Tricia, 20 Years Gone
By: Kate Delany
Tags: Friendship, Death And Dying, Nostalgia, Grief And Loss, Memories

Tricia, 20 Years Gone

It will be twenty years this fall. Two decades she’s been gone. Trish. Tricia Marie. Lover of terrible 70s bands and even more terrible 70s track suits. Devoted to Karen Carpenter, to gardening, to family. Devoted in a way I could never understand to our blue collar hometown. I’m middle aged. She would be too if she were here. And now that it’s about to be evened out, the years she was here and the years she’s been gone, I find myself wondering more than ever: what’s the best way to remember a long gone friend, to guard her memory from misremembering as well as from oblivion?

The first time I read “My Dead Friends” by Marie Howe I thought of Trish. “I have begun/when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question/to ask my dead friends for their opinion” — yes I’ve asked the ghost of teenaged Trish for advice on my adult life. Standing in my garden, I like to think she’d be proud of me. Trish spent large swaths of her last days, days she knew were numbered because of the cancer, transplanting flowers in her parents’ front yard to a backyard spot where she believed they’d thrive. Something about dappled light. Dumb flowers, I remember thinking. Something common, azaleas or hydrangeas, nothing worth a dying person’s time. I’m a fanatical gardener now. At last (too late!) I could finally have the conversations Trish was always trying to strike up at our high school lunch table about the seeds she was starting or the wonders of bonsai.

Howe imagines her dead friends nodding in unison, affirming her plans (“whatever leads to joy, they always answer). But I don’t rely on Trish to greenlight my plans. Yes I think Trish would encourage. But the Trish I knew would ask quietly needling questions too, the kind that reverberate in your mind like a bell’s ring after it’s done sounding. She was 22 when she died. I went on to have an adulthood. She didn’t. We spent the years of our friendship discussing the future. Sometimes we disagreed.

I was the maker of big plans, we both agreed. A little buzzed, laying on our backs on the town football field after dark, we’d discuss these big plans. Later, Trish would condense these adventures into a single calendar square. It was her version of a diary, each square the content of the day. As a teenager who filled journal after journal with dreams and desires, it struck me as too little, a diary for a small life. Maybe we’d mapped out constellations, dreamed our way out of our hometown, fueled by booze or teenaged angst or both. On Trish’s calendar it would simply be recorded: “Jumped the fence at Ace’s Field. Looked at the stars with Kate. Talked.”

When I went off to college — the best one my guidance counselor could get me into with an academic scholarship— I wanted Trish to do the same. Her moldering away in our hometown, it made no sense. We liked the same things, asked the same questions. How could one of us believe that getting answers to those questions meant getting away while the other felt no burning desire to do so? “I like being with my family,” she’d say. “And besides, this town isn’t really so bad. You know that.”

There’s a natural desire to canonize any long gone friend. Saint Trish. It wouldn’t be unearned. She had the patience of a saint and the generosity too. Never giving up on our friends who dropped out of high school or got into drugs. Ever befriending the outcasts. In Katherine Lim’s story “The One Who Goes Farthest Away,” a group of middle aged friends get together after years apart and their collective memories turn to a friend lost in youth. Though “each is lost in his own private memory of their friend” they ultimately toast to the collective decision that “he was the best of us all,” this friend gone too soon. It’s a nice thought but I’ve drifted away from a lot of my childhood friends and maybe if Trish hadn’t died, we would have done the same.

Trish enrolled in some community college classes but she never came to visit me on campus, no matter how often I mentioned it. Instead she called me at midnight every Sunday my junior year. I was stoned for a lot of those conversations and I’d picture her far, far away, even as she’d say, “If you’re coming home this weekend just call and I’ll go sit out on the front step and wait for you.” My then boyfriend, now husband, thought it was a little nuts, this friend just waiting on her front stoop for me to pick her up to take her wherever I was going. It made no more sense when I’d explain that Trish failed her driving test and never tried again. She was fine just waiting for me to swing by.

A lot of our outings involved late nights at diners, Jersey kids that we were. We were at one of our usual haunts, the Sage Diner, when she told me the doctors said she had ten years. (Turns out she would get little more than two). It was okay, she said, because she never had any big plans. “But you,” she added, brandishing a diner fork, “better make good on all your big plans.”

Have I? I don’t know. I’ve centered my life around writing, just like I always said I would as a kid. More recently, my life has been consumed with political organizing. The 90s, when Trish and I were growing up, was a tamer time, politically. But it just so happened that last November’s election fell on Tricia’s birthday. Needing a distraction from electoral updates, I went to the cemetery.

I hadn’t been in years; still I knew the spot. Her parents passed not long after she did but I couldn’t find any of the flat headstones with their names engraved. I asked the office. Yes I was looking in the right place. I noticed on some of the adjacent graves that nature had taken over entirely, grass growing over the names. No one had been to those graves to pull away nature’s work. It just looked like a grassy spot. You’d never know someone was buried underneath. The thought made me panicky.

I got on my knees and began pulling up clods of grass, first in one spot, then in another, first like a crazed gardener, then more like an animal. I began pacing, realizing I couldn’t very well pluck this cemetery hill bald. Where are you, Tricia? First I wondered it. Then I asked aloud: “Where are you, Tricia? Where are you?” When I caught the catch in my throat, I knew it was time to get back in the car, put on a Carpenters song. I tried. I tried. Back at home, I sat on my front step and stared at the garden I’d seed in spring. “I couldn’t find her,” I told my husband without turning around. “It’s been a lot of years,” he said gently.

When you lose someone in your youth, there is the temptation to cordon off their memory, install them in a private museum of your mind that you visit alone as the years go by. It’s hard to integrate the dead and the living. The ancient Celts had their ways. Samhain, the night when the veil is thinnest between the living and the dead was meant to be a moment when not only can we remember the dead but maybe, just maybe, they can remember us too. But in our modern world, where the past is disposable and we are ever pulled into the future, commercial Halloween is easier.

In Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape,” the main character Lois spends her adult life living two lives — one with her husband and kids and another staring at landscape paintings, thinking about Lucy, a friend she lost in girlhood who “stepped sideways, and disappeared from time.” She works to ignore “ the voice of a person who should have been there but was not.” This is not what I did. I’ve tried to bring Trish along with me. It’s true that now my daughter is about the same age Trish was when we first met. Tricia was sneaking out the back door of a rec sock hop, having just emptied a bottle of vodka in the punch bowl. It’s true that I’ll soon be old enough to be the mother of the Trish in my memories. Still how can I leave behind Trish when she was always waiting out on the front step for me?

Though they were born years after she was gone, my kids know about Tricia. Tricia, the movie talker. Tricia whose canoe repeatedly capsized that school camping trip. Tricia who loudly and confidently sang misheard song lyrics. Though I’ve always championed big plans, I can see now that in the end, this is what we are: the little memories and idiosyncrasies that those who love us hold on to and carry on with them down the line.

Sometimes when out I’m driving with the kids, Steve Miller will come on the radio. I’ll roll the windows all the way down, turn the volume way up. All of us will sing “Jet Airliner” Tricia’s misheard lyrics style: “Big ole Jed and Lionel, don’t carry me too far away/ Big old Jed and Lionel, cause it’s here that I’ve got to stay.” Sometimes as the song is fading out, my daughter will turn to me and smile. “Tricia,” she’ll say.