Friendships Can Help Ease Losses In Life

The month before my niece Laura was born, I practiced being an aunt. I was 9 years old and I’d place an imaginary baby in the basket of my bike and take her along to Audubon Park. Laura was born July 29, 1964, the firstborn of my 15 nieces and nephews. I adore them all, especially because I could not have children of my own. But Laura holds a special place in my heart because she was the first and because she followed in my footsteps. She is a journalist, living and writing in Staten Island, N.Y.

Laura had her first child, Matthew, two years ago. I met him when he was 3 months old. Matthew, Laura and my sister Lucia flew across country in the bitter February cold to attend my father’s funeral. Matthew was a baby just learning to laugh, and we passed him around those funeral days like a sacred, but whimsical, object.

Laura and Matthew stayed at our house then, and have stayed twice since, and these visits have allowed me to glimpse a baby’s life. The first time Matthew visited I learned that his dirty diapers smelled of buttered popcorn, another advantage to nursing.

During his second visit, he crawled and climbed on furniture - Laura called it cruising - and kissed his reflection in my bathroom mirror. He spent 10 days with us last summer, an almost 2-year-old, discovering words. When he met his 6-foot-4 cousin, he threw his arms up in the sky and exclaimed: “Huge Man!”

That early summer morning when I dropped Matthew, Laura and my beloved sister Lucia off at the airport, my heart hurt in the way it does when it’s lodged in your throat. You clear your throat, hoping it will help. It doesn’t.

As I waved goodbye to them, I did some calculating. They all live in the East. I live in Spokane. I will see them only once a year for the rest of my life. This is not enough.

The Italian word for miss is “mancare.” Translated it means “to lack.” I felt the lack of them acutely and drove away wondering about our culture where families live thousands of miles apart and see one another once a year.

We are piling up years of losses, years of holidays and regular days not spent together. Then I thought of my father who died two years ago, a brother-in-law dead now four years, my dear friend Kit, drowned six years ago. The losses of my life seemed piled in an impossible way, like the layers of basalt on the side of the road as I drove away from the airport.

I pulled myself together because I had an appointment that morning with the Sewing Ladies. The women are in their 70s and 80s and they meet once a week in the basement of the chancery of the Catholic Diocese of Spokane. They work on quilts and blankets which they give to those in need of warmth. They sew, they chat, they eat lunch, they say the Rosary and go to Mass together.

Our hour-long conversation was not a deep one; they were telling me how the newspaper could better reflect their lives. Yet I sensed an accretion of loss in that room as palpable as fingers on fabric.

Several were widows; some had lost children. They showed me pictures on the walls of other Sewing Ladies, now deceased. I wanted to ask them how they stood it. My losses felt overwhelming, and yet, at 42, I still have so many people alive in my life - my husband, my mother, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, my good friends.

I thought of my 90-year-old mother-in-law showing me a treasured scrapbook, filled with photographs of friends. “Of course, they are all dead now,” she said. I thought of the 84-year-old man I interviewed who grew teary talking about his long-dead parents. He said: “I don’t know how old you are when you stop missing your parents, but it’s not 84.”

I wondered why more older people don’t simply withdraw from the world, bitter and depressed. Then I realized that the Sewing Ladies were on to something. By showing up one morning a week, by taking out scissors and thread, by sharing lunch and prayer and friendship, they are filling up some of the “mancare.” They are patching together closeness, through friendship and prayer, but it’s not the same. It doesn’t replace the lost husbands, lost children, lost parents, lost days with loved ones. Nothing can. Still, they try.

I stepped out of the basement where the Sewing Ladies sew and into the daylight and looked up. In a voice that sounded like Matthew’s, I thought: “Huge Sun!” Then I walked to work, my heart back in its proper place.

, DataTimes MEMO: Rebecca Nappi is interactive editor at The Spokesman-Review.