While I was in Doha this last September, one night I had a dream about Lisa.
I’ve obliquely mentioned how she had an impact on my life a couple of times. The times I’ve talked about being in San Francisco, for example, were times when I was visiting her. (This story where I was brushing my teeth and heard an amazing song? It was in her bathroom.) When I was talking about being stuck in 1992 (like here and here)?
Even there, in that first “here”, I mention “While in Qatar, I had a dream about one of my friends from college and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks thinking about various things related to 1992.”
Well, that dream was about Lisa.
Lisa was someone that I had the hugest crush on in 1992 and we dated a little bit but she was on a journey of discovery where she was finding out that she wasn’t heterosexual after all. I was her friend during that and gave her all the support I could (while, you know, still trying to get her to date me as well… and, in recent years, I’ve come to realize that I wasn’t a very good friend (or boyfriend, for that matter) during that period). The dream got me to check Facebook and see if she was on it and she was… then I checked to see if she was active and it looked like she was… so I took a deep breath and I wrote her this:
Hey. Hello. Hi.
I suppose if I had to explain why I was writing this it’d be because I had a dream and you were in the dream and the only thing I did in the dream was ask you for your forgiveness. When I woke up, I felt really sad and I told Maribou about the dream I had and she talked to me about it and…
Well, I go on ramble for a bit. I talked about my life now. I talked about Maribou. I talked about 1992 and 1993. I apologized for not being a good friend or a good boyfriend. I told her that I hoped she was well.
A day later, she wrote me back and she seemed very happy and posted about her life now with her partner and she waved away the request for forgiveness and told me that if anybody should be asking for it, it should be her and she told me some stuff to give me more perspective about what she was going through in 1992 and 1993 and we chatted back and forth and she updated me about her family and I updated her about my family.
And a couple of days ago, Facebook reported that she was dead.
Contact your friends that you still think about all the time but haven’t talked to for a while.
So… what are you listening to?
Love you sweetie. I’m glad you were able to reconnect, even though what happened is heart-breaking.
(And I bet you were both better friends than you remembered being.)Report
Dude, I’m sorry. That’s the horribly normal part of aging; folks you know start to die. I’m FB friends with a dude I served with who has kidney cancer now. He’s still alive and fighting, but I worry about him, and then feel guilty for my own worries about mortality.Report
I am terribly sorry Jay.
A few years ago I got an FB message from my college girlfriend. But I didn’t read it, ’cause I really don’t facebook and it sat unnoticed for about six months. So, I was at the dentist or something banal like that, killing time and decided to read FB, saw I message and opened it up. It was her telling me that her husband, who oddly enough had been my brother’s roommate in college and our boss at the pizza place where we met, had just died from cancer, before hitting 50.
We weren’t close by that time in our lives, and no closer now. The tone of the message was her simply letting me know, as she had been coming to grips with this for months at that point. And had waited months before passing the news on, with months passing before I read the message.
None of that made it any easier.Report
I’m so sorry. I lost a close friend from graduate school a couple years ago. Pancreatic cancer. It feels like a blink of the eye between getting the news she was sick and that she gone. We were literally making arrangements to go see her in hospice when her husband called and said she had passed.Report
Yeah, got an e-mail this morning that a man I used to do Youth Group with (back when he and I and another woman ran the teenaged youth group at church) died of cancer. He had been unwell for a while but had been away from church for even longer (his mother was not well).
The thing that hits me hardest at the moment is that I’ll never hear his laugh or his slightly-sarcastic humor again….Report
Well, that took an unexpectedly dark turn. I’m sorry to hear that your friendship won’t be able to blossom again.
At our age (I’m 54), I suppose it begins to become a bit of a fact of life when friends begin to die. I lost one several years ago, and the news was rather jarring.Report
I’m part of a group of people who’ve worked together on and off for about twenty years, late 80s to early 10’s, and we’ve mostly stayed in touch. Now that we’re all older and more settled down, it’s unlikely I’ll work with the vast majority of them ever again. Which, when I think about it, makes me sad.
The first one of us went a few months ago. Cancer. Many of us got together to have a few drinks in his memory. That’s going to be happening more and more.Report
I’m sorry this story ended the way it did.
The first part made me think of this song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijt4exi5HGwReport
Yeah, thanks. That’s a lovely song, too.
I’ll think of her when I hear it from now on.Report
Thanks to all and condolences to all.
I wish I had talked to her last year.
I wish I had dreamed about her last year.Report
My brother went through this with his old college roommate, except he reached out a month too late. Jaybird’s right – reach out now.Report