More mourning...

This is all I've thought of for the past two days but now that I'm trying to post about it, I just can't find the right words...  here's my attempt.

Yesterday morning I learned that a Winston friend from Chicago ended her life this weekend.  Susan and I started at Winston at around the same time and we hit the ground running with business trips to Ohio where the real estate group spent 10+ hours a day reviewing documents in a dank basement records room.  We all got to know each other quickly and made games of the drudgery by placing bets on which artists would appear next on the automated radio that we could not turn off or by reading each other particularly funny lease or franchise agreement provisions (yes, you read that right... lawyers are dorks).  

Some time later, Susan and I took a trip back to Ohio by ourselves to tie up loose ends on the document review.  Without any partners there to regulate, we were free to talk as much as we wanted... and so we did.  We talked, and talked and talked.  We talked about our relationships with our siblings.  We talked about boys.  We talked about being from California (she was from Modesto and went to UCR undergrad and UCLA law).  We talked about how weird it was to be making money after being a student forever.  We even talked about underwear.  God knows how we got on that topic but our exchange went something like this- Susan: I hand wash them so they last longer. Me: Why does it matter?  A 5 pack is like $6.  Susan: Not cotton Hanes; nice underwear.  Me: Ha! I don't have any nice underwear.  Susan: Yeah, you're married.

That last night of the trip, we snuck out of the records room early (early being 6 pm) so we could get to Old Navy before it closed.  Then we had really mediocre Ohio Mexican food and margaritas at a chain restaurant.  And before we left our fast food client's headquarters that last time, we had taken pictures of ourselves by the giant hamburger in the lobby.

Over the next few years we saw each other at work a lot and sometimes outside of work too but I am only remembering snippets right now.  I remember a few real estate happy hours and hanging out with her at another friend's birthday party.  I remember a few lunches where we griped about the pro bono clients that were driving us nuts.  I remember her telling me she was happy because her grandma was visiting.  I remember her telling me that her puppy peed on her while she was napping, in an apparent cry for attention after she had been at work one weekend.  I remember how she came to my baby shower and then gave me a room divider so Lily could have her own "room" in our apartment.  Susan's pets kept knocking it over and she couldn't use it anymore so she insisted on giving it to me instead of selling it to me.  When she drove it over (she insisted that we didn't need to come get it from her) she was on her way to go for a hike in the countryside.  She seemed excited and content to go for a hike by herself.

I also remember almost crying on a work call toward the very end of my pregnancy because the party across the table from us demanded that Susan and I stay late to alter some irrelevant footnotes on all of the closing documents.  After the call, Susan smiled, was polite enough not to mention my unprofessional use of the f-word in front of our partner and reminded me that it would all be over the next day.  It was and I gave birth to Lily the day after our deal closed.  A few weeks after Lily was born Susan emailed me to tell me that earlier that day she had seen Matt and I walking Lily in our neighborhood.  She didn't want to honk and say hi because she was afraid she'd wake the baby but she said we looked really happy.  It makes me so sad to know that she'll never experience that joy of having children, though I know she loved her nieces and nephews an incredible amount.

But aside from these random conversations and interactions, I have a mental block right now about almost everything else except that time in Ohio, about 3 years ago.  In a way I'm glad because I know that we had fun and she was happy.  We laughed too much for her to have not been happy...

The shock of how Susan died has given way to an intense wave of sadness.   There are so many things that I wish had happened differently.  I wish I had made more of an attempt to keep our friendship going over the past two years.  Instead, I was caught up in my own stuff and let us become more "Facebook friends" than true friends who talked and knew important things about each other.  I feel awful that we missed each other when she was here in LA just a few weeks ago- I thought her trip was in June and didn't catch her Facebook post that she was in Santa Monica and she didn't email me like she had said she would... maybe we weren't meant to see each other again.  

I don't know how to end this post.  I feel like I could write forever.  Susan, you are missed and mourned.    I wish you were alive to read this so I wouldn't have to write this.