Christie Tate - B.F.F.: A Memoir of Friendship Lost and Found

A Memoir of Friendship Lost and Found

B.F.F.

New York Times bestselling author of Group

Christie Tate

A VID R EADER P RESS

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Copyright 2023 by Christie Tate

My Dead Friends, from WHAT THE LIVING DO by Marie Howe.

Copyright 1997 by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

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First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition February 2023

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Interior design by Lexy East

Jacket design by Ben Wiseman

Author photograph Mary Rafferty

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-6680-0942-0

ISBN 978-1-6680-0944-4 (ebook)

To Mereditha promise is a promise

MY DEAD FRIENDS

by Marie Howe

My friends are dead who were

the arches the pillars of my life

the structural relief when

the world gave none.

My friends who knew me as I knew them

their bodies folded into the ground or burnt to ash.

If I got on my knees

might I lift my life as a turtle carries her home?

Who if I cried out would hear me?

My friendswith whom I might have spoken of thisare gone.

When it was my turn to speak, I squeezed the pink heart-shaped rock with my left hand and grabbed my notes with my right. If you looked closely, youd see my whole body slightly shaking. Halfway up the stairs to the stage, I lost my shoe and had to backtrack to retrieve it.

Slow down. Breathe.

This was my first eulogy. I wanted to honor my friend Merediththe first friend Id ever lost like this. To death, that is. Id lost plenty of friends by other means. During my four-plus decades of life, Id been in friendships that blew up or dissolved in both inevitable and unexpected ways. Id withdrawn, drifted away, lost touch; Id also ghosted and, more than once, watched seemingly close friends vaporize before my eyes. It was a miracle that Meredith and I enjoyed an uninterrupted run of close friendship for more than a decade.

My eulogy could best be described as a collage. A Meredith collage. Id culled lines from over 1,300 emails shed sent me over the years. Each snippet highlighted a specific role Meredith played in her life. Most of us gathered in this multipurpose room of the Ebenezer Lutheran Church on Chicagos North Side knew Meredith as a pillar of recovery in twelve-step meetings, because she attended roughly one zillion meetings in church basements, elementary school classrooms, and hospital atria during her too-short life. But she was also a striving graduate student, an earnest wife, a jealous sister, spiritual seeker, an exhausted employee, a faithful daughter, and an anxious friend. She, like all of us, contained multitudes, and I arranged her words to celebrate her in all of her complicated realness.

From the stage, I gripped the microphone in the hand that held the heart rock Meredith had given me months earlier, the day before one of her scary scans. Since her death, Id carried it with me everywhere. Id read that quartz not only enhanced spiritual growth and wisdom but also clarified thought processes and emotionsall of which I needed now more than ever as I stood in front of a hundred people memorializing the life of our friend.

As I spoke the first few lines, my voice echoed off the stained-glass windows and bounced back to me sounding tentative, shaky. I took a quick pause to center myself, and then read Merediths thoughts on her lifelong struggle with loneliness in friendships. Several of the women in the audience chuckled. They knew. Friendship is hard. For many of us, friendship has been almost as tricky to navigate as romance. In some ways, more so.

A minute or two into my speech, my muscles relaxed, and my shoulders sank back into my body. My hands steadied, my voice stabilized. I slid into a good rhythm. Every few lines, I made eye contact with audience members as Id learned in high school speech class. When I looked up, I met the gazes of women in the audience. Their smiles beamed love and tenderness toward me, and I received it. Another miracle.

It was with Merediths help that Id learned how to be a friend. A bona fide, true-blue, long-term, steady friend. Through her, I learned to tolerate the vagaries of friendship, address the pain of competition with and envy of other women, and confront the lie of my own unworthiness. Without the work Id done with Meredith, I would have looked out into the audience and seen threats, competition, and frenemies. But as I spoke Merediths words out loud, I saw loving allies. I felt suffused with tenderness, even for those women over whom my inner demons of envy, resentment, bitterness, and scarcity had taken me to very dark places. Standing on that stage, I could feel it: Id changed.

After I read the last line, I made my way back to my seat, relieved to be done with the public-speaking portion of my mourning. Through the remaining speeches and songs, I sat squarely inside the bulls-eye of grief, running my fingers over the cool surface of the rock in my palm. I missed Meredith. Every day, I craved conversation with her. I longed to text her about everything: my new meditation app, whether my dress made my breasts look lumpy, Adele lyrics, complaints about my husband, a question about what to get my dad for his birthday, a recipe for no-bake cookies. I felt bereft and understood that I would for a long, long time.

But there was also the faint drumbeat of anxiety. Sure, I felt bighearted and magnanimous toward every female soul at Merediths memorial service, but what about in the weeks and months to come? Would I revert to my old ways? Slip into the version of Christie who ghosts when conflicts and tension arise? Without the scaffolding of Merediths presence, could I remain the steady, solid friend shed encouraged me to become in all my friendships?

Not so long ago, Meredith and I both believed that we simply werent cut out for go-the-distance friendships with women. We joked that we were too damaged by our history of addiction, too twisted by our petty jealousies, and too wounded from growing up alongside golden sisters with luminous hair, radiant complexions, and all-around upright lives. But we decidedactually it was her idea and I went along with itto focus on friendships. Lets do the work to get better at them, she said, her cobalt-blue eyes boring directly into mine. We excavated our pasts and appraised where wed done wrong by our friends and where wed been led astray by toxic ideas that no longer served us. We did it in conversations over breakfast sandwiches, on coffee dates, on walks down the sidewalk after twelve-step meetings, and over the phone.