Sally's Wedding

Sally got married on the 18th of December. Her mother and father had split a few years back; it was primarily her father’s decision and Molly, her mother, and three sisters have had a hard time processing.  Her father’s name I never learned but he gave one hell of a speech at Sally’s wedding. No one wanted it to be good. He told a story about five year old Sally traveling to Disney World after the loss of a pet and managing her emotions quite well until she reached Minnie Mouse. Sally, with a line of tiny millennials sweating behind her, commiserated with her newest friend, about the loss of her oldest. 

Good shit. 

Margaret, Sally’s mother, went second. Margaret is one of the most open hearted people I know, so much so, that I think she’d developed chronic anxiety as a means of protection. The hurt she harbored as a result of her ex-husband’s abandonment was powerful enough to shape shift and tonight, after what’s his name spoke, it took the form of competition. She began defeated. She tried to riff on some notes she’d written but shed them quickly to speak from the heart (a mother’s love is a magnificent force so she could). She really found her pocket though, finishing with the Irish Blessing; a semblance I’d read the night before at my father’s house in the mud room untying my shoes : 

May the road rise up to meet you, 

May the wind be always at your back, 

May the sun shine bright upon your face, 

The rain fall soft upon your fields,

And until we meet again, 

May God hold you in the palm of his hand. 

And with these words, the power of her hurt became love. 

Becca, who I hadn’t seen since the beach as a teenager, came to the ceremony and then again to the reception after we’d eaten. I remember her hair very short with freckles like flecked watercolor. When I first met her a decade earlier, she was who I envisioned Harper Lee’s Scout to be at 17: curiously optimistic, organized enough, and kind before she was anything else.  Becca had been in an accident (the details of which I don’t remember on purpose) but she couldn’t really dance and a good portion of her body was badly bruised. I don’t know how we started on the subject but somehow we discovered we were both on Lithium. Becca, from everything I know about her, has always been very brave.  

Gay men, when their identities weren’t safe to embrace, would ask, “are you a friend of Judy’s?” If they thought there was a chance the man was… you know… obsessed with Judy Garland. It was probably a means to an end—sex, conversation, both— but it functioned as something we could use to reach one another. I imagine the signal flare in James Cameron’s Titanic. 

Becca told me she’d had two suicide attempts. Maybe she knew something of my story from Molly and needed to reach me quickly. Maybe she’s always that courageous. Likely, most of the time, she has no choice not to be. 

She said she’d been reading obituaries of young people who’d taken their own lives—her curious optimism hoping they’d be nothing like her…or me…and some weren’t. The majority however, had more life than most in them to lose. They were described as hyper-compassionate, ebullient, the life of a party and light in a room. She didn’t mention diagnoses and neither did any of the actual obituaries. 

Divergents don’t have code words, so when another is bold enough to reach me the experience has been, every time, vital. Becca watched me dance that night with Barbara. She saw me make new friends, love my partner with abandon, and the drinks in my hand. She said I could light up a room and that that probably meant I could understand the equal and opposite capacity and recognized I was carrying that too. She gave me what the bride's mother did to her daughter on her wedding night, and what I do now to anyone without a code word:  

May the road rise up to meet you, 

May the wind be always at your back, 

May the sun shine warm upon your face, 

The rain fall soft upon your fields,

And until we meet again, 

May God hold you in the palm of his hand.