Laura’s View of Me

One of my favorite photos from my wedding day wasn’t taken by our official photographer. My friend Laura, up from Chicago for the weekend with her husband, snatched a couple of photos of me and Jason as we exited the 1941 Studebaker Commander we owned at the time and headed across the street to our Victorian home where the reception was held. Laura was staying at the hotel just up the street, and from her room on an upper floor, she captured a life moment I didn’t mentally record, a fleeting moment of lived experience. 

I joked afterwards that it was our “paparazzi” photo, the one that looks like we were celebrities and people were fighting to get every angle and capture our private moments. “You looked so beautiful,” she explained to me later, “and I wanted to show you how the rest of the world was seeing you.”  

I don’t know how the rest of the world was seeing me, but I do know Laura’s view of me was always an admiring one.  

“No one there knows you weren’t Homecoming queen, Jennifer,” I remember Laura telling me years earlier when I was getting ready to move from the Chicago area more than four hours north into Wisconsin to start a full-time job as a university professor. We were in her apartment in a Chicago suburb, one of our last nights together, and I had told her how nervous I was to move and start over.  

"You know I was far from being Homecoming queen,” I responded. “I was the class nerd, the one who always got yelled at for ‘wrecking the curve,’ the one on the math team, the one who studied all the time.” 

“I just mean,” she replied, “you have to remember no one at your new job has you in the box you’ve put yourself.” She sighed and paused, looking up at the ceiling, searching for the words. “I just mean . . . you can’t move to a new town assuming everyone there will see you only as others have seen you, or only as you see yourself.” 

“I’m still scared.” 

“Oh Jennifer, they’re the ones who should be scared!” Laura leaned back and stretched. “You’re amazing! You’re smart and funny. They’re lucky to have you in their lives and they should be scared that you won’t like them, not the other way around.” 

I laughed. I had never once thought of it that way. Never. As Laura got up to grab a snack from the kitchen counter, I thought about meeting her a few years earlier when I worked as a temp office worker at Diner’s Club. When we first met, she didn’t know anything about me. And she didn’t assume much either. She didn’t take one look at me and assume I was or wasn’t Homecoming queen—or anything else. That was just Laura. Her movements were like her heart: gentle, graceful, soft, kind, generous.  

Over 20 years later, when I got the news that Laura had died, it was already months after it had happened. Her husband called when I wasn’t at home and spoke briefly to Jason. I never got to know Laura’s husband—met him maybe twice, at least once when they came to my wedding. Laura and I weren’t close anymore by that point. Five years had passed since I’d moved, and we’d grown apart. I drove down to see her once and we had fun staying up late in a hotel and eating out. I drove down again when her mom died. She came to see me once. But our lives had rapidly moved in very different directions. 

After I got married and had kids, we stayed in touch via cards and notes. I learned from those cards that they moved out west. She wrote one Christmas of her heart attack and how sickly she had become. Then, after the call from her husband, I learned from her obituary online that a few years later, she contracted COVID, fought it for weeks, and died. She was 53.  

Hearing that she died felt like a bigger loss than I expected. I think about her often and I feel more grief than I expected. How is it we can feel grief when we lose someone who wasn’t in our lives anymore?  

I know I feel a tremendous sense of sadness for her husband and for her. She loved life and its little luxuries. I’m not sure she always got or did what she wanted or expected. Like all of us, I’m sure she wanted more years. Early deaths are always tragic. 

I know another part of my grief is that with her death, I lose someone with whom I can reminisce about an important part of my life. I didn’t make a lot of friends when I was working on my doctorate. I was busy and I lived in a suburb while others lived elsewhere. I didn’t feel great about myself, so it was hard for me to make friends.  

Laura and I were very different, but she was incredibly supportive of me. I feel a sense of loss and grief because I never got to tell her how much her admiration of me helped me. If there’s an afterlife, I hope she knows now.  

I also wish I could have told her how many people I’ve repeated that phrase to: “No one knows you weren’t Homecoming queen—or king.” I don’t wish I had been the Homecoming queen—that isn’t what that phrase means. What Laura was trying to teach me was to be confident, to love myself, to believe in myself, and to not stay in the same boxes I’d been in before. She knew I was my own worst enemy. She knew that many of us are. She knew that we struggle to give ourselves permission to grow and be something new.  

I’m not sure Laura gave herself that permission always. It’s easier to help others see insights than to see them ourselves. I’ve used her phrase and that insight with others to challenge them to learn more quickly what Laura was trying to teach me in my mid-20s and beyond: move outside the boxes into which we are placed by teachers, parents, friends, and ourselves early in life. Explore.   

Every time we travel to or through Chicago, Jason hears stories about Laura. I look out the window of the car and see places that remind me of her and of my four years living and working in that region. I listen for her voice—the memories of what she said and what I think she would say to me now.  

I’m traveling for work this summer to a city near where Laura lived at the end of her life. I expect to cry at least once while I’m there. I’ve been thinking about how excited she would have been to hear of my visit. I look on the map and see she was less than an hour from the hotel where I will stay. She would have arranged a time to meet with me, to have a meal, to talk. I would have enjoyed seeing her settled there.  

We wouldn’t have had much to talk about except the past, but we would have caught up. And I know, because that’s who Laura was, that she would have said amazing things about me. “Your hair is awesome letting your natural curls come out like that! You look beautiful—I can’t believe you’re in your 50s! Your kids...wow. Your book and career—how did you do it all?” I can hear her voice, soft and gentle. Kind.  

Laura’s view of me would have been the same as always: admiring, appreciative, loving. That’s just how she saw me. And I’m so grateful.  

Now my challenge is to see myself from Laura’s perspective. Perhaps that is the best way I can honor her memory, to stop putting myself in boxes with negative or limiting labels. To instead take her view of me. What would that mean for all of us—to see ourselves the way our friends see us?