It’s been 9 days since I learned she died.
Just over a week ago, I thought of her and looked her up and discovered she had died 4 years ago.
I found her memorial page. At first I thought it had to be someone else (it had to be someone else, just a coincidence of names), but there was the unusual spelling of her first name, her middle name (a family name, usually only an initial in her signature), her birthday (one week before mine), and there was her photo. Her smile.
We met the first week of college, two freshmen stuck in a mandatory class. I remember commenting on her handwriting (it really did remind me of my father’s, the extended scrawl of ink across the page). I think she came in late that first day of class and sat next to me because I was near the back and near the aisle. I could have that backward.
We became unlikely best friends. Buddies even. We spent so much time together, but we never dated. We had very different majors, so our class schedules only overlapped in the mandatory classes. Of course I had a crush on her, off and on, but she didn’t hold that against me or use it against me. I had my girlfriends (who sometimes resented her) and she had her boyfriends (usually older, but always of a specific type; I never knew anyone so consistent in what she wanted a man to look like).
For nearly a decade, we were confidantes, discussing our relationships, our faiths (or lack of it in my case), life, the world–everything. We’d hang out on campus, or go to cheap restaurants, or walk around parks, or whatever. We were friends. She came to my wedding. She visited us at the hospital when my first child was born.
I don’t remember the last time I saw her, face to face, or even the last time I heard her voice. We both moved away at about the same time. I had taken a new job and moved my family across country, and she had gone back home, trying once again to put distance between her and a relationship that wasn’t working but she couldn’t let go (she had done that several times over the years).
I do remember the last time we swapped emails. It had been five or six years since we had moved apart. I had come back, but she had not. I reached out, she responded. I was excited about my second child and my first publishing contract. She was excited about having gotten married (to a man who 100% represented her type). But then the conversation stopped.
We were still friends. I want to think so. But … I never reached out again. And neither did she. College was long past and we both had our families and careers. Almost 20 years passed between that short exchange and her death.
I only learned she had a daughter when I read her obituary. I wish I could have met that little girl, even once (she’s not a little girl anymore).
There was no mention of her husband in her obituary. And the memorial page had her maiden name. (Oddly enough, it doesn’t bug me that I never met her husband, maybe because I had met him three times before?) That made me sad. She had been so excited about getting married.
Her obituary didn’t say what she died of, and none of the included photos seemed current. It doesn’t matter.
She’s gone, and I’ll never get to see her smile again, her eyes sparkling with wit. Or hear her voice.
I miss her.
I try not to beat myself up about letting more than two decades pass like that. And I try not to get angry when I think that phones and email work both ways. People grow up. People change. We all get busy living our lives. It’s easy (too easy) for people out of sight to slip out of mind, even if we don’t forget them.
She was one of the best things in my life, and now she’s gone, taken decades too soon.
I miss you, Ali, and I will never forget you.
-David