t mailed yet. Putting that puzzle together with my husband was very soothing.

I can’t explain the mind-numbing quietness I feel. We communicated for 52 years via letters, phone calls, and later almost daily text messages. And now there is
deafening silence. Her last text to me was “I love you too.”

I bought this soon after she passed away. It seemed appropriate, she loved puzzles and I have a hole in my heart.