Just Breathe

A friend passed away last week. I only heard today, but the weird thing is that I’d been thinking about her all weekend, wanting to call and see how she and wifey were doing, to let them know I was sending good energy … to no avail, it seems. The chances of surviving pancreatic cancer once it’s spread to the liver are pretty slim. She was diagnosed in January and two months later, the call happens.

How can it be a shock when it’s not really a surprise?

She was my massage therapist, but you can’t spend an hour each month for years with someone and not discover common ground and share stories and become familiar enough to grow fond of each other. She made me laugh. Oh, she made me laugh. She’d play Eddie Vedder and his ukulele during our sessions; she was a huge Pearl Jam fan and Ed was her man. I learned a lot about him from her. I learned a lot of things. We talked about energy and music and universal cycles and TV shows and family and I will miss her. She was brave and funny and she shot from the hip. She loved her wife and her adopted family, and she meant a lot to a lot of people. I bet she’d have meant a lot to Eddie, too. She wanted to be his massage therapist, after all. Everyone needs a good masssage therapist.

I’ll miss her for more than the massages, though. I’ll miss the stories of following PJ on tour and tracking Ed to ground in Seattle (she never met him … but she did see his house from afar!) I’m grateful to have known her, and for all that I don’t understand why she had to go when there finally seemed like nothing but open road before her, I have to believe that strength will come from surviving her loss. She’s fine. I know that for a fact. It’s the void left behind that I don’t understand, especially after all she and her wife had been through over the past years.

I’ll never be a Pearl Jam fan, but because of her, I have a favourite song. Ironically or perhaps appropriately, it’s called “Just Breathe”. For the rest of my life, whenever I hear Ed’s earthy growl or his unearthly wail, I will remember Laura.

Please tell someone that you love them. It’s more important than you think.