Eulogy For My Friend Barbara Asbell Bryan

On March 11, 2018 my best friend for the past 40 years, Barbara, passed away. She had been ill with heart problems for some time but we truly thought she'd pull out of this latest hospitalization the way she always did.  When I received news of her death in the early morning hours of March 11, I couldn't even cry. I tried to cry and couldn't do it and felt like I had betrayed her because I was unable to shed tears for her.  My mind refused to believe what my ears had heard. 

Later that afternoon I got in my car and drove down a back country road with the music blaring "I'm Still Breathing" by Green Day, I screamed and I cried and I yelled and I finally allowed my heart to feel her loss. Today was her funeral. It took me three days to write her eulogy. Her eulogy from a friend. I just hope I did justice to Barb and her memory.  Here is the eulogy for family members who might like to have it.

 My heart goes out to her family:  Mike, Phillip, Becky, Will, Miss Sue,  Angel, Andrew, Alex, Emily, and KatieLynn. 

Barb will be greatly missed.

                                              Eulogy For My Friend 

I met Barb when I moved to Cochran in my eleventh grade year. We become friends almost immediately. In our senior year, due to my dad being transferred from San Antonio to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, I found out I would also be moving to attend Biloxi High School. I remember telling Barb in school during second period class. She ran out of the classroom into the bathroom and I followed. She was crying her heart out. When I asked why she was crying she stammered, “Because you’re leaving.” As an Air Force kid I had never had anyone cry when I moved away. She had my heart from that day to this. Before school was over our senior year I was able to come back and graduate from Bleckley County High school with Barb and the rest of the class of 1980.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I never wanted to stand before you and talk about Barbara, I still don’t want to, but I do want you to know who Barbara Elizabeth Bryan was.  I want you to know what she was like. I want you to know what she loved. What she was most proud of. What she dreamed of. What she hoped for. The things that made her human.

Things like what a huge wrestling fan Barb was in high school. She came to school one day clutching a photo of herself with some wrestler named Ric Flair. I had no clue who he was, but she was so excited you’d have thought she’d met all the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. She kept that photo in her notebook for awhile and then tacked it on her bedroom wall.

Barb somehow acquired an orange and white Bobcat car in her senior year. She’d pick me up for school in the morning and we’d always be late because I am NOT a morning person. We’d be late for school and Mr. Smoot or Mr. Harmon would get onto us. Barb would get mad and threaten to stop picking me up, but she never carried through on her threat. That old Bobcat was something else. We thought it was kind of cool. I look back now and realize it was one ugly car. We’d turn the radio to Q 106 and drive around after school to see who was in town, try and run into our crush of the week, and find who was riding around with whom. At night we’d park at Bohannon’s or across the street from the old Otasco. Everyone would. There’d be eight or nine cars parked side by side with us kids milling around talking. There wasn’t much else to do in Cochran on weekends, except hang out at Bogies, the local quasi arcade, and play Space Invaders or Pac Man, or go the river.

Like most of girls in the late 70s, Barb wore her hair in the famous Farrah Fawcett hair style. She always had a can of AquaNet in her purse and she’d spray her hair every so often throughout the day so not even a single feathered hair fell out of place. The wind would gust and her feathered wings would stand straight up then lay back down like nothing had ever happened. There was an art to wearing that hairstyle and Barb had it down to a science.

 People keep telling me how sweet Barb was. She was that way even in high school. The word sweet is used so often that it has become a cliché, but she WAS sweet. She never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings. She would allow people to hurt her before she hurt them. I saw that happen many many times over the years and it drove me crazy. But she didn’t know how to be any other way.

When I moved back to Cochran from Biloxi in 1983 and became a mom, Barb was already a mom, and she’d babysit my oldest son, Adam, while I worked a few hours a day. Adam and Barb’s son, Phillip, became close. Barb called Adam Adam Bomb and to this day Adam still calls her Ma Barb.

