I think the answer to this is different for everyone. And I think one person can have lots of different sorts of friendships that fall on different ends of a wide spectrum. I know it is absolutely that way for me.
I have been blessed to have many different friends over the last 30 years. Some I have been friends with for years, some I am just getting to know. A lot of people of come in and out of my life. Some I miss spending time with on a regular basis, others I don't miss at all.
There is one special group of people though. Its hard for me to explain, but there are some people who I meet and I just feel a very genuine, very deep connection to. Soul mates if you will. There are just some people who have such an impact on my heart that I couldn't ever forget them no matter what kind of time passes. And sadly, sometimes these are the people who I don't get to keep in contact with the way I wish I could or I don't get to see them as often as others.
I lost one of my soul mates this week.
Jessi and I met in middle school. She was very nice and very quiet. When we went to high school we had every single class together our freshman year. And so began one of the best friendships of my life.
Those 4 years of high school Jessi and I were pretty inseparable. We lived kind of far apart and it was long distance for us to call each other. I remember after some ridiculous phone bills her mom got a special long distance plan where they had free long distance on weekends. Jess and I knew we could talk as much as we wanted starting at midnight on Friday. We learned the hard way you had to MAKE THE CALL after midnight. Apparently if you made the call at 11:30 and kept talking until the wee hours of the morning on Saturday it DID NOT automatically flip over to free calling. Boy did we get in trouble for that one!
That wasn't the only trouble we got in to. Jess and I were boy crazy to say the least. And that got us in to all kinds of trouble (but some of the best memories of my life)! We caused a riot on the streets of West Alex one night. A full out brawl over us! We lied to our parents and got busted all because we wanted to spend the night with two boys that we liked. Instead of passing notes back and forth at school we had notebooks that we would pass back and forth throughout the day. I wish I still had those. We just never ran out of things to talk about. We could be together all weekend and still talk on the phone for 3 hours Sunday night.
We weren't always up to trouble though. One year for her birthday her dad got her three tickets to the Nsync concert. So she asked me to come with her and instead of asking a third friend, she invited my little sister to come with us. Jessi was the youngest in her family and she knew how crazy my sister was about Nsync and she just knew exactly how awful it would feel to watch her older sister go without her. So me, Jessi and Em went to Nsync. Its one of my sisters favorite memories and just completely shows the wonderful kind of person Jessi was.
I think a favorite memory that Jess and I never stopped laughing about is we were driving down Route 40 one day in the pouring down rain. All of a sudden my windshield wiper on the driver's side just flew off of my car! There it lay shattered in the middle of the road. Here we are two teenage girls, trying to see to drive the car, we had our heads out the windows. Oh the whole sight was just hilarious. We would randomly over the years just send each other a message - hey remember when our wiper fell off???
One of the things that most of the people we went to high school with didn't realize was that Jessi was sick. And the hardest thing about her being sick is that it always seemed like nobody could explain what was wrong with her. I remember her waking up some mornings and not being able to get out of bed because she couldn't feel her legs. And she had all kinds of stomach problems. She was eventually diagnosed with crohn's disease. And she had arthritis. It was hard on her. She just wanted to be like all the other teenagers, but at times she just physically couldn't do it. But she never let it get her down. She would just push forward. I remember one time she got rushed to Children's Hospital in an ambulance. Her sister and I drove up to Pittsburgh to meet Jessi and her mom at the hospital. Jessi's reaction to everything... how cool it was to ride in an ambulance!
At our high school the senior class went on a trip to Florida every year. Jessi wasn't going to go. I begged and pleaded with her until final she agreed to go. And I am so happy that she did. We had so much fun!
Graduation came and went and Jessi went off to college while I was still at home. A couple years later I moved to Morgantown. We always stayed in contact but we were living different lives. This is where Facebook and Email came to the rescue. We weren't ever as close as we were those years in high school but we were able to see each other's wedding pictures and pictures of our babies. We didn't spend a lot of time together after high school, but we always knew that the other one was only a phone call or an email away.
We made lots of plans to get together over the years that just would not ever pan out for one reason or another. Then one day last August I was sitting at my desk eating my lunch and decided to check Facebook. Jessi had updated her status and it just rocked me to my core. She had been diagnosed with liver cancer. Now Jessi had always been sick. One of her problems was a liver disease. But now it was cancer. Most people would get this diagnosis and be devastated, but not my Jessi Marie... oh no! She was excited. She was happy because this would allow her to get the liver transplant that she desperately needed but wasn't "sick enough" to get on the list until now.
Things from August to now have been a complete roller coaster for her and her family. A roller coaster that crashed on Saturday. First her brother was supposed to donate part of his liver and that got canceled, they had her do an extreme round of chemo that landed her in the hospital, very very sick. She finally got her transplant, went back in to the hospital with blood clots in her lungs. Then she was home a couple weeks before going back to the hospital again and not ever getting to come back home.
Nothing about this is right and nothing about it is fair. My heart is shattered because I don't have her here anymore. Not that we spent a lot of time together lately, but she was still there anytime I wanted to talk to her or her to me. And there were still just certain things in our lives that she is truly the only one who I could talk to that I knew would understand. She passed away on May 4th, her son's 8th birthday was the 6th, and she will be buried on her 30th birthday on the 9th. I don't know how her son and her husband are going to move forward from losing her. I don't know how her mom is going to go back to a normal life after not ever leaving her side through any of this. I just don't have any answers.
Jessi was a beautiful woman inside and out. I'm so honored to say that in my life she is one of the friends that left a permanent mark on my heart. She will not ever be replaced and I will always remember her as lovely and sweet as she always was.
This is a video that was shown at a 5K to raise money for her hospital bills. It was held the Sunday before she passed away.
