in memory

Remembering an old friend who died young. It seems cliche to say she was, among our group of high school friends, the most vibrant, most loving, most generous. As if her death — shocking, tragic as it was — romanticizes her life.

But she was. She was cheerful and enthusiastic while the rest of us were honing our cynicism. She was sincere while we were caustic, brittle. She was unpretentious, grounded, and kind. Which must, at the time, seemed to the rest of us, a little like weakness.

The memories I have of her — fleeting, blurred, softened — will seem like they were drawn directly from the script of an 80s teen movie. But I'm telling you, they were all true.

Dancing on her bed, using her hairbrush (me) and curling iron (her) as microphones, singing along to More than a Feeling, and Come Sail Away. Journey’s Faithfully. Not the typical playlist for the girls at The School of the Holy Child, but she had two older brothers she looked up to, and I’m guessing they had some influence over her musical proclivities.

Driving around in her hand-me-down, oversized American car. (Could it even have been a Ford Thunderbird?) It was white with gold and burgundy trim. She called it Bertha. She drove with the windows rolled down so we could smoke. Even when it was cold. I worked at a bakery then, and sometimes, she'd pick me up after work on a Saturday afternoon, and I'd have surreptitiously crammed a cake box with brownies and chocolate lace cookies, linzer tarts, and raspberry ruggelah, and we'd keep the box open between us on the long front seat, on the way to play rehearsal or to our friend's pool a few towns over, or to an ill-conceived party hosted by friends of her brothers, or to the mall. Singing, smoking, making ourselves sick on all that pilfered pastry.

It was cystic fibrosis. She sat us all down one night to tell us, assuring us all that she was mostly fine, but might need to rest now and then (she did) and should probably stop smoking (she did not). We had seen the symptoms of course — bronchitis, coughing, shortness of breath — but none of us knew what we were seeing.

The two times we fought — I mean, really fought — loud, passionate shouting — can tell you a lot about who she was, who I was at that time. The first was at a party in her neighborhood in the late fall. All her brother's friends were home from college. We were drunk on wine coolers and jello shots and the guy who had driven up, hours earlier, in a cute little Jeep with no doors, and had briefly made eye contact before heading to the kitchen for beers, asked me if I wanted to go for a drive.

She would not let me. Fiercely protective and smarter than all of us, she said she would never forgive me if I went. I didn't know him, she said, she didn't know him, we had all been drinking. She shouted, pleaded, followed me out to the driveway where he was waiting, bemused. She dragged me back inside.

I won't let you, she said. I will not let you.

A few years later, I was hired to direct a summer theatre production of Dracula and she was my stage manager. After a few rounds of auditions, we had the whole play cast, except the leading role. After hours of deliberation, she suggested she could contact a cousin, who was an actor in New York, to see if he might do it. She spoke to him, cajoled him, and finally, he agreed to come to the suburbs nearly every night for a month of rehearsals and two weekends of shows.

What happened after is a little fuzzy, but what matters is that a week into rehearsals, we met an actor who was the perfect Dracula. A friend of a friend, a transfer student from a nearby town. I can't remember the details of how he came to us exactly, but what it meant was that now we had two leading men, and I had already decided which one I wanted.

In the parking lot of the converted barn where we held rehearsals, we paced and argued for what seemed like hours. He was doing me a favor, she said. We can't do that to him.

It's not right.

Years later, reading management and leadership books, and trying to grow into jobs I was not particularly well-suited for, I would think of this play as one of those moments, when I decided to be one way and not another. When I made a choice. Her love, her loyalty was centered on the relationship, the connection. Mine was functional.

It didn't matter much, in the end. Her cousin was relieved to go back to his life, and rehearsals went on, life went on, the shows were performed in the auditorium of the town library and raised some money for the local theatre group. We put on a great show, or we didn't. Everyone went back to school and then autumn blanketed over everything with its transient splendor.

She died ten years later. During those intervening years, we lost her father, my father, my mother. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding. She visited after the birth of my first child. She got married and moved to the city. 

The last time I saw her, we met for dinner in New York. We said our goodbyes near the entrance to one of those underground parking lots. It was a damp night, and I remember puddles, rainwater seeping through cracks in the concrete. We hugged and as I walked back to my car, I turned to wave again, and she was smiling and waving back.

It was night and it was dark and the only light was the single bulb from the booth where the attendant sat, but when I looked back, I swear to you, I swear it, I saw her there, as if she was floating just above the ground — beatific, luminous, awash in light.