No One Owns The F**king Sunrise

I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years getting over myself. As another birthday comes to greet me, I review my uncertain and arduous path between 47 and 57:  three years of breast cancer, diagnosis, reconstruction, and recovery; the crash of the economy at the height of my creative career marketing products people didn’t need; and the younger of my two daughters electing at 20 to remove herself from our lives. It all took a sharp swipe at my ego: I was broken, inside and out. Even if I could have mustered up another round of ‘power bitch’, it was doubtful I had enough energy- or interest- to follow through on anything.

Gillian Zed January 2019  Photo by Meri Hoffsten

Learning to be vulnerable in my late 40’s, to ask for help, was a challenge to my stoic, self-reliant form of feminism. After a career rising above blanket misogyny and inner-corporate drama, I no longer had the sanctuary of my professional setting to hide in. My group of adoring clients, my network of collaborators, essentially paid to agree with me, that was...... ALL GONE.

I had to make friends. I had to join support groups. There was just no way in hell I was going to get through all that shit alone. Being a strong, independent, and superior woman had brought me that far, and then, unceremoniously dumped me at the doorstep of humanity. My talent as a copy writer was shot. With no ability to concentrate, I couldn’t string together words in the clever ways I once could. (You can still find one of my tag lines printed on product packaging in some dusty gift shop.) Work as a potential art director or photography stylist, even if the gig wasn’t physically strenuous, left me deeply apathetic and indifferent to potential customers. I was no longer engaged with all that ephemera I'd built a career launching into the marketplace with my proven, unique vision.

I just didn’t care. I wanted to. But that broad was gone. She had checked out somewhere between the third breast surgery and my kid moving away without a forwarding address. I was struggling with trying to figure out who was this shell of a woman that remained?

After a move east for my partner’s job,

<Side note soap box and shout out of appreciation to R. for working the ‘square job’ that provides our financial stability and health care, including the routine mammogram that saved my life with early detection. Because it was not on my radar, or family history, I wouldn’t have elected to pay for this basic screening at 47, therefore it’s doubtful the cancer would have been discovered before becoming potentially deadly. That very practical reality -having reasonable, preventative based health care/insurance- is a blessing- a privilege- I am acutely aware of. Every. Single. Day.>

I took a job at a quaint little New England soap store and became a 48-year-old shop girl. That was until the first Massachusetts winter. Then, just months out of my last reconstruction surgery, I played the recovery card, and began a tradition of going somewhere warm – or just warm-er - for January. To get away. To heal. And, hey, maybe I’d write. I kept it affordable by hitting up friends and family for house or pet sitting gigs, lucking out with locations.

Over this last decade, during those weeks alone with my thoughts, walking on a beach in San Diego, watching the rain from a Seattle brownstone, I’ve sorted through the junk drawer of my emotional clutter. With my new perspective – eminent mortality - it seemed I’d saved all the wrong mementos and discarded the snippets of joy that DID exist in my life’s story. When looking back I’d chosen to focus on the areas where I believed I had failed, came up short, disappointed others, myself or simply did not achieve the lofty goal I had set for myself. Having been so accomplished in seeing the potential in others, my clients, my children, I assumed there was nothing for me beyond that. I was defined by making other people successful. Not myself.

I did write during my winter sojourns, and other trips tucked into the year when I could. I began to write about subjects that affected my world, tore at my heart, made me want to help, to change society: I wrote stories about people I admired for their ability to be who they were, authentic in themselves, unapologetically. Having been given a second chance on life, I wrote about the person I wanted so badly to become. I wrote for myself, publishing a short story I was proud of, Pier View, on Amazon.

In recent years, I’ve been lucky to visit Hawaii for my January trip. I often rent a place near family in Lanikai or Kailua Beach on the east side of Oahu and spend a few weeks writing, walking, eating good food, and sorting through that -thankfully less crowded - emotional junk drawer. Although far from Honolulu, there’s plenty of tourists, it’s one of the most photographed beaches in Hawaii. The sun rising above the sea next to the majestic Mokulua Islands is a spectacular sight; humbling.

Dawn is around 7am in the winter and sometimes I would manage to wake up early, inspired to get down to the sand and watch mother nature do her thing. Often, I settled into a spot far down on the beach, removed from the tourists and tripods, sit on my towel, drink my coffee and thank the goddesses for being alive.

