My neighbor Basil used to say that sometimes the people who treat you better in life are the people who aren’t really your family. My friend LaRita told me once that she considered me her daughter, but that it was good we weren’t really related because that meant we would argue less.
People we call family.
When I worked on my doctorate in family studies, I became aware that this concept had a name- that sometimes in life we have people we aren’t biologically related to, but we call family.
LaRita Archibald quickly became one of those people the summer of 1993 when I was interning at USA Boxing at the United State Olympic Training Center. My sister Denise had just died a few months before and in the phone book I found the number for a local group of suicide survivors (what we now call the suicide bereaved).
It was LaRita’s number that I would be calling, the same message that stayed in her phone for what seems like forever. She had started one of the first support groups for the suicide bereaved in the late 1970s after the death of her son Kent. She then spent the rest of her life trying to ease the journey for all of us who would come after her.
Today is what would have been LaRita’s 92 birthday. I always call her on her birthday and yesterday I checked to make sure I had the date right (Facebook has made me lazy in that way– I don’t write it down and instead check a person’s profile). It was there that I found out LaRita had died on May 13, six months ago.
It’s hard to sit on the outside, to be one of those people we call family, because oftentimes we don’t know what has happened to someone as the family might not contact us. I have quite a few people in my life who would tell you I am family, but sometimes when they’ve died, unless I see an obituary or the family posts somewhere on social media, I don’t know. Or I might find out when something like an invitation is returned in the family (that happened two years ago with my friend Sally– we had been out of town when she died so I didn’t see the obituary).
We had a great weekend- Greg’s team won the girls soccer state championship, my Chelle Summer Holiday event was the best one I’ve had yet, but this excitement is tempered today by the news of LaRita’s death. I’m not just grieving the loss of my friend, but also of not knowing when it happened.
I know that LaRita was tired, that her body was failing her– she told me so when we talked on her birthday last year. Her husband Eldon had died a few years before. She had to carry around an oxygen tank to breathe. She didn’t have the energy to do things she once did. She had lost two children, one to suicide, one to an unexpected illness.
But she was such a part of thirty years of my life, more than half my life. And not just the suicide grief that brought us together. As the years went by, we shared more and more. We still talked about suicide grief and related topics, but we also simply enjoyed each other’s company.
She so badly wanted to come to my wedding when married Greg but no one would make the trip to Albuquerque with her and she was past the point in her life she felt safe enough to drive the trip down I25 from Colorado Springs to Albuquerque. We had always visited each other and I know she wanted me to visit more, that she was a bit envious we went to LA to see the Blooms instead of going north to see her (I tried to explain it was because they had the ocean).
I have so much more to say, but I think that’s where I’ll stop today. She had an enormous influence on much of my adult life, being that I was 21 when we met. Perhaps more blogs will come from it, particularly one about a major influence she still has to this day. Sometimes I need to travel the road a little to sort it out. Or swim some laps.
I’ll do that now. I know she is at peace, she is with Eldon, her parents, and her children Kent and Karen. But I will always miss the sound of her voice, of the funny things she would tell me. And the love she gave to me.