A friend knows

Julia ♦ August 22, 2023 ♦ 2 Comments

The mandevilla is blooming profusely again. August, 2016

“A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.”
— Donna Roberts

In April, during the weeks Jeff was recovering from the surgery to remove his brain tumor, we were unable to travel to our York home. I started to worry about various things I needed to take care of there, especially our plants, but I was afraid to leave Jeff for very long. So Amy agreed to go with me for a day trip to get some things done.

When we got there, the hibiscus and mandevilla plants I had bought at markdown prices the previous summer were looking nearly dead. They had bloomed so fabulously for several months last year in Alexandria that I brought them down to our sun room at our York home for the winter, determined to have them blooming for us to enjoy again when the weather got warmer. I was crushed to see how bad they looked, after Jeff and I had watched over them so lovingly through the winter months.

Amy watered and tended all our plants for me while I did other tasks, and she reassured me about those and some other plants that were looking almost as desperate. I had been afraid they had died from not being watered, but Amy told me she thought that they had been damaged by the cold snap that had happened shortly after I had moved them outside thinking the danger of frost was past.  She told me that they probably would come back again. I wanted to believe her, so despite the hopeless appearance of the plants, I did.

I don’t remember much else about that day. I was still pretty numb with grief, shock and exhaustion from the trauma of the preceding weeks. I know I talked a lot and must have said quite a few things that sounded gloomy or reactive or bitter. Amy never scolds me or tells me to snap out of it or urges me to look on the bright side or changes the subject. She simply listens, and sometimes cries with me, and I always feel better if she is around.

Amy was there for me, just as she has been so many times over the years, especially since the beginning of our cancer nightmare in 2012. Again this spring, she was there to take care of Matt while Jeff was in the hospital for yet another surgery, and she was there at the hospital with us, and she was there in York County with me when going there alone would have been more than I could bear.

She was right about the plants. They are looking more beautiful than ever. They just needed someone to have the faith not to give up on them; to tend them and care for them until they could get over the cold and neglect that had nearly killed them. The mandevilla is pictured above and the hibiscus below, both photos taken in recent days. Now every time I see them I am reminded of Amy’s rescue.

Just one of a half-dozen blooms on the hibiscus, late July 2016.

Sometimes in life we are simply treading water, trying to survive day to day, rarely thinking about the broken dreams and dashed hopes, but knowing on some level that a huge part of us has gone inert and desolate. If we are lucky, we will have friends who hold onto that part of us and tend it faithfully, helping us go through the motions, trusting that in time we will be whole again, or at least better able to cope with the sorrow. Then one day we might hear a familiar melody in the notes our friends are singing to us, and realize that the strange song we’ve been hearing from them is one we knew by heart all along, even though we forgot it for awhile.

This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.