But today, waiting for the glimmer of a day that will not be held back, I feel tears rise, and alongside my gratitude, I must also again, recognize my loss. Not my breast, not my career, not my daughter. Thinking that sequence of events was the lowest, the worst, the place in my life that made me not only crack open that drawer of emotional bric-a-brac, but fucking pull it out and dump it on the floor with a clatter. That wasn’t it. It was another fat chunk of life’s shit, dropped right into my lap. Something else had changed in the ten years since I had vanquished breast cancer.

     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In 2015 my closest friend, Terri, a funny and acerbic woman of 33, my bar stool companion during the exhausting recovery months, died. She’d been drinking herself into seizures, eventually had a heart attack, the resulting coma, and inevitable death. Thirty-fucking-three.

Terri had been one of the first people who loved me without obligation or potential benefit, a true friend after my lifetime allowing so few. I felt lucky to have her next to me while I battled the undefined demon that was breast cancer. She did not care who we’d been in our abandoned careers, (she’d worked for corporate at Seattle’s coffee king until the crash,) or where I’d traveled, or what the doctors were doing for me. Terri just loved my sense of humor- biting and sardonic like hers- we made each other laugh, which was good medicine for both of us.

Even though we came to live far from each other, we spoke often, (she never forgot my birthday,) yet I had no idea of the level of her addiction, or the havoc it was wrecking on her health. Terri, of course, omitted much in our long-distance chats, but she was never one who shared. Her disinterest in the details went both ways, and even when I sensed something was maybe off, I did not press.

We had been drinking buddies yes, but that time period for me was a temporary escape. My recovery refuge. Through my naiveté or warm-hearted blindness, I never saw it to be the all-encompassing lifestyle of self-medicating, (and self-destructive,) numbness it was for Terri. I’d grown up covering for my  alcoholic older brother’s relentless bouts, yet never saw the same illness in the beautiful, energetic, young woman next to me. There was some deep pain there, but I didn’t learn about it until after she was dead. I felt responsibility for her slipping through my fingers, for missing the signs of the depth of her crippling addiction, believing I had ultimately failed her. As a friend, a woman, as family. 

Standing over her twisted, tube fed body in the ICU, (I made it to her side in less than 20 hours from three states away,) I recognized my humanity then, in a way I never could have fathomed. It wasn’t that MY time might be shortened on earth. Suddenly it was evident that those I love, even those 20 years younger than me, also had tenuous expiration dates. Alone with her, I sobbed, loud and snotty, clutching her lifeless, wired hand, begging her forgiveness, gasping, over and over again, in a pleading, begging-for-it-to-be-different voice: “I didn’t know, I didn’t KNOW.”

I shared this pain with Terri’s sister J.C., while we waited in the hospital for the angels to come for the girl that we both knew better than anyone else who had gathered there for good bye. J.C. herself a health care practitioner, thoughtfully looked at me, tilting her head kindly. “Gill,” reaching across the table to touch my arm, “She didn’t want you to know.”

I was silent.

“You would have tried to do something. She knew that,” I was nodding vehemently now, “Then, it would have been just like me, our parents, and everyone else. The end. Cut off. Pushed out.” I learned about a failed intervention, Terri hadn't spoken to her family in years, 

I was reeling. How had I let my friend off the hook so easily with all her bullshit excuses? Why hadn’t I pushed harder on the phone for more information about her health? I had failed. I had failed, big time.

It was almost a week of waiting. I drank more than ate, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and never got drunk. I rolled joint after joint and never got high. I sat, numb and alone, in a loaned apartment, staring at the Space Needle through the rain, waiting for the phone to ring. Sometimes, I would call my niece, a therapist, and put her on speaker while I cried uncontrollably, rocking in agony, and guilt. She offered insight that helped then and has stayed with me.

“Terri needed to keep that place safe, where you two could remain close, where your love for her would be as friend and not a fixer. She loved you enough to not want to lose you, and knew if she revealed her truth, that would change. You were able to just be her friend, and that it what she needed from you. Unconditional love.”

That was the same gift Terri had given to me, with her giggle and wink, for years, as I was coming through my cloud of loss and scars and self-doubt: love you, long time.

