Jammie's prayer…
When I moved to the Adirondacks region from the WNY area I left behind a lot of people. Several months later one of my friends mentioned on social media that they might have the opportunity to move to Maine, which is closer to me than Buffalo. We hadn’t been talking much in recent years, but it prompted us to start talking and in those texts came out the grief over our common friend, Jammie.
Jammie died in June of 2018. We were not talking at the time over some stupid arguement we had over her dumbass boyfriend situation and my leaving husband #2 didn’t help (they were friends before I was friends with Jammie). It was hard. Honestly, I was even more mad at her than I was when we stopped talking. I couldn’t bring myself to even go to her wake cuz I was so upset by her leaving this world before we made up. I robbed myself of that experience…that closure that I didn't know I needed and I regret it looking back on it now.
We (our friend group) called Jammie, Sparkles! She was so full of life. She would blurt out the strangest things and we would just laugh with her. She was silly. Super funny. Sarcsstic. An amazing singer. She blew me away at karaoke and there were too many times I would convince her to sing a song she didn’t at all know. She would do it and we’d all laugh. We went camping and got drunk off grape pucker. We had so much fun together and I didn’t realize that I missed her so much until my potential “Maine moving friend” texted me the song “You can call me Al”. I’m sure there’s a story about how that became our song. I can’t say that I remember it all, but I do know that day I cried sitting at my desk listening to the song all the way through.
A few weeks later, an old email from Jammie popped up when I was deleting emails in my inbox. I didn't even realize I had emails from back in 2013, but it seems that I did (and still do). Jammie would send lots of forward emails to us back when that was a thing (texting memes is way better btw). One that struck me instantly was the prayer included inside of this mandala. It inspired this piece and made it come to life. It also reminded me that our friends are so important, whether they are with God, down the street, across the state or across the country. I pray this prayer that I now call “Jammie's prayer” for everyone of them tonight. You are beautiful, classy and strong and I care about you.
And although, my “Maine moving friend” is still living in WNY, we text and I hope we do for a long time. We’ve got some catching up to do!! 💜