Sherry L Huckabee: Letter To A Friend

My precious, wonderful, most beautiful friend,

I am sorry I have not written sooner. I was looking for a moment of inspiration hoping that my fingers could faithfully deliver to you the love and tenderness held for you within my heart. I am sitting now in Mont St Michel looking out over the vast, ethereal land that surrounds this astonishing Abbey built upon a hill in the midst of a magical sea that is and then is not. I can only hope that the Archangel will guide my words and open your heart to hear them.

It is always difficult to write to you. I see you struggle and suffer so. When I offer advice it is for you condescending. When I offer understanding it is for you patronizing. When I offer love for you it is by its nature suspicious for you cannot imagine how a person can love someone as ugly as you see yourself to be. But I my friend, I see you as an incredible, beautiful woman. Not just because you are in every physical sense. Nor just because you are in the sense of being kind, loving, and gracious to others. You are beautiful my dear in your fragility. In your deepest desire to love and be loved. In your patent declaration that you are lost and therefore your willingness to be found. You are beautiful my dear BECAUSE you struggle. Not in spite of your struggles. Not in spite of the wretched, raw, empty, looming darkness that you hold within, but because you, like so few, know that the abyss lives within your soul. Love, it lives within all of us. Every man, woman, and even every child.

People glimpse edges of their abyss and they run. They run anyway they can. Alcohol, drugs, rampant love affairs, or by just turning a blind eye to the yearning, crying, lonely, lost part of every soul that screams in the night when all seems lost. This is what it is to be human. This is part of our nature. This is who we are. All of us. There are no exceptions my love. None. And this is what MAKES us all beautiful. Because we get up every day despite that gnawing inside, despite the pain of loves lost or not yet found, despite the challenges of life, the aches, the hurt, the soul’s shame. Despite every death of mother or lover or child. Despite every suffering. We get up in the mornings and we try again. We keep some glimmer of hope inside - every single being walking this planet. A hope that today may be the day when the love is found, or the morning passes without the thought of a lost one, or maybe, maybe today the cancer will be gone, the arthritis will have healed, the baby will sleep.

What makes you beautiful in particular, my love, is you don’t hide from that abyss. You stand naked before the mirror and witness it. Your suffering is only that you think there is something wrong with you because it exists. There is nothing wrong with being human, we all are.

I do not think you are a stupid, shitty friend. I never could no matter what you did. I wish you could see the you that I see to know that would never be possible. You did not move to pull yourself together. You moved to rip yourself more apart. I knew that – I never expected you to be all together from this. I expected you would be, well, as you said raw, exposed and suffering deep into lonely, dark nights. I understood, for whatever reason, that you needed to do this and never had judgments for your reasons or your doing. You have held my hand as I returned from those deep, dark places. I have forced myself down their path as well – terrified for what I might find there. Eventually I found that it was just me there – a part of me every bit as real and necessary and wonderful as the parts of me that are beautiful and good and light. I learned somewhere that I am more love-worthy, not less, for those deep dark places and for the fact that I know their contours - that I can sit in them and wave my hands at the heavens and scream I hate you and cry and cry until the silence comes and slowly the resolve comes over me to crawl, then stand, then begin ascending back into the light. That I often lost the loves I had was not because I shared the caverns of my soul, but because I was scared to face them myself.

I used to have a quote on my wall as a teenager. “Having it all together is like trying to eat once and for all.” I loved that saying. We will never have it all together, my friend. I won’t. You won’t. Man is hardwired to strive. That too is our nature. There will always be a sense that we could do more, be better. I’ve come to believe that the peace within comes not from finally arriving at a place where there is peace, but rather for accepting that it is traveling the downs as well as the ups that we are here to do.

Another favorite expression (perhaps one of us shared it with the other, I don’t remember) is “Nothing is born without bleeding and tearing.” I used to believe that we needed the dark to understand what light is, that sorrow was there to help define our joy. I’ve come to believe over these last years that they do not exist side by side to balance each other but rather it is the pain that actually gives birth to the joy, the grief that gives rise to the jubilation. Without the hatred there is no birth of love, without the sorrow there is no birth of joy.

You my dear are simply giving birth. You are raw, bleeding, exposed, lost in agonizing pain as you claw your way into a new world.. You will bear children from this, my dear. Literally and figuratively.

I love you my beautiful, dear friend. I pray for you in every church I enter – not that you become the beautiful, together woman that you want to be, but that you see that is already what you are.

Sincerely, deeply yours,

Sherry