Fillette

One of my friends from college died today, at 1:53 pm Eastern Time. She had been suffering from fourth-stage sarcoma and died in the arms of her husband and two grown daughters. I'll call her "Fillette," or "little girl." That's not far wrong to describe her the way I remember her, and it has echoes of her real-life name as well.

Until last August I had been out of touch with her since the summer I got married, way back in 1984. I had googled her a few times and found an email address, but never actually sent her a note. Or maybe I did but the address was no good. Anyway, last summer I found an address that worked, and sent her a quick note. That's when I found out she was sick. I sent her a longer email and she said she likely wouldn't have the energy to reply to it … but maybe some day …. 

Of course that day never came. She got sicker and weaker, and then died. I got back in touch with her just in time to lose touch permanently.

So I never really knew her as an adult. My memories of her are all as a college student: warm, friendly, open, childlike … naïve and with a tendency to suck her thumb just a little when she was abstracted or thinking about something else. Cute. If I hadn't been so neurotically afraid of romantic relationships, I would have liked to gotten close to her. As it was we were just good friends. The year after I graduated I came back to town for a month to visit old friends and I stayed at the house she shared with four others. It was a lot of fun. Of course, sex would have been fun too, but I didn't know how to get there from here.

I'm trying to think what I feel about this, to describe it for you. I'm sad, of course. I'm a little shocked that someone I used to know as a peer is dead, although I'm close to 60 at this point so that's going to happen more and more often. Six years ago when I found out that Lisa had died, it was disorienting. But I really have no right to think of it that way.

And I'm sorry I waited so long to send her a note. In my mind I can't rule out the fantasy that she and I might have rekindled some kind of conversation. I don't know what that would have looked like, though. She was married and lived many miles from here, so there was no chance of anything romantic. And my conversations with, for example, Inga, have dropped off to a bare trickle just because there is nothing to sustain them in real life. One reason you can't go back to old friendships on the same terms as before is that both you and the other person have moved on, nearly always in different directions. You strengthen ties by repeating the contact, over and over; when they have lain dormant for decades, don't expect them to come back to life. My experience rekindling friendships with Marie and Debbie are very much the exception, and both cases involved sex. So the fantasy I had of rekindling a conversation would probably have proven false even if I had written her a couple years earlier.

Still, I'm sorry.

On the other hand she's out of pain, and that's good.