old friend

A couple of weeks ago my mother, who is a hospice chaplain, sent the family an article from the NY Times about hospice chaplains. I read part of it, it was two pages long, and left it open on my desktop to finish later. As is my habit, it remained there for a long time as I kept seeing it and not having time to finish it. But last night I was trying to catch up on old reading and instead of ignoring this article as I’d been doing for weeks, I decided to simply finish it. I scanned the first page for a review and clicked to page two. In the very first paragraph it mentioned a name I recognized as someone who was using a hospice chaplain to help her die. I thought, well there have to be several people with this name and I continued on. But like coming upon a wreck that’s broken apart and strewn pieces over a debris field I found more clues: she lived on the lower east side of Manhattan (so did my Karen Gilbert), she was the same age as my Karen Gilbert. At least she was the age I thought my Karen Gilbert was, I’d not communicated with my old friend in over 24 years. We’d been in graduate school together, working on our Master’s degrees. She married a lovely man, a guy we’d all thought was pretty cool. The wedding was in Goshen, NY – a bunch of us took the train up. Her wedding cake was homemade with loving hands, not bakery bought, decorated with real flowers. We kidded often about how her husband, Paul, was one of the few good men in the world and how mostly they were just pretty well useless. When she got pregnant I asked what she’d do if she had a boy and she answered that would be bad because then she would have to leave it at the hospital. Her beautiful baby girl came home a few months later. Thanks be to the gods for that one, huh?

The hospice chaplain article said its Karen Gilbert had died of colon cancer; and a narrated slide show was attached to the piece. I still hadn’t discovered the hulking shell of the wreck that my debris field was pointing toward. But when I played the slide show, there was her husband’s name, Paul Gregory, yes that was him. I knew it was impossible that all these clues could not be adding up to my old friend and there in the slide were pictures of her. It was difficult to find in the photos of a 56-year-old woman dying of colon cancer the same woman I’d known a quarter century ago. But when it showed photos of her and Paul from their wedding I knew my long ago friend had died on September 29, of this year attended by her friends, husband, and a Buddhist hospice chaplain.

How odd, to find out someone you knew a long time ago as a vibrant young woman has died a sad and painful death – or any kind of death. How should one react to this sort of news? Should you be sad even though you’ve not seen each other in years? Years of missed opportunity for reconnection have passed and now the chance is over. Are you allowed to miss a person you haven’t talked to in two and a half decades, someone you’ve not been close to, someone who simply passed through your life for a few years – years ago? One death summons all loss and particularly Karen Gilbert’s death for me. The article mentioned her sadness and guilt at having to leave her children. She died of colon cancer, the same disease that claimed my mother, who also had to leave her child. I recall our months and months together in classes, late night conversations, the people we knew. I think about how many of them have died in the intervening years – the roommate I lived with when I met Karen died of breast cancer several years ago. I think of the number that counted her years and it seems foreign to me. How could we be that age? How could we die at that age? How can we leave children, husbands, a life well-made? How could we have come from graduate students to here?