My tribe: On holding tight and letting go

I have written many times and in many different ways about the small group of women with whom I have become close over the past six years. Meeting almost exclusively on Facebook, we laugh or cry or rage in a way we can’t with our day-to-day friends. In December, some of us rushed to the side of one of those women, who was very ill. We have since lost her, but we’ll never completely let her go.

* * *

My tribe is small.

We are a farmer, an immigrant, a journalist, a funeral-home director, a teacher, a former executive, a homeschooler.

We are, before all that, mothers and friends.

We have other tribes. Families, best friends, confidantes with shared history. Yet we hold each other in a special, guarded circle.

We are funny, and smart, and boisterous and loud, though we know when to be quiet. Like when the food arrives.

Or when our heart breaks.

We have our phones with their cameras ready at all times, but we know when to take pictures. Like before we eat.

Or before we cry.

We have secret pacts. Like: everyone has to use the washroom at every stop, even if you think you don’t have to.

Or that we’ll always always be there.

Each of us travelled hundreds or thousands of miles to gather in body, in the shadow of anticipated loss, but with the hope that we weren’t about to lose one of us.

Over and over I caught us trying to hold on to the moments, the phrases and cadences and genesis of in-jokes. But words resist corralling. We won’t remember the words.

We’ll remember the scenes.

Five of us with limbs crossed or bodies tucked up safely on alien yellow furniture with bright red and orange flowers and a crooked middle cushion. Voices rising and colliding, separating in laughter like a wave, then rising one at a time in a fountaining pattern.

Twenty-three seconds of video where we smiled goofily and waved awkwardly while our strongest voice recorded love and laughter in case we didn’t get to see our dear one’s face. Five of us staring into the clear eye of a smartphone, willing all our compassion through it.

In the car, the hollow desperate sound of five women weeping in complete silence.

Connecting with the one of us who couldn’t be there, squeezing in so we could all see her face, sharing our news and letting her cry, because we had all had a turn already. The familiar warmth of tears on cheeks and chins.

Walking into the thin, precious air of the ICU for an unprecedented 58 minutes, surprised by her moon-like and pale face, yet her sudden smile warming each of us from ribcage to throat. Perplexed that we had come just for her (we had come for us), she said: “Thank you. This was on my bucket list.”

Those words we will keep.

My tribe is small.

We are a healer, a pillar, a clown, a helper, a pragmatist, a gentlewoman, a protector.

We are, before all that, friends and mothers.

We have other tribes. But this tribe is knit with confidences and compassions we guard jealously. We are small. Yet we are fierce.