I've been thinking lately about how we lose touch with some people so easily and don't always attempt to get back in contact until it's too late. Last week someone close to me lost a friend they hadn't spoken to in awhile in a freak accident and she's been beating herself up a bit about not trying to get back into each other's lives. Both this friend and myself are pretty terrible about keeping in touch with people in general, so it's never surprising when one of us loses touch with someone. Usually, I'm pretty good about keeping in contact with those closest to me, but it was a conscious decision to fall out of contact with a family member that finally got me on the road to bettering myself.
I didn't "meet" my surrogate grandmother until I was about 10 years old. She was our grandma's best friend and they'd raised their own kids together, and met each other's grandkids, but somehow lost touch over the prior ten years. After grandma died, we got back into contact with all kinds of people from her past, but the kids didn't remember very many of them, surrogate grandma included. She became a huge force in our lives though. We'd spend our summers there and visit often throughout the year. I adored this woman but she was a bit scattered; she smoked like a train and she often had this grandiose plans of things we'd all pile in the car to go do, even though us kids knew it would never happen. Still, I learned a lot from her and I loved being around her. She was endlessly supportive of my love of film, never missing a single film festival or art show that I was involved in throughout my high school and college days. She would sit there and listen to me blather on for hours about how much I loved directing or storyboarding or editing, and she did it with a genuine interest. She listened and she was interested because she loved me and I was telling her about my passion. I've never forgotten about how intently she listened because it's rarely happened to me since. Most people listen so they can figure out when its their turn to speak, or they get bored and tune out altogether. But not her. After I graduated college, things changed dramatically for her. All of her kids and their kids moved out of state and she was alone in the house with her partner. She was on disability, so she didn't work and just stayed home with the dogs all day and watched television. I would talk to her at least once a month and, for awhile, I was helping her out with some financial support. She and her partner had been together for eons, and I have fond memories of him being nothing but great to us as kids, but it was common knowledge their relationship with each other was never the greatest. I always got the impression they stayed together because it was easier to do, financially and physically, than to move on with their own lives. And really, they lived separate lives a lot of the time. Sometimes he was there when we went to visit, sometimes he wasn't, and that was just how it was. As time wore on, they began to live even more separate lives and were rarely under the same roof, though still technically living together. It was weird though...despite things having been that way for as long as I could remember, she seemed to have a major problem with him being out and about with other women. Perhaps their arrangement wasn't supposed to include other people, I don't know. But I do recall an incident in the early 2000's where my brother said she suspected he had a girlfriend and she was quite upset about it. And in hindsight, maybe this was the beginning of the end for her.
The year was 2006 and I was probably in the worst of my depression and debauchery. I was two years out of college and just a total mess, though you'd never have known it from the outside. Hell, a lot of those on the inside didn't even know it because I was that good at keeping a pretty face on. At the time I was still talking to my surrogate grandmother every month without fail, until later in the year when an incident prompted me to intentionally lose contact. I called her around lunch time, after having been on a massive coke-fueled bender the night before, and I could tell she was under the influence of something herself. Her speech was very slurred and I kept having to repeat things I'd just said. I asked several times if she was okay and she said she was just tired, which I knew to be a lie but didn't call her on it. The whole convo probably lasted twenty minutes before I said I had to go and we hung up. This wasn't the first time I'd heard her like that, it'd been happening pretty much every call for the last six months or so. I also suspected she was using the money I was sending her to buy liquor or cigarettes, and I wasn't a fan of that. This latest call sort of confirmed all of that for me and I decided not to send money anymore and to scale back contact a bit. The hypocrisy, of course, being that I was spending my money on my own habit while admonishing her for spending my money on her habit. We were one and the same but I was in a position to change things (for both of us, really). We didn't talk much for the next year and that was mostly on me. I mean, she didn't try to call me either but I sort of feel like it was my responsibility to keep up the contact in this case. The next year saw me try and fail miserably at holding together a relationship whilst kicking my bad habits and more of my loved ones becoming aware of my issues. And then out of the blue I got a call saying she'd been found unconscious in her home and was rushed to the hospital with a suspected overdose of something. It turned out to be alcohol poisoning and she never woke up. I struggled with the decision of whether or not to go see her before she was taken off the machines before ultimately deciding not to. I didn't want to see her that way and I didn't want to remember her that way. I did go home after she passed because there were some things she'd wanted me to have when she died, and that process ended up being very healing for me. I felt tremendous guilt, mistakenly believing that if I'd just kept in touch with her things would have been different. But I knew there was not much I really could've done, she was going to drink herself to death whether I kept in touch or not. Losing her prompted me to finally get my ish together because I didn't want to end up that way.
Sometimes losing touch with someone is the best thing we can do for ourselves, or for them. And sometimes it's completely unnecessary and both parties suffer. But you can only beat yourself up about it for so long. People change and grow apart, and when they don't, they're bound to get left behind by those that do seek change. I do still regret having lost touch in the way I did, but I think it was a necessary thing. I think about her often, especially when I accomplish something in my career because I remember how supportive she was of it. And I try to take the things I learned from her, good and bad, with me as I keep on livin'. Whenever I get close to going off the rails, I remember her and how her story ended and how it felt for those of us left behind to lose her. I couldn't put anyone I love, especially not my own child, through any of that. Even this many years on, she is greatly missed.