 I know many of you remember when Barb was the librarian in town at Tessie Norris. She loved her job because it allowed her to connect with people. She loved having the children come in for story time. I’d go by the library after classes when I was attending college and we’d talk. I miss those talks. We talked about new books coming out that she should order for the library, raising kids, stretching our meager budgets, problems we were having in our personal lives, and how to effectively get rid of stray mustache hairs. I insisted plucking was best. She preferred bleaching. She’d throttle me if she knew I’d told you that. But I always warned her that if she went first I would tell one tiny little secret. I thought maybe if she knew that, she’d try to outlive me. So there, Barb, told you I would do it.

 Many people don’t know this, but Barb was an excellent writer. While working as the Acquisitions Supervisor at Mercer University she earned her degree, and she was published in the Mercer University Literary Magazine “Regeneration.” She blossomed at Mercer. I remember how proud and energized she was about writing then. Last year she talked about wanting to write again, but didn’t know how to get started. I told her, “Just write, it will come, I promise.” I don’t know if she tried. That was about the same time she started having a lot of problems with her eyes and couldn’t see well enough to know when to step over a curb, much less write, so those stories probably went with her and we’ll never  get to read them.

One of the highlights of her life was when she traveled to Guatemala as part of a Mercer University Mission program. Her and other Mercer students and professors visited an orphanage in Guatemala to lend a hand in whatever was needed. While she was there, Barb became enraptured by one little boy. His name was Pablo. She wrote to him for a long time.

 Barb had a kindness in her that was a quiet kindness. She didn’t toot her own horn about it. She didn’t draw attention to herself. She just acted. When her son, Phillip, was stationed in Iraq, all three times, she started a coloring book and crayon drive at Mercer. She would collect the books and crayons and ship them to Phillip’s unit and they would give them out to the Iraqi children. She did it for the children, but she also knew that if a U.S solider handed a coloring book and crayons to a child, then the relatives of that child might have a harder time shooting that soldier.  And Phillip just told me about that the other night. I never knew. She never told me. When Phillip drove to Houston after the most recent hurricanes, Barb supplied him with toys to take with him. Some of those toys ended up in the hands of a seven year old little girl who was having a birthday and had lost everything she owned.

 Barb liked to rock out to Molly Hatchet.  Just listening to the song Bounty Hunter took us both back to the old days and even as recently as two years ago we jumped in the car one day and went for a drive while we played that song full blast.  She loved The Walking Dead television show and would tell me about the latest episode while I listened in bewilderment, trying my best to figure out why some dude named Negan carried a barb wired covered bat. Barb also loved her cats, Jack and Grayson. She called them “The boys.” One day her and Mike said something about buying some food for “the boys” and I thought they meant Phillip and Will. Took me a second to figure out that they were talking about the cats. A few years ago the black cat, Jack, got really sick and Barb phoned me in tears worried, she might lose him, but somehow Jack pulled one of his nine lives out his cat bag of tricks and he lived.  Barb talked to that cat as if he were human, and he listened as if he were human.

Barb and I traveled to my mom’s cabin in Hiwassee a few times. Once to see Bad Company and once to see Molly Hatchet, both at the Georgia Mountain Fairgrounds. We actually met the members of Molly Hatchet who, when they found out we were from Cochran, started peppering us with questions about people they had once known in Cochran. This past November we went back to the cabin to spend time together without real life interfering. When we left Cochran that day I told Barb I had a new Green Day CD and would she like to hear it. I knew our musical tastes were different, but she said sure. The song started playing and after the first verse I looked at Barb and she was crying. She grabbed my hand and clutched it tight throughout the song while she cried.

Some of the lyrics to the song are:

I'm like a child looking off on the horizon
I'm like an ambulance that's turning on the sirens
Oh, I'm still alive
I'm like a soldier coming home for the first time
I dodged a bullet and I walked across a landmine

Oh, I'm still alive

As I walked out on the ledge

Are you scared to death to live?

I’ve been running all my life

Just to find a home that’s for the restless

And the truth that’s in the message

Making my way, away, away.

Am I bleeding am I bleeding from the storm?
Just shine a light into the wreckage, so far away, away

'Cause I'm still breathing
'Cause I'm still breathing on my own
My head's above the rain and roses
Making my way away

My way to you.

When the song was over, with tears streaming, she turned to me and said, “I’m still breathing.”