My focus shifted. I made sure my family- blood and chosen- knew I appreciated them, showing them love and forgiveness. Asking for forgiveness. I wrote my lost daughter a letter. She didn’t respond. I began calling my mother more. J.C. and I became close, sharing our best Terri memories. Like knee-buckling grief, I gradually got over the anger, the should-have-beens, the gotta-wins. And yes, worked hard on getting over myself and the self-perpetuated mythology of being together and in control.

So, in the last ten years: I officially ended the bloating and mood mangling post-cancer meds, found a comfy bra solution for my mismatched boobs and ceased bitching about it every morning, we returned to California, and I opened a little vintage store with a beachy theme to keep me in my happy place. And then, on that day Terri died, almost four years ago now, I stopped drinking completely, to honor my dear friend, who, even when told it would probably save her, could not. It’s a good way to be close to her. I do miss the wine.

The person I was before, before all this fucking loss, was oblivious to the pain I was operating under. Carried over from an emotionally isolated, nomadic, and lonely childhood, I was intent on constant motion under the guise of moving forward, even if that was not always the case. I often missed happy moments and enjoyment sprinkled among the uncomfortable reality I was avoiding.

Finally, in my mid-50’s, new lessons eventually seeped through my grief: self-preservation is not a healthy emotional path, you are not in charge of the universe, choose to take care of yourself now, in a meaningful and genuine way, not out of fear. There’s no longer an inner power struggle to be the one that has it all, to be the best, the smartest, the strongest. I am none of those things. And I’m at peace knowing that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today is Terri’s birthday, I wipe away the tears and wait for a late-January dawn over the sea, setting my phone’s camera. Looking up, I see there’s now a cluster of visitors standing in front of me, at my prime spot that I’d invested a half hour walk into. This has happened before. A couple years ago I would’ve cleared my throat subtly and the oblivious tourists would look around, for the first time realizing they were not alone in paradise, say ‘oops’ or ‘sorry’ and move sheepishly out of my view. But today, there is a different reaction inside me. I’m not pissed off. I’m not agitated by their ignorance and selfishness. I am thankful they too, have come to see this beautiful moment.  Grateful, now believing the sun will return for me for many years ahead, and blessed to share it. Without a sound, I get up and move down the beach.

I miss my best friend. I miss my younger kid and sure, I guess I miss my breast too. I don’t have remorse however, for the loss of my stress-fueled career that mostly made more money for people who didn’t need it. There is no nostalgia for that bitchy broad who once resided inside me, that knew everything and had to tell you so. I shift my gaze to a quiet future, where I write for myself, sell my sea shells, and cherish every brunch date and funny text with my older daughter - who somehow has learned about this self-love shit at a much earlier age.

It is a world of commercialism and commodities. We expect so much from our investments of time, stress and money, but so little from ourselves. There is no optional bottom line here: you will miss out, your emotional junk drawer will fill up, making it harder and harder to open. I don’t know how to help you do it for yourself, I can only share what happened for me.

Cancer, unemployment, losing connection to a child- all facilitated for me a desire to change the path that had not served me, that had only brought me to unhappiness. I shed my self-centric thinking enough to understand that I’m not so powerful that I can make people leave me. They do that all by themselves, for their own reasons. I set out to be a more patient, kinder and caring human. I strive to avoid stress at all levels in my day to day. But, Terri’s death, tragic and preventable, was the final push for me to become present in my life. I miss her enormously. I have, with time, shifted to mostly recalling the laughter we shared, instead of the painful end I couldn't fix.    

It’s a work in progress, sure, but I’ve accomplished changing my stars a bit through self-love and self-forgiveness. I’ve learned that the important things can not be packaged and sold. We're simply here to help each other, and should respect the planet that provides for us. Ultimately, we’re all connected: by the wonder of a baby’s first breath, the love in every family embrace, our endless devotion to animals, and the beauty of each fruit and flower.





A decade later, now healthy, with much pain in the rear view mirror but joyful memories to make ahead, I appreciate each morning, every dawn, even if I don’t watch it happen. Because no one owns the fucking sunrise. It’s there for us all to share, gratis. That beautiful gift of possibilities. Every day.