Thinking a little about her because of a post in another thread, I just Googled her and very sadly found her obituary. She wasn’t my girlfriend, just a friend nice enough to dance with her nerdy friend. This was an 8th grade school dance.
Weirdly she apparently stayed in the area overall; as I did but I never saw her after high school.
Sounds like she had a pretty good life. Married 34 years (so got married fairly young) and raised 2 kids.
So I didn’t really know this person anymore, but when I did know her she was a very nice person. It leaