Losing Arlyn

I lost a friend to cancer over a month ago, but I haven't been able to write about it. I'm going to try now. She was a few years older than me and a single mom to a 16 year old daughter. We took Open Studio at the Wellness Community together and both were also on the gyn support group there.

Arlyn was a very upfront person. You knew just where she stood. She wasn't critical (except of herself), just honest. If she liked you, she told you. It's really nice to hear someone tell you that they like you, most of us don't do that very often.

She loved doing art, especially playing with paint. She liked to get the paint really thick and gloppy and textural.

She was a wonderful mother who really admired her daughter. Everyone who knew Arlyn felt like they knew her daughter too. I only met her daughter twice, once when Arlyn was pretty much bedbound, and again at Arlyn's funeral. I was impressed with both her maturity and her childlike sweetness. She came to her mom's funeral dressed to the nines, with a gorgeous hat, purple shoes, and a dramatic coat with a big wide belt. Arlyn's casket was a pine box and her daughter and her friends (both Arlyn's and her daughter's friends) painted and decoupaged the entire surface of it. There were drawings, paintings, photographs and words all over it. They filled the top with blank cut out shapes which were glued to the surface and provided the mourners with colorful markers and pens so that we all could write to Arlyn. I've never seen anything like it and it was just so right. Arlyn would have really loved it.

It's been really hard losing Arlyn, not just her friendship and her tremendous spirit, but also for what we shared- being mothers of kids who still need us (of course kids still need their parents even in adulthood, but I mean kids who are still dependent on us to help them grow up). That's why it's been so hard to write this post (I wrote it, let it sit as a draft for weeks, deleted it and started over).

Goodbye my friend, I miss you.