As soon as I returned to the hustle and bustle of London from the sleepy Cotswolds, I headed off to Stuttgart, Germany, where my friend Sunnie has been living for over a year. Sunnie and I grew up in a small town close of LA where we were in drill team together, attended the same school dances and went to each other’s birthday parties. Who knows how much hairspray, styling mousse and frosty lipstick we went through collectively during our formative years?
A very important thing about Sunnie is that she is an identical twin. It was always Sunnie and Stacey, Stacey and Sunnie — they did everything together. Stacey was right there along with Sunnie at all the drill team practices, dances and birthday parties I remember. I realize looking back that though we would’ve considered ourselves good friends, the self-absorbed teenage me didn’t think to get to know either Sunnie or Stacey much beyond the surface level. As I left my suburban childhood behind, my vague understanding of the 16-year-old Oh twins became fossilized in a nostalgic amber, catalogued somewhere in the back of my mind. Then, a little less than a year ago, I got a sudden Facebook message from Sunnie telling me that Stacey passed away. It was a complete shock to everyone, a baffling tragedy. Those who were closest to Stacey are still reeling from her death and the void she left behind. Sunnie flew out to Los Angeles for her sister’s funeral and I got to spend some time together. Despite the lack of depth in our original friendship and our unfamiliarity with one another in our grown-up forms, we both felt the comfort of mutual recognition and belonging that stemmed from a shared childhood. As we rediscovered our friendship, the amber that cocooned the teenage Sunnie in my mind began to crack, allowing me to see her for the multi-faceted woman that she is.
Sunnie and I continued to keep in touch after she returned to Germany. From time to time, I wondered how she was doing so far from home, friends and family. I personally know how isolated one can feel living in a foreign country under normal circumstances. I can’t imagine what it’s like to grieve the passing of a loved one, let alone a twin sister, in a strange land. When I was first planning my London trip back in September, I knew I wanted to try to fly out to Germany to visit Sunnie. In the end, I was only able to manage a short three-day trip but we made the best of it. As we explored Stuttgart and neighboring Heidelberg on buses and trains and by foot, we caught up on life’s small details, philosophized about the Big Things and regressed to our goofy teenage selves. We ate breakfast in our pajamas and Chinese noodles on the train. We went to the supermarket and bought all the junk food we (okay, I) wanted to sample. (Side note: I heart Haribo! So much more than gummy bears!) Except for the fact that we were in Germany and in our early 40s, it kind of felt like an extended after-school hang. On the last day, Sunnie said, “Your visit means more to me than you know.” Having experienced the relief of serendipitous company during seasons heartache myself, I think I understand what she meant by that, at least a little.
It was Sunnie’s birthday not too long ago. The first thing that came to mind was to wish her happy birthday but I was struck by the thought that it might be a while before she can have a truly happy one. “We came into the world together and I thought we were going to leave the world together,” I remember Sunnie saying one day as we stepped off the curb to cross the street somewhere in Stuttgart. My heart aches thinking about her future un-happy birthdays and the many sad days in between. Life is so unflinchingly brutal sometimes. But life also affords us beautiful pockets of reprieve from the hard stuff, even when we’re waist-deep in the hardest of it all. I got to see first-hand that Sunnie experiences these pockets — lightness of being and joy — in the mist of her unspeakable grief. This is the gift of grace, I think. It doesn’t seem like much — it seems like too little, in fact — but when one receives it, one sees that it means “more than you know”.
CASE & POINT 
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