That weekend we ended up watching comedies, cooking, grilling on the covered porch in the rain, eating, junkin’, and laughing. A storm hit the third night we were there. The wind howled and shook the cabin and we went out on the covered porch and watched the trees sway in the moonlight and the wind chimes go sideways. There was so much energy in that storm and Barb and I just stood there and took it all in.  We didn’t talk as the storm rose and then eventually died out.  We didn’t need to talk. I didn’t realize what a treasure the memories of that trip would be one day. 

         

She and Mike went to the cabin last month for their third anniversary. There’s a chaise lounge in the cabin that I bought that I always claim as mine. Barb knew this. So what did she do? She texted me a photo of her sprawled on that chaise lounge claiming it as hers. The last time I saw her, the Friday before she left us, we talked about going back to the cabin in April after she got her strength back.

Barb had so much love inside of her. So much optimism. She always believed the best of people. She always had faith that things would work out. She hid her health problems so well that a lot of people had no idea that her health was as precarious as it was. Barb took care of everyone and put everyone else before herself.  When she had her first heart attack at age 36 it was the middle of the night, but she didn’t want to bother anyone, so she waited until morning when she knew her mom was awake and then phoned her.

Barb adored her mother so very much. They had a very quiet, loving relationship. Barb was Miss Sue’s number one caretaker until her own health wouldn’t allow her to care for her mother anymore, but she went and saw her often and would always fill me in on how Miss Sue was doing. One of Barb’s greatest achievements was being a mother to her boys, Phillip and Will. She always talked of “my boys” (not the cats), how worried she was when Phillip was deployed, how happy Phillip and Becky were together, how they had given her a granddaughter, KatieLynn, her little “mini me”, how well Will was doing in his job and how very grown up and confident he had become. Whenever I’d see Will at his job I’d text Barb and she’d text back, “Hug him!” Will remembers when he was a little boy and had trouble going to sleep how Barb would lay down with him until he drifted off. Phillip told me that his Mom instilled in him the belief that you don’t give up. You keep fighting for what you want, just the way she did.

She fought for her college degree, she fought as a single mother, she fought paying her bills, like so many of us. She fought her health problems, she fought trying to stay at her job at Mercer even when she was so sick and worn out that she was nodding off while driving to Macon everyday. She fought the feeling that she would never have the love of a partner who cared for her the way she should be cared for.  Then she found Mike.

Or should I say, refound him?

Barb loved Mike. He’s been her rock.  I was teaching in Nashville GA in 2014 when she phoned me one night and asked if I remembered Mike Bryan. Remember him? He spilled red punch on my dress at the prom. He had been her date at that prom. Of course I remembered him. She told me that they had started emailing after she had found an old email address of his while she was cleaning out her inbox. She didn’t know if he had the same email but she wrote anyway and much to her surprise he answered. Next thing I knew they were dating and she was gushing and calling him Yogi to his Boo Boo nickname for her, and then he asked her to marry him to which she replied with an enthusiastic “Yes!”

 I was at their wedding, and when I saw her standing at this very altar with Mike as they exchanged vows, I knew he’d take care of her and love her, for better or for worse. And he did. To the very end, he did just that. They went on trips together and dressed up silly every Halloween. They double dated with me and my husband to a concert by an AC/DC cover band. Mike made sure she took her medications, he took her to doctor appointments, he sat with her hour after hour every time she was in the hospital refusing to leave until she went to sleep. He put a smile on her face and gave her the safety and security she had always longed for.

 I love Mike because he loved my friend.

 Barb tried to warn me that this day would come. That one day I’d lose her. I didn’t want to believe it. I still don’t want to believe it. What Barb failed to tell me was how I was supposed to live my life without her being a part of it.  Barb and I shared secrets that no one else will ever know. I kept hers and she kept mine. I will still keep her secrets because that’s what friends do.

 I told her that I was supposed to go first so I could donate my heart to her. She would protest and say, “No, I don’t want you to go first.”  Then I’d try and joke and remind her that my heart was in a lot better shape than hers and she better grab it while I was offering. She would always cut the conversation short and change the subject. Well, it turns out she took my heart anyway when she left all of us here to figure out how to live the rest of our lives without her.

I love you, Barb. BFF and always. I promise.