FRIEND'S LOVE CAN'T CALM MOTHER'S FEAR

The Boston Globe

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It's not something we talked about, and we talked about everything. But not this. Not then. Not now. Not ever.

Our imagined husbands might go off to fight a war someday, we said, and our sons, if we had sons, might someday be called to fight. We were, even as small children, familiar with battle. We'd read the poetry my father had written in combat. We'd watched "The Fighting Sullivans."

But we never imagined the kind of war we're mired in now. We never anticipated raising a child and seeing him grown and married and settled, then suddenly unsettled and terrifyingly vulnerable. We never expected that at 35 he'd be called to serve.

Rosemary and I have been friends since second grade. We grew up together, wore each other's clothes, slept over each other's houses, traded comic books and secrets, and walked a million miles side by side. As kids we traipsed uptown to the library and downtown to the Dairy Queen. As teenagers, we dreamed and schemed and double dated. As college students, we separated, but only by miles. And as young mothers, separated by even more miles, we connected in more important ways.

Rosemary was 25, married and living in Virginia, when her mother suddenly died. Her son, Mark, was an infant and my son, Rob, was a year old, and if there is a moment when adulthood begins and childhood ends, it was then for us. The death of Rosemary's mother came without warning.

I can see Rose as she was then, back at home sitting cross-legged on her bed in the house where she grew up, in the room where we slept and laughed and planned our whole lives, nursing Mark, new life in her arms, but her old life, our old life, over. I kept waiting for Mrs. Jablonski to come to the door, "Do you want something to eat? Do you want tuna fish? Some cold cuts?" She had always come to the door. She had always fed us.

"You're so lucky," Rose said that night, and she didn't have to say more. I knew I was lucky. I had my mother. And I believed with the certainty of youth that I would have her for a long, long time.

Why is that, I wonder? What made me think that my mother was immortal?

Once when we were in third or fourth grade, I was at Rosemary's "sleeping over" and it started to rain and the rain pelted the windows and the wind howled and thunder roared and lightning lit up Rosemary's room. And I cried because I wanted to go home.

Rose woke up and thought I was afraid that the lightning would strike me. But it wasn't me I was worried about. It was my mother. My father was at work and she was alone. And I thought, what if something happens to her?

But nothing did happen.

And nothing happened for so long that in time I grew to believe that nothing would ever happen.

Life lulls and deceives us. But eventually, some day, sooner or later, something happens to everyone.

Not long after Rosemary's mother died, my mother sustained a head injury.

"I'm sorry," Rosemary said, because what else was there to say?

We grew older and we grew wiser. Still, life continued to stun us. Rosemary's husband was scheduled to take Flight 11 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. But he changed his plans and flew out of Providence instead.

Who can process, explain, and come to terms with something like this?

Now Rose's 35-year-old son has been ordered to Iraq. When he was fresh out of college, we worried. When he stayed in the Reserve, we worried. When he got married last year, we smiled and relaxed.

Time lulled us again.

We sat on her front porch last week, the day before he was to leave for training, the spring sun warm, a magnolia tree in bloom. And Rose talked.

And her words full of fear and resignation and disbelief belied the beautiful day. "I'm sorry," I said.

And I am. I'm sorry that we're not kids again and can close our eyes and count to 10 and make this war go away.

I'm sorry that friendship and love aren't enough to dull a mother's fear.

I'm sorry for Rosemary and thousands of other mothers and fathers who are sitting and waiting for their grown-up children to come back to them.

We sat in silence for a while, Rose and I, two old friends, feeling the sun, feeling the breeze, feeling a million things but saying nothing because there was nothing more to say.