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I was pulled into the world of MySpace because my nieces and nephews were incapable of just sending an email or picking up the phone to call. I then went over to Facebook because that was the new new thing, and suddenly I found my own friends as well as my family alive and well there. But increasingly with my busy schedule, the emails would filter in from Facebook and annoy me – whether it was someone else wanting to be my friend or simply someone musing about air molecules and I would have to log on and respond and I often felt like this was a big whopping waste of my time – until…

A friend from 30+ years ago found me on Facebook one week ago and it was actually a friend I wanted to hear from, so I was happy to log on and respond. First, let me say I am a very lucky person with loved ones that are unparalleled, friendships that are genuine, and a partner who is more supportive of me than anyone has ever been in my life, and yet, yesterday when I was in the hospital lobby speaking to my aunts and uncle who had driven in to see my mom who was still in restraints and hallucinating and one of them said, “I know this must be hard for you, Rachel, especially because you are dealing with it alone” – I thought ain’t that the truth.

Nobody knows what it is like to be the child of alcoholic, unless you are one. Nobody can understand the polarity of emotions that take you from anger to pity to fear to sadness in nanoseconds. So although I don’t feel alone per se, I do feel that most people and even T can little understand how I feel right now.

Out of the blue, my old friend writes that she is living in her parents’ old house as both of them are dead now. Through a snippet here and there, she learns about my mother and begins telling me the years of watching her own parent die of alcoholism – “he didn’t want to be sick, but he couldn’t give up the drink.”

LOVE will never cure or heal them …I could not love him on his terms of being a alcoholic and unfortunately all the LOVE you have for her will not rid her of her demons.

And so this morning, when I am trying to figure out what is the next step, she writes

I, too, chose to look at life w/ gusto & laughter & more importantly with eyes wide open…But my heart still aches every now then for what could have been but never was.

I know that she came back into my life because I do feel alone in caring for my mother and dealing with my anger and sadness, not because I’m not supported by my loved ones, but because this is a 50 year heart ache, not an isolated incident. My friend knew it too.

So Facebook might have started off for kids and it still does annoy me because you have to log on to engage, but it has become a telegraph for old friends too, ones who come back in your life when you least expect them yet need them the most.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.