Grief

I miss my friend. Miss her a lot. Possibly I’m still in the denial stage, because it doesn’t seem quite real, and possibly never will. Tomorrow is, or would have been her birthday. Writing this my phone is shuffling through eerily poignant songs. Talking to myself, Linkin Park. I think a part of it is the ghost, the social media remnant left behind. Sharalyn still comes up in my messenger contacts, no longer with that green online indicator. Everyone time I go to share something on Instagram she comes up as a suggestion. The things I know would make her smile sometimes make me cry. Protecting me, Aly & AJ. Tomorrow, or today, when I set this to post, I know there will be a reminder on facebook about her birthday. I knew that was coming and needed to put this into words while I could still think coherently. I’m expecting a lot of people to post about Sharalyn on her birthday. In time those will be good memories, only three months later I think they’ll still hurt. I plan on being somewhere remote and out of reception for much of the day.

Flowers in the attic, The Funeral Portrait. It’s a quirk of technology, social media, that we can post and tag and talk about Sharalyn. It’s how a lot of people find out about death these days. Sometimes it’s fragile link we have to a specific person. It made me wonder how many friends and connections I have through that single medium. Sometimes all I have to get hold of people who avoid social media is an old mobile phone number, which may not even be relevant anymore. It makes me wonder if I’ve missed important events or tragedies of some of those people. If they’re even still there. Wasted Feelings, Foxy Shazam.

A long time ago, eleven years ago, 2014, Sharalyn messaged me, very drunk. She told me she loved me, btw, and just thought she should a few people. That she loved them. She asked if we could catch up and watch Labyrinth or Princess Bride or Frozen. I said yes but only because I loved her. In the End, Linkin Park. The context that a friend of Sharalyn’s had tried to kill themselves and she wasn’t dealing with it well. Her way of dealing was to tell people she loved them. A lot. And make it weird. If I search the word ‘love’ of our messaging apps, on chats between us, it comes up a lot. Too many to count.

Our friendship was weird, but a lot of mine are. We met on a dating site, when Sharalyn was 19 and I was a little bit older. I’d set up a profile for a friend and joined myself to try and prove it wasn’t as cringey as we all thought it was. This was before apps. Over a decade before tinder. I’m not over, Carolina Liar. Sharalyn and I didn’t meet in person until years later, We joked about that, we were friends over email, on myspace, bebo and eventually facebook. We both had two different phone numbers our conversations somehow survived. We debated which of us was the Nigerian scammer. In my late twenties I went on a meet and greet app arranged date with a woman from Mexico, who I waited an hour and a half to meet because Auckland transport is terrible. She would end up marrying a co-worker of mine, in a strange twist of fate. I told Sharalyn we were meeting up at that point, enough was enough.

We arranged to meet in Takapuna. Shaz, as everyone called her, was late. She was always late. It came up in every speech. Grace, Bebe Rexha. It was my fault, I picked the location and Shaz had to walk past a pet store to come find me. She never could and was of course, side-tracked. When she did find me she hugged me said ‘Hi! This is weird.’

Sharalyn’s hugs were legendary. It was the first thing she did whenever she saw anyone and the last thing she did when they left. They could go on for ten minutes or more. If you tried to let go first, she’d tell you ‘No, not done yet.’ You could spend half an hour trying to say goodbye to her in the Albany Pub carpark after dinner. Beautiful and Lost, Ron Pope.

We were supposed to meet up the week Sharalyn died. A heart attack at 37. She asked to reschedule because she and her ex-husband were trying to sell their house. Three days later I asked her how that had gone. Her partner replied from her profile. She’d passed away last night. The full realisation of that took two minutes to sink in. I know that from the time stamps on the conversation. I called her phone and her partner, Keegan, answered. The conversation last one minute and twenty seven seconds. Keegan and I hadn’t met at this point, now I could hear him crying down the phone to me. I remember wondering, how many times had he already had this conversation? Heavy, Linkin Park, Kiara. What had happened? Sharalyn had a heart attack, in the middle of the night. They lived remotely in Dairy Flat with a lot of animals. Horses, dogs, fish, pigs called Pigpig, rabbits called Bunbun. Too far for the nearest ambulance to reach her in time to do anything. She’d died the night before. I don’t imagine Keegan had slept at all. At 9:23 AM he was telling this story, for who knew how many times.

Ain’t that unusual, Goo Goo Dolls. I sat with that story, that grief, for three days. I didn’t tell anyone. Deliberately. Sharalyn and I had very few mutual friends, it was always just us when we caught up. I needed to sit with that, to process, somehow. I didn’t have the capacity to explain my connection and love to this person to anyone else. For the first day I felt nothing, I wondered if I was numb or in shock. The second day it started, I’d break down, physically unable to stand, crying. It hit me at all times, in all places. For the rest of the week. By the time the funeral happened on the weekend I was cried out. I still felt sad, I still do, but the tears were done. Perhaps I’m back in denial, of it being not quite real. Take it back, Scott Ruth, Noah Gundersen.

After three days her family made the announcement, on social media. A lot of us knew by that point but some people were just finding out. Because we could tag Sharalyn in the posts we made more people found out that way. They came fast and plentiful. Memories and commiserations. Tears. Mine was about the time a drunken Sharalyn told me she loved me and insisted I say it back. I changed my account settings so people could tag me like that, just in case. I decided it was important.

Messages came for me too, from my friends and family. After three days I had the mental energy to deal with them. Childhood Courtesy, Dead Sara. People don’t know what to say. That’s why we say ‘thoughts and prayers.’ Make casseroles. Because we feel like we need to do something. For some people it’s overwhelming. I’d respond to some of those messages and then not hear from the person who was trying to help for hours, or days. I’d expected that, the absence, and it was I’d kept the news to myself for three days. To protect myself and to let the family do the same, until they were more ready. It’s incredibly hard when you go to lean on somebody and they’re not there, because they weren’t as strong as you needed, as they thought, didn’t have the capacity. It doesn’t make them bad friends at all, the world isn’t fair like that. I heard from my friend Sarah, of course, who’d been my plus one to Sharlyn’s wedding. The one person I’d almost called and told. Sarah and Sharlyn didn’t really know each other but both said they felt like they did, and were invested each other’s lives, even though all their updates on each other came through me when I was inevitably trying to avoid talking about myself.

1800-Painless, Teenage Joans, Between You & Me. I met Keegan, Sharalyn’s partner at the funeral. A big bear of a man, heavily tattooed, bearded, crying. I introduced myself and we joked about how everybody refused to let Sharalyn be late to her own funeral. I think she would have laughed either way. He hugged me. Remember, we’d never met before. He hugged like she did. Later I’d speak briefly with Warren, her ex-husband. Same thing, same hug. Sharalyn trains her boys well. I guess I’m one of those too. I left the funeral to go to a Christmas party with all my friends, pausing only to change into the themed shirt the wives had secretly arranged for all the boys to wear. Sharalyn would have cackled.

Drop Top, Mercy Mercedes. The last time I saw Sharalyn was a few months before. We had dinner at the Albany Pub. She messaged me before with an announcement. She was on time. She also paid. She insisted on that, partly because I’d been out of work for two weeks that point and partly because more often than not in the past I’d paid. She spent all her money on animals. She was quite gleeful about being able to turn the tables on me over that and insisted she still owed me a couple of dinners. We easily spent twenty minutes hugging in the carpark before Sharalyn drove off in her Terranosaurus. A Little More, Eric Hutchinson.