"It's ok to get relentless about what you need"
Notes to and from a friend who's already been gone too long.
[Trigger Warning - Cancer, Death, Suicidal Ideations]
I think, Manda, this is good information. Your body and your mind are carrying a load NO ONE understands. But you. So you get to keep showing up for you.
I think: your body and mind are signaling.
It’s okay to get relentless about what you need.
Can you take some time off of work, for a season? Or a week? Or even a long weekend?
Can you see a counselor who gets it?
Basically: what would you tell YOU if you were your client?
-Amanda Raffenaud (Manda)
May 25, 2021
—
One of the people I’ve ever in life been closest to was forced to leave this life way too soon. When she was diagnosed with Stage 4 Metastatic Breast Cancer in December 2018, we became the hopeful. We, the #HeartCamp18 tribe, became the ones to send gift cards for nourishing foods and rides to and from appointments, we became the ones to send the texts and the cards and the prayers. We became the cheerleading squad and the worlds best listeners. And man, there was so much to listen to when we paid attention.
If I could go back and do it again, I would’ve written more down.
I would’ve saved more tangible messages and moments.
Manda was one of the most special people I’ve ever known. The gift she had, for seeing people in their whole truths, for not only doing the work, but for encouraging and lifting up others in their work as well was so beautiful to both witness and be a recipient of. After the weekend we met (which involved 38 of our newest, closest friends), we reunited just the two of us about two months later.
We sat at a table in a TGI Fridays restaurant where I was on a pureed only diet in the middle of an active Crohn’s flare, but Manda didn’t let that stop us. She ordered extra mashed potatoes and insisted I bring them back to the air b’n’b with me so I had something to snack on later. She was a mother, through and through. She was a giver. A dreamer.
She was one of my best friends.
That lunch became infamous in both our minds - we talked about our hopes and our dreams and our fears and our losses. James, her husband, had died by suicide previously a few years prior, and Manda was walking her sons, then in junior high and high school, through how to really do trauma processing work. She was taking such good care of her mind and her body and her family, and she had found passion and peace in the midst of such unpredictable pain. I remember telling her how I’d do anything to become a mother, but I didn’t know if my body would allow me the privilege. Manda shook that notion off from the start. Her intuition told me that I’d get my miracle one day. We’d started infertility treatments a few months prior but hadn’t had any success, and we knew that IVF was just around around the corner.
When that season came, when I finally became a mother, Manda was there, on the phone, at 3am, as I cried from exhaustion and she reminded me over and over again that I was brand new at this, and that it was okay to feel anything that I was feeling. She was the first person who ever said to me that while I’d birthed a baby, I’d also birthed a mother too. In one swoop I became someone totally new.
In those first few months of motherhood, Manda saw ME. Manda checked on ME. Manda cheered the loudest for ME. Sure, she loved the pictures of my daughter, and the updates I’d send every few days, but her priority wasn’t fawning over my newborn who had all of her needs met every minute of every day. Her energy came to me. Her love came to me. She worked to make sure that I felt seen. That I was heard. That I wasn’t alone or lonely. She remembered what it was like and didn’t want someone else to feel the way she felt.
When I think about her, thats one of the first things that I remember. The grace and the compassion and the tender nurturing that she gave so selflessly. Thats one of the things about her I miss the most these days.
When the text above was sent to me, I was in the throes of IVF for the second time around. My daughter had just turned two, and we’d suffered two IVF related miscarriages. I was preparing for a 5th embryo transfer and I felt beaten down. I was scared, and I didn’t know if we were making the right decisions, I just knew how desperately I wanted a sibling for my daughter.
If I knew then what I know now…
It wouldn’t have mattered. Because serendipitously, it was in Manda’s home when I went into first trimester labor. She could barely keep her eyes open but she stayed up with me anyway, the two of us sobbing on the couch, waiting on the first flight out in the morning.
When I delivered the twins two days later in the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom, Manda asked to see them - something nobody else ever did. She asked me to tell her about them - anything I wanted. Anything I could remember.
Her messages said everything:
Manda.
No. No no no no no.
I’m absolutely crushed.
Manda I am devastated
I can’t imagine how you feel
The trauma of what you’ve endured.
Shock and numb im sure.
I’m so sorry friend.
So incredibly sad.
-Manda
August 4, 2021
What comes next will always be the part I hold onto. My reply, the only thing I could think about came a few weeks later, a text from me to her.
“Manda, I say this with all the heartbreak in the world. If you have to go, when you go, will you look out for my babies? Will you find my twins and love them as only you can?”
& with no hesitation, her response was a resounding yes.
I will, Manda. I absolutely will.
And I’ll pour all the love into them as you would have here.
They already know you Manda.
- Manda
September 27, 2021
—
18 months later, Amanda told us her instincts were saying it was time for us to come and say goodbye. We booked the next flight out, and spent three days in a hotel room, getting to spend an hour here and there with her when she had the strength and tenacity for company.
