Bad Messenger

What is it about being “the messenger” that is so delicious to a person? What human need is this filling? 

We all have that friend, and I use the word “friend” cautiously, who loves to be The First to tell you something absolutely awful. The lack of self-awareness is sometimes so grievous that is it more so the story than the story delivered.

Yesterday, something wonderful, in the greater scheme of the world, happened. The widower of my deceased friend got engaged. 

As pundits like to say, “two things can be true at once” and in this case, that is certainly true all by itself. His engagement is joyous news. Being that he is also a single dad who was widow(ered?) suddenly with five small children, the reality that he will no longer be alone, and his children will have a loving stepmom there for them is not just comforting, it is a correction of a grievous, unnatural wrong the world Hiroshimaed at them. The light found its way into that sudden cavern that sucked the path to the future from a family, and the ladder out seems placed there by an angel, herself.

In my heart, I know that not only is this something wonderful, it is something my beloved friend would have desperately wanted and possibly, as my magical thinking whispers, facilitated.

To a lesser but sharper degree, this engagement underscores the fact that my friend is dead. Fewer things say dead more than your widower getting remarried, and the empty seat at your table occupied by another woman. Also, she will raise your kids, be at their weddings, and celebrate every motherly milestone with them, and while the world is benevolent in allowing that for them, it SUCKS that it isn’t you. It sucks that your own parents are navigating every day without you and that there will never be a replacement daughter the way there can be a replacement wife and mother. Hey, I’m just a friend. We were just friends. Platonic. Casual. Ships that passed in the night. Ephemeral. And I feel your loss like a persistent ache and know I will have it for as long as I have a working mind. I can only imagine what it is like for them. 

Which is why, in my joy, there is bitterness. And when I got that fucking text from her, my very much alive friend, with two party emojis, telling me of an engagement of a man she does not know whose dead wife she did not know, I wish I had the words to tell her how utterly tone deaf that was. How maybe I am overreacting because I am a bundle of conflicted feelings looking for a target and, hello, she just drew a crop circle size bullseye on her head. 

With two party emojis.