Anderson Cooper told Stephen Colbert, "I wish I had a scar running down my face..." I can so relate to that.
He wanted a scar so that there would be an external sign that something was different about him after his brother killed himself. Colbert said that, after four decades, he still catches himself wondering why no one is asking him about his brothers, since he still thinks about them in the here and now.
In my prior post, I mentioned my friend Karen, who had died from leukemia. I had been introduced to Karen by another woman, Jean, who was also 13yo older than me, and I'd met through fandom. Turned out, when Jean and I first made contact in the late 80s, she lived only a mile from me. Jean and Karen had both worked at Denver Social Services throughout their adult lives.
Jean became my best friend for the five years I knew her. She was even more independent than I was, and bought a house back when single women almost never did something that expensive. I was over at her house nearly every weekend. We talked fandom, favored stories, my writing, the boyfriend that I'd recently broken up with, horses, horse racing, families, philosophies of life. She was well read and had a non-judgmental viewpoint on just about everything except her work which, like Karen, she complained about constantly. It was a rich period of my life.
In June of 1993, I got a phone call from Karen. Her husband had family across the street from Jean and, long story short, Jean was now in the hospital with severely metastasized cancer (she never went to doctors) and was expected to live just a couple of weeks. Needless to say, that news was devastating.
Jean ended up going home. Her 80yo mother came from out of state to stay with her, but due to her mother having no short term memory, Jean found her impossible to live with and sent her back home. Karen and I took Jean to see Jurassic Park on July 4th weekend, and then went out to dinner. Jean didn't touch her food. The next day, Karen called me at my job and said that Jean wasn't answering her phone and since I had a key, I should go over there and check on her. I was thinking that I desperately wanted Karen to come with me, but she and Jean had had some problems, and I knew Karen didn't want to or she would have suggested it herself.
So, I drove to Jean's by myself, thinking how, if she was fine that I was going to yell and scream at her that she couldn't decide not to answer her phone and put me through this. But, as expected, I found her dead in her bedroom and called the authorities.
For a long time after that, I felt like this "thing" had happened to me -- I found my best friend dead in her home -- but few people knew, and when I did mention it, they didn't know what to say and so I or they would quickly change the subject. So, I get what Anderson Cooper means about wishing he had a scar. A scar that would be a visible proclamation that "something happened to me".
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