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A PASSAGE: SCATTERED THOUGHTS
Apr. 14th, 2012 02:34 amNote: For those of you among my IRL contacts who know the situation, I've withheld names and locked the post to friends-only, so please do not share or link.
She worked in the cubicle next to me for a number of years. She was funny -- sometimes wry, sometimes silly, sometimes caustic, sometimes ribald. She was blunt -- we all knew what she was thinking on any particular day about, say, our employers, or her husband. And she was giving and generous and often kind -- she seemed to always have food she would give to any co-worker in sight. Not just the usual office-cubicle food; she would have random Real Food items -- she might out of nowhere offer helpings of paella or something. I half-joked that someday I'd come in to see her roasting a pig on a spit (somehow anchored into our dingy carpet). She was also known for an incredible string of luck on scratch-off tickets -- minor winnings that often made their way into the foodstuffs she'd share.
After she left our workplace some years ago, I really didn't see much of her -- while we enjoyed each other's company, we weren't particularly close friends. I'd known her marriage was increasingly acrimonious, and that she frequently enjoyed more liquor than was good for her -- and in recent years the tidings I'd heard were increasingly serious: A separation. Poor health. A short period of jail time after a DWI.
By this time, the Facebook Era was in force, and she connected with me and several others, and we would often do short text chats -- ours, she usually initiated, late at night, when she had insomnia and I was one of the few contacts still awake (my current night shift makes me largely nocturnal). We kept things light, and I didn't pry for any information other than what she volunteered. We got together once at an area museum -- she'd enjoyed an undersea-vessel simulator it was temporarily offering -- and chatted; she was recovering from having been hit on her bicycle by two cars in one day. It seemed as if that incredible string of luck had vanished, or was running in reverse. And she was still, at core, kind: When she talked about the jail time, it was mostly expressing concern for the well-being of the women she met there and the trying lives they lived.
Last month, she ended one of our brief text chats -- which were usually scattershot, as they'd come while I was working and happened to have Facebook open in a window -- by asking me to call her sometime in the near future. And I planned to ... and kept planning to. But you know how these things go -- work gets busier, other Lifestuff happens, I had other calls to make (like when I heard about a friend's engagement out of the blue), and I didn't get around to making the call. And as I said, we weren't particularly close, just former co-workers who appreciated each other's eccentricities -- and I didn't really make getting in touch with her a priority.
Then a week or two passed without the midnight texts, and I didn't really think anything of it. Until a colleague told me the rumor: She had died.
It was friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend information, and for a day or two it didn't seem as though it was actually, you know, a Real Thing. Until another colleague talked with her mother, and her sister wrote a brief message on FB to people concerned: Yes, it was real. (The family had declined services or obituary.) And, apparently, alcohol-related.
When something like this happens, it seems we invariably start questioning whether we could have made a difference -- as in, you know, what if I had made calling her a priority. What if that one bit of human contact could have, if nothing else, staved off a descent, given her another day? But I know that's useless specualtion -- we'll never know what could have been. Many-worlds theory is, at least in practical application, essentially a parlor game. Maybe a call from me, or from any number of people in the same position -- people somewhere on the spectrum of acquaintance-to-friend who weren't particularly close to her but who liked her and had occasional contact with her -- might have made a difference. And it might not have. I don't blame myself, or anybody else -- for one thing, it's inaccurate; for another, it would end up making things All About Me instead of about her.
But. If there's one thing I do take from this: I live my life, and it's frequently a busy one, and like everyone else I have a lot going on. But I don't ever want to be finding myself asking the what-if questions again. I don't want to ever be desensitized or numbed or oblivious to signals people may be putting out.
Mostly, I don't ever want to be too busy to reach out to a friend again.
She worked in the cubicle next to me for a number of years. She was funny -- sometimes wry, sometimes silly, sometimes caustic, sometimes ribald. She was blunt -- we all knew what she was thinking on any particular day about, say, our employers, or her husband. And she was giving and generous and often kind -- she seemed to always have food she would give to any co-worker in sight. Not just the usual office-cubicle food; she would have random Real Food items -- she might out of nowhere offer helpings of paella or something. I half-joked that someday I'd come in to see her roasting a pig on a spit (somehow anchored into our dingy carpet). She was also known for an incredible string of luck on scratch-off tickets -- minor winnings that often made their way into the foodstuffs she'd share.
After she left our workplace some years ago, I really didn't see much of her -- while we enjoyed each other's company, we weren't particularly close friends. I'd known her marriage was increasingly acrimonious, and that she frequently enjoyed more liquor than was good for her -- and in recent years the tidings I'd heard were increasingly serious: A separation. Poor health. A short period of jail time after a DWI.
By this time, the Facebook Era was in force, and she connected with me and several others, and we would often do short text chats -- ours, she usually initiated, late at night, when she had insomnia and I was one of the few contacts still awake (my current night shift makes me largely nocturnal). We kept things light, and I didn't pry for any information other than what she volunteered. We got together once at an area museum -- she'd enjoyed an undersea-vessel simulator it was temporarily offering -- and chatted; she was recovering from having been hit on her bicycle by two cars in one day. It seemed as if that incredible string of luck had vanished, or was running in reverse. And she was still, at core, kind: When she talked about the jail time, it was mostly expressing concern for the well-being of the women she met there and the trying lives they lived.
Last month, she ended one of our brief text chats -- which were usually scattershot, as they'd come while I was working and happened to have Facebook open in a window -- by asking me to call her sometime in the near future. And I planned to ... and kept planning to. But you know how these things go -- work gets busier, other Lifestuff happens, I had other calls to make (like when I heard about a friend's engagement out of the blue), and I didn't get around to making the call. And as I said, we weren't particularly close, just former co-workers who appreciated each other's eccentricities -- and I didn't really make getting in touch with her a priority.
Then a week or two passed without the midnight texts, and I didn't really think anything of it. Until a colleague told me the rumor: She had died.
It was friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend information, and for a day or two it didn't seem as though it was actually, you know, a Real Thing. Until another colleague talked with her mother, and her sister wrote a brief message on FB to people concerned: Yes, it was real. (The family had declined services or obituary.) And, apparently, alcohol-related.
When something like this happens, it seems we invariably start questioning whether we could have made a difference -- as in, you know, what if I had made calling her a priority. What if that one bit of human contact could have, if nothing else, staved off a descent, given her another day? But I know that's useless specualtion -- we'll never know what could have been. Many-worlds theory is, at least in practical application, essentially a parlor game. Maybe a call from me, or from any number of people in the same position -- people somewhere on the spectrum of acquaintance-to-friend who weren't particularly close to her but who liked her and had occasional contact with her -- might have made a difference. And it might not have. I don't blame myself, or anybody else -- for one thing, it's inaccurate; for another, it would end up making things All About Me instead of about her.
But. If there's one thing I do take from this: I live my life, and it's frequently a busy one, and like everyone else I have a lot going on. But I don't ever want to be finding myself asking the what-if questions again. I don't want to ever be desensitized or numbed or oblivious to signals people may be putting out.
Mostly, I don't ever want to be too busy to reach out to a friend again.
