"Hate is love disguised, I believe now."

Larissa Kaye Batten (llbeara@aol.com) writes "Soul Food," a weekly column for SpiritSite.com.  

Larissa is a prolific writer whose work has been featured in several publications.  

You can visit Lara's web site at www.miracleanimalrescue.com (site will open in a new window).

Amy was a member of my brother’s high school "circle of friends."  

There really is no better way to describe their cluster of friendship.  Everyone did everything with everyone, and I never saw one member of the cluster without another.

My brother was blessed. He was highly sociable, terrifically popular, and constantly surrounded by a gathering of friends.

I, on the other hand, was shy, studious, and so dedicated to my high school studies that I could see little beyond my books and my bookworm friends.

My family kitchen, den, and living room were usually filled with my brother’s friends, exacerbating my awareness that I was not as popular as he was. There was a constant parade of activity in our house, and I had absolutely no idea how to fit in despite my closeness in age to my brothers and his friends and their willingness to accept me into their fold.

I simply refused to participate. I was aloof, cold, distant, and, in my own way, superior to their shenanigans. In my eyes, they were constantly up to something. Parties, fun, high school football games, playing hookey, playing ball inside when they should have been outside, experimenting with alcohol, kidnapping a friend until the police showed up, switching dates at the high school prom, etcetera.

The girls in my brother’s gang of friends were pretty and popular. Some were cheerleaders; many had boyfriends. Most seemed happy. To me, they all fit in in a way that I did not.

Amy was not much different than the rest of my brother’s friends. She was pretty, popular, sweet, and she fit in smoothly and surely to the group of friends.

I did not have too much to say about Amy until she began to appear in my family’s kitchen once too many times.

My mother was a French tutor at the time, and Amy needed help with her French. So when I could have been spending quality time with my mother after school, my mother was preoccupied helping Amy with her French.

When I bounced into the kitchen to get a snack and chat with my mother, my mother was busy. My mother was busy with Amy.

When the house should have been empty and quiet, the house was full of laughter and friends. The house was full of Amy and French books and my mother not paying enough attention to me.

I could think of absolutely nothing to break up the friendship between Amy and my mother. I have never been a jealous person by nature, but I have no doubt, in retrospect, that I was the epitome of jealously.

I did not want this girl in my kitchen; I did not want her in my house. I did not want her in my life, and I absolutely did not want her in my mother’s life.

But I was completely powerless over Amy’s existence in my kitchen and in my mother’s life – with one exception.

I had one way to banish Amy from my existence, and the method was hate.

My father once told me there is a fine line between love and hate, and I can see this now.

When I could have loved Amy for being a kind soul and a friend of the family, I chose to hate her instead.

I was cold and mean and as distant as I could be. I do not recall lashing out at her; I simply recall retreating to the extent that I was sure she would know I did not like her.

I could not break up Amy and my mother, but I could make Amy uncomfortable in our house and around my mother. I could not tell Amy how jealous I was, as I couldn’t even admit to myself how jealous I was.

So I walked around hating her. I wanted her out of my house and out of my mother’s life. I wanted her out of all of our lives.

And I got exactly what I wished for.

The phone call came smack in the middle of the night. We were on our annual family vacation in Bethany Beach, Delaware.

My brother slept in the living room, my parents in the master bedroom, and my brother’s girlfriend and I in the second bedroom.

My father heard the phone and answered it. He woke my brother, and my brother went to the phone while his girlfriend and I slept on.

Then all of our lives changed.

"Wake up, wake up," my brother said, shaking and shaking his girlfriend awake. She had a reputation of being unable to be awakened, and this time was no different.

"You have to wake up, you have to hear me," my brother told her.

I sat up in the bed next to hers.

"Amy is dead. She died in a car wreck tonight."

I still get shivers when I think of this. I know I will never be the same.

For the hours and days and weeks and months, and even years, that have passed since that night we received the news about Amy, I have always remembered.

I have remembered my brother’s pain, his girlfriend’s shock, their friends’ phenomenal grief, the hours and days they prepared for the funeral, and the night I spent doing something I never would have guessed I would do in all my lifetime.

I wrote a poem for Amy, to be read at her funeral. I, who had hated this girl for all I thought she had that I did not, sat for hours trying to find the words on behalf of her friends to say goodbye.

I was devastated. I saw in my brother’s friends not the usual glee and joy of high school students, but the desperation and mourning that I had not yet witnessed in people so young, so innocent in so many ways, and so simply unprepared for the news that had changed their lives forever.

