Tomorrow, on Halloween, I will attend your memorial service. I wasn’t part of “making the arrangements,” as one inevitably says of planning funerals and memorials. Your family picked the date. I don’t know if they picked it because it was Thursday or because it was Halloween. Perhaps Thursday was simply the best time for them. It doesn’t matter that it’s Halloween—except you’d like that. It would make you laugh. It would give you a great story to tell.
We weren’t close friends, and we didn’t socialize outside of work, and oh, my god, you were a talker. None of that matters, either. What matters is that you were a kind, generous, warm-hearted person. You had a forgiving spirit and a good sense of humor.
You died unexpectedly at home. You were alone, except for your cats and your dog. Everyone who knew you knows how much you loved them and what a wonderful home you gave them. Your family is taking them. If they treat them half as well as you did, your animal companions have good lives ahead of them.
I’m not bothered by the fact that you were alone, because dying is something each of us does alone. We may be surrounded by friends and family members, but the act itself happens only to the person who dies. Something else happens to the rest of us: We are stunned and saddened. We grieve. We deny. “But I just saw her last week!” We catch ourselves wanting to post a funny link on your Facebook page because it’s something that would be right up your alley. We look at your page and see the things people have written, photos of you that show your gorgeous hair and genuine smile. We think of you when we’re doing ordinary things. We think how surreal it is that you’re no longer here.
I am bothered by the fact that you weren’t done. Some people are ready to die. You were not, and the arbitrary nature of your death leaves us reeling. You had decades left, until you didn’t. All of us have known people who weren’t done. If we haven’t known them personally, we’ve seen them on the news. I’m glad your death wasn’t violent. I’m glad it didn’t make the ten o’clock news.
Someone speculated that you had an aneurysm. The autopsy may tell us something, and knowing the cause of death may give some people closure. It will enable other people to say, “If she’d done x, she wouldn’t have died. I do x, so I won’t die.” But we can’t death-proof ourselves. None of us will leave this world alive. We can do our best to take care of these fragile bodies we inhabit, and we can hope that we’ll be lucky.
A mutual friend said the thing she admired most about you was that you were always authentically yourself. I’d never thought about that before, but I’ve thought about it a lot since she said it, and I agree with her. You were who you were, unapologetically, confidently, and happily.
I don’t know what your belief system was, whether you thought there was a heaven or what your version of heaven would be. I imagine it would be a place where you were surrounded by your friends, both two-legged and four-legged. A good glass of wine would be in your hand. You would be laughing. I don’t believe in any such place, although I understand why people do. It gives them comfort.
What I do know is that you will be missed, and you will be remembered, and you would see the humor in your Halloween memorial. Tomorrow, I may cry, but I also hope I’ll smile, just a little, in memory of you.