I’m in the process of broadening a friendship with a woman from church. She’s older than me (well, aren’t most of my friends?). In fact, she’s closer to my Mom’s age than my own. However, we’ve hit a bond. Not just the choir bond either, though she makes choir practice worth attending, even if you don’t sing.

Her daughter committed suicide sometime in the past seven years. (I’m only a year and a half into this church and it was before I came but sometime during our previous pastor’s stay so, sometime in the past seven years.) A few weeks ago at church, she came up behind me, moved the strap of my dress to reveal one of my tattoos and said:

“You remind me of my daughter.”

We then discussed a few things as we finished up morning practice and headed upstairs. It was the first time she had made an effort to share anything about her daughter with me. She shared her daughter’s desire for tattoos. (She committed suicide in her teen years so no tattoo.) She told me how she had pierced her nose and her ears, all the way up, with a thumbtack. (My nose was previously, as in up to a month or so ago, pierced.) She told me how when her daughter put plugs in her ears, she did to… and her daughter removed them. (Good tactic, eh? Love it.) She told me about her crazy hair colors, and I shared some of mine.

As I shared some of this with my Husband, he said that’s one of the reasons that we’ve been brought into the city (we previously lived outside of the city) and into this church (we previously attended a church outside of the city). I had been feeling it for awhile as well, that some bond was going to be created with this woman, but I didn’t know what or when or how or really why.

But things are coming together. We’re having lunch soon.

She really wanted me to have a daughter. She offered to come help paint the one wall pink. I could sense her own disappointment when we announced that we were having a boy. Not that she said anything; she ooh-ed and ahh-ed appropriately over the ultrasound photos. She’s still pulling for us to use her first name as LittleBrother’s middle name. (Probably not!) But I felt it.

And so, eventually, whether I discuss it over the first lunch to get it out of the way or whether I wait and have to explain it the first time she comes to my house, I’m going to have to say to a woman who has buried her daughter…

“I had/have a daughter… but I gave her away.”

And that really just doesn’t sit well with me right now. I feel selfish in missing her, especially with our degree of openness and how I can see and interact with my beautiful child. I don’t know how to appropriately communicate this to a woman who has lost a daughter who was also equally beautiful and special. I’m not sure what the appropriate rules of conduct are in discussing the similarities and differences of placement and death with someone who has experience death in, my opinion, one of the worst possible ways. I’m not sure how to handle the conversation at all.

I admire this woman’s heart, her acceptance of our youth and the issues that surround them (that include depression that her daughter fought) and her faith. I think I’d be crushed if I said something that offended her or made her feel worse.

But at the same time, I refuse to hide who I am when it comes down to one-on-one level of communication.

And so I sit at the cusp of this new friendship, knowing that I have things to offer her as a suicide-attempt survivor myself, and wonder what the right way to proceed should be. I think it would be different if she lost a son and I placed a daughter, or vice versa… but instead, this whole same gender things… it seems touchy to me.

She lost a daughter that she wanted desperately to save. So did I, but to the rest of the world, to those untouched by situations like this, it looks like I didn’t want my daughter. When the reality is that I would have laid down my life for her instead.

How to explain…