Hello and welcome to You. Still Have Time. We're your host. I'm Hope. And I'm Harold. And today's episode, I might be mostly solo because we're dealing with a topic that has affected all of us At one point, I'm sure, but four weeks ago I lost my oldest and best friend. Quite frankly, I'm still trying to recover from it.
I don't know if I ever will, but I wanted to take this opportunity to just talk about the feelings that I've been going through. It's been an experience unlike any other, we were friends for 61 years. I met her in 1965, and we were pretty much each other's family. We were like older.
She has an older sister who by the time we met, was already married and had a child. I am an adoptee and I always knew I had siblings, but I. I wasn't in contact with any of them until 2012. So we were each other's sisters as I call her. She was my first sister I, in preparing for this, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to say, and I looked up online, you know, losing your best friend.
And for some folks it's called disenfranchised grief. And what that means is that society tends to dismiss the impact of the death of a friend. They're not family. They're not your spouse. A lot of times the families of your friends don't see you as a part of this whole situation.
So your feelings, you're left to deal with those feelings pretty much on your own. I am very fortunate in that regard, in that my friend's family. Treated me as part of the family. I was one of her healthcare proxies and assisted in making the plans for her memorial. So I did not feel isolated. I did not feel divorced from them.
My other, the other fortunate part is that she and I had a supplemental group of friends. We originally started, there were 10 of us, and I've known them almost as long as I knew her. But she and I had the closest relationship in, in, in that group. So now there are eight of us left, left.
We lost a friend about fif another friend about 15 years ago, and it has been comforting to me that the rest of us have come together. I think it's a wake up call for, for some of us, because we've been talking about, oh, we should get together, we should get together, we should get together.
And there's always one excuse or another for not doing it. Unfortunately this, no one made excuses for this, and as I said to them at the memorial. I'm tired of seeing you at funerals, so I guess if you are, if you are part of a group, if you have a close friend, the only thing I can say is to treasure it to not put things off.
Those of you listening to this podcast are not 20. I don't think you are anyway. And as we grow older, even though the name of this podcast is you still have time, you still have less time. And it's still important to make those connections and keep those connections, get together, do things together, take photographs of each other get to know each other's kids if possible, whatever it is to keep those connections solid because when death happens, it is really final.
I am sorry, I'm having a little bit of a hard time talking about this.
Because
strange things keep happening. I'm on Facebook and Facebook memories pop up with her name. I'm on my email and something. A draft email will pop up. It's very strange. I'm I'm not saying that it's some sort of sign from anywhere, but maybe it is, but I feel her. There has not been a day in the past 30 days that I have not thought about her, and she struggled.
She fought valiantly. She fought so many different illnesses over the past decade, really. She was so strong and withstood so much, but in the end, her body could not fight anymore and I was honored that her children and family invited me to be in the room with her.
At the end,
I am sure so many of you have been through this but I'm gonna tell you just a little bit about her before I end this because I think she deserves to have her name out there. Her name was Beryl. It was an odd name and when we were younger it was Beryl and Hope, hope and Beryl. Whenever you saw one, you saw the other.
But we would meet new people. And since we both had names that were a little different from the norm, I mean, we weren't Deborah or Diane or Kathy. People would meet us and sometimes people would say, were your names Barrell and Holt? And we would laugh and she would say, no, it's Barrell. Like Cheryl with a bee,
I, she was such a creative person and I watched that build through our teenage years and beyond. There was no kind of art that she didn't like, but she especially was drawn to collages and sketches. She was sketching in the hospital even. She learned a few years ago to make glass and fell in love with that and made glass pieces and crafted jewelry.
I remember just in planning for this podcast that when we were teenagers, we actually bought beads and string, and there was a time in the late sixties where, you know, everybody was wearing these beaded necklaces and she and I made necklaces. We even, recruited my mother to help us with it, and we sold the necklaces for a dollar.
I mean, we may have made $20 tops, but it was a project that we really loved and we enjoyed. She wasn't perfect though. She could be bossy as anyone who knew her would tell you. She thought she was always right and a lot of times she was because she would investigate things. And that's something that we have in common.
You know, I Google everything. Beryl would delve into information and find out information whether would, it would be about gardening, which she loved, and food, which she loved. She, there was no kind of food that she wouldn't try. I just I just find it really hard to talk about her in the past tense. She was a pain in the ass sometimes. That's, that's the truth. She would hang up her phone. On me if she was angry, especially in the last few years when, when she was going through all of these medical issues, sometimes she would curse me out and hang up the phone and, and I'd just wait.
And then she would call back and say hey. Yeah, so, and then she'd just start the conversation from there. She was beautiful. She was, she had hazel eyes and she was always known as a girl with the pretty eyes. I remember our friend Phyllis, asking her one time if she saw colors differently from her eyes.
We just thought that was hysterical.
I don't know what more I can say about her, but. Again, I just give you all this admonition. If there are people in your life that you care about, that you love, that you know you will miss when they're gone, do everything you can to be close to them, to stay in contact with them,
because when they're gone.
Especially if it's your like bestie, there's no one to share those memories with. I was trying to think of someone's name the other day, and the only other person
that I know of who would've remembered that name would be Beryl. And so unless my memory suddenly. Comes into focus. I'll, I'll never remember the name of the person I was trying to think of, and there are so many memories like that, singular memories that just she and I know about. So am Sorry if this is sort of a downer episode, I didn't want it to be
go hug a friend. That's all I have to say. Call your friend, tell them you love them, and make plans to get together real soon.
Thanks for listening.
If you'd like to see some of Beryls work, I neglected to mention that she also was a filmmaker. You can Google her name on, not Google her name, but search for her name on YouTube. I guess you can Google it too. Her name is Beryl, B-E-R-Y-L, Ben, B-B-E-N-B-O-W. Do a search and you might find something that you like.
Because as we say here, you still have time.
Thank you for listening.
Ciao Beryl. I love you.
