We didnt mention you

That is rare.
We usually do.
Even if it is to say that we know nothing.
Even if it is to count the years since the last contact.
Even when it is just to repeat the same speculations about you and your sister.

Even though we never really talk about the emptiness that it causes,
to feel so distant or the hurt that wells up inside
to not be any part of your life as a young woman.

You are not even that young anymore.

We have any idea who you are anymore.

Its not as if we two surviving friends see each other so often, or often enough.

I almost said something about you and then, swallowed those words back.
What would I say?

It's been another while and I gave up trying a few years ago.
Comments about a Facebook post are not news of someone you saw grow up.
I set the idea aside, thinking we might talk about it later.
Then it slipped my mind.

He didnt say anything either.

Was it something on the edge of his thinking too?

You are part of what these two old men mean to each other.
Part of the history that keeps us friends.

Maybe your mothers other old buddy made the same decision I made?
Or maybe he felt the same lack of anything new to say?

We two had things to talk about in the here-and-now.

About people who we care about, care for and who care about us back.
You are still two of those three in your silent absence.

Yet a few days later it still sticks with me.

The unspoken, futile repetitions about your unavailability.
The years of your not returning calls.
The years of me no longer making those invitations.

And it came to me that we never mentioned you after all.

There is a man you no longer know.

That man who once thought of himself as your brother, has a little brother.
He learned from that little boy what it is like to love a child.
To hold them when they are small and need holding.
To never shake that feeling after they have grown.
The feeling of caring.

That feeling that clings to me in the memory of you.

You dont know that little brother.

His childhood is over without you being any part of it.
His adulthood is beginning.
He only has a dim memory of your name.
And no recollections of you.

I started to care about the child who was you during a meeting.
Your mother had brought your sassy ten year old self along.
We were learning that she was to be trusted fighting our landlord.
I learned that you were not easy to beat at cards.

You and I played cards during the whole meeting and I rarely won.
On that day you started to have a place in my heart.

And the years of being an adult around you as a child came and went.
In all of them I was an adult who loved you.
And your mother was one of my closest friends.
Your mom and I would go out drinking with my fellow survivor.
The three of us would talk from the depths of our hearts.
Some of that talk was of you.

There were times you came along as one of the big people.

Once you came along to get your brother

only to watch me get sued for his custody.
How glad I was to have you there.
It felt like you had grown up to be a friend, who was on my side.

That was when you, your sister and your mother gave us refuge.

More years of being adults around you came and went.

We went with you and watched you walk out of childhood strong and proud.
We watched you go to work.
We watched you become the woman who loved who she loved.

We didnt talk about your mother either.

The dead provide no news to be missing from the conversation.

Your mothers friendship is also part of who these two elder men are together,
as friends of each other and friends of hers.
She always will be part of us.
Even though she is truly gone.
Not deciding to be gone the way you have.

And other people have gone too.

My brother who you never met and will never meet was taken by cancer.
His brother who you will probably never meet is being taken by Parkinson's.

The solidarity he and I felt with one another when your mother was taken so young,
has been needed again and again afterwards,
as it was needed before,
when she was still with us.
Still one of the people comforting survivors.

We are all survivors until we are the one who is missing.

There is one thing he and I talk about when talking about your mother
that we never say about you,
even if the same unspoken feeling is there.

The feeling is heartbroken.