Truthfully, I’ve never gotten to sit in a room like that with a friend before. And I’ve buried more than my fair share of friends dating back to high school. There was heart failure, drunk driving, suicide, choking, brain bleeds, and so much more - but there had never previously been a chance to say goodbye.
Rick and I sat together with Manda in her living room - the same one in which she’d snuggled our 4 month old daughter in September of 2020, and again, when I was still technically pregnant with Noah and Victoria in August of 2021. Now this was March, 2023, and while we tried begging the universe for more time, we knew that there wasn’t really any hope left.
Those days on that couch, we did our damndest to say all of the things that we could. Anything and everything that came to mind. I’d written notes and letters to prepare for this conversation, for these final moments together, just as the year prior, I’d asked Manda to do the same. I tried to take my anticipatory grief in stride, “stealing away” parts of her - her handwriting, her signature, her words, her voice, her essence, her presence - and put them in a special pocket in my heart for once she was truly gone.
I repeated all of the words we’d been saying to each other for years, this time with more fervor and intensity, with tears spilling out of the corners of my eyes, and my heart aching under the gravity of the moments in front of us.
Manda,
I wish you had more time.
It’s not fair.
I love you, I don’t want you to go.
You changed me.
You taught me.
Your love was contagious.
Your compassion a gift.
Your eloquence, even on the hardest days, unmatched.
What will I do when you’re not here anymore? It’s going to hurt, Manda. I know it’s going to hurt, and I know that I can’t stop it - not for you, or for me.
How can we support your boys?
Will you send me signs? I promise I’ll watch for them always.
Will you please find my babies? Will you love them extra hard since they’ve been alone for so long now?
I love you, fiercely and ferociously and relentlessly.
I’ll hold you in my heart, for always.
And then we hugged. But it was a different type of hug. It was the last hug. In that moment, we both knew it. And letting go felt impossible. I couldn’t squeeze her any tighter - there was hardly anything left of her. So instead I put my hand over her heart and let the beat sync to mine. We both cried. It was heartbreakingly painful.
I just kept thinking about all of the terrible people I know that get or have gotten to live long healthy lives, and here was my best friend, on her deathbed, after spending almost 4.5 years in the fight of her life, and despite living in insurmountable pain, she kept her poise and her grace and her faith and her compassion - a true class act. It wasn’t fair. It was so colossally unfair.
Two weeks after we flew home from her living room, Manda texted me that she signed the hospice papers. She died 8 days later.
It’s no secret to say that 2024 was the hardest year of my life, and that’s WITH believing that Manda’s perched up there somewhere in the stars, watching down over me. That she found Rowan too, and that she’s getting the chance to love and be loved in whatever the eternal afterlife looks like.
When I was fighting myself to stay, when I found the courage to pursue therapeutic ketamine for my treatment resistant depression, I knew that Manda would’ve approved. I know that she would’ve done the research with me, or listened to all the pros and cons lists I’d developed, but ultimately, I knew with all my heart that she’d understand - how desperately hard it had become to stay, and how impossible it would be to leave. I mean listen - she had to do both, under extremely different circumstances, but still. She had the earth shattering, heart wrenching pain, and then she had the slip away into the night quiet death that just came too damn soon.
But it’s more than that. Manda would’ve begged me to get relentless with what I needed. With being honest on what would’ve helped me to survive. She would’ve asked me twelve way to Sunday to stay, and she would’ve had a list a mile long of reasons why. Not just because I have a daughter that needs her mother (which is true.) Not just because I have friends that need me too (also true.) Manda would’ve written and read me a list of the things I brought to her, to her life, to the table, to the world - reasons that solely circled my own traits, my own feelings, my own needs - and she would’ve told me that she wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Ever.
While ultimately Ketamine saved my life, Manda did too. Because it was her voice in my head on the worst nights that said wait.
Pause.
Give it one more day.
You can do this.
I believe in you.
I miss you like hell but I’m not ready to see you here yet.
You still have so much life left.
Don’t let the pain take it away.
In trauma processing, I’ve found myself thinking of her often. Of how fascinated the scientific part of her brain would’ve found this therapeutic protocol. Of how compassionate her empathy would’ve led her to be towards me. Of the way she’d likely have gotten on a plane or sent a hundred emails or sat on the phone with me while I sobbed as I made these decisions, as I navigated past moments of pain and tragedy and trauma and strife, all to make sure that I never, not for one moment, felt alone.
Although this text below was sent two and a half years ago, it’s one of the most poignant, meaningful messages I’ve ever recieved. I come back to it often, because it summarizes Manda in all that she is and all that she was and the way I’ve carried her with me for nearly two years now:
I read this today: grief lasts longer than sympathy (or empathy).
So true.
Your grief will always be seen by me, Manda.
Even when the world moves on.
-Amanda Raffenaud,
July 19, 2022
—
The world has moved on, Manda.
I’m trying to move on too.
Honestly, it’d be a hell of a lot easier if you were still here. If you were in this with me. But I also know that in a way you are here, because I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart.
I miss you more than all the words in the dictionary,
Love relentlessly,
A
January 7, 2025