I had nothing other than the words of my poem and a few kind words aloud to give to this cluster of friends who had lost one of their own.

My perception had been altered in a single night. Where once I had seen everything I had always thought I wanted – the ability to belong, to be a part of, to be one with the rest and best of them – I now saw what I had never seen before.

I did belong. I did fit in. I was part of the rest and best of them. I was just as human as the the rest of them, and the girl I had once hated I came to love and miss in a very short time.

My brother and his friends were like ghosts for the following weeks. They walked around quietly, fearfully, dreading what might come next.

I did not attend Amy’s funeral, but my words of poetry were there. I gave her the best I had at the time – my gift of writing, my gift to express in words to her and to her friends what I had never had the humility and courage to say until then. I loved them all, and my heart was with them.

I wish I could say that I was a changed person after Amy’s soul passed on. I wish I could say I became kind and loving toward my brother’s friends, but in many ways I remained shy, distant, and independent.

Inside me, however, I was not the same. I had begun to realize that the people I had glorified for having it all were just as human and vulnerable as the rest of us.

I have three images of that time I will never forget.

I will not forget my brother sitting motionless on the living room rocker as he sat in utter disbelief after hearing the news. I could do nothing for him. I do not think he even cried just then. He was in thorough shock. I am not sure if he even rocked that chair. To me, he was perfectly still, powerless, and full of angst and the first whispers of mourning.

I will not forget either how my brother had to wake up his girlfriend to tell her. She kept telling him, no, no, and falling back asleep. He would wake her again and tell her again. She didn’t want to hear, but it was too late not to know.

I cannot forget either perhaps the most powerful image and memory of all. When my mother turned 50 a few years later, my father had a wonderful surprise party for her.

At some point during the party, I wandered into the restroom and saw Amy’s mother for the first time in a long while. I recognized her as she stood by the mirror. She was a ghost of who she had been. She was pale, she was gaunt, and I knew she was lonely for Amy.

She remembered the poem I had written, but how could I remember those words at all? I could see the shadow of Amy’s mother in the mirror as she stood by it, and the ghost in the mirror could have been Amy. Here were the mother and daughter I had wanted my mother and me to be, only the daughter was a reflection in a mirror and the mother a ghost of the mother she had been to Amy.

I had everything I had always wanted when I had thought of Amy. I had my mother. I had a mother-daughter relationship that was only going to grow through the years.

I spent years hating myself for hating Amy, until I realized that my hate was not hate at all. I grieved Amy, and yet basked in the lessons she had taught me.

Hate is love disguised, I believe now. Hate is not hate at all. Hate, for me, is the fear of knowing who someone really is. Hate is seeing someone as they are not. It is personifying love into something ugly, which love cannot be.

Hate is being afraid of the love that is there for us all.

Retrospectively, I did not hate Amy at all. I loved her, yet could not love her. I wanted to know her, yet could not know her. I did not love myself enough to love another, to see through whatever exterior I assumed to see until I found the soul inside.

Amy gave me the gift in her dying of knowing her soul, of learning, so very slowly, about love, and of being grateful for what I had all along.

It has taken me most of my life thus far to come to know love, but it has been worth the long journey to get here.

For me, Amy is still on the path with all of us others. She is still part of her cluster of friends, only now I know that the cluster is not a bunch of high school students. The cluster is love. The cluster is life. The cluster is God.

Amy just came to know God sooner than I did.

I want to tell you something that I pray you will never forget.

At Amy’s funeral, they played the Simple Minds song, "Don’t You Forget About Me."

Although I was not at the funeral, I heard about the song. I have never heard the song again without thinking of Amy. Often, when I hear the song, I repeat her story to those who hear the song with me.

In my own way, I have wanted to pass Amy’s lessons on.

I will never forget about Amy.

And, most importantly, I pray to never forget about love.

The next time I think I hate someone, I want to remember I am merely afraid to love.

I pray that I might remember to love because love is so precious.

I used to blame myself for Amy’s death. I thought my hate caused her death.

But I am not that powerful, and I did not cause Amy to die. Only when I moved past the shame and guilt did I begin to learn the lesson.

God has given me the power to love, and it’s my decision to love with the love he has given me.

I will never forget you, Amy. You, of whom I was so jealous, you have helped to teach me how to love.  God bless you, Amy.  God bless the world as we all learn to love in the name of those who have died for love.

Amy, they played "Don’t You Forget About Me" at your funeral. Now, in your name, I pass it on to still others. 

Amen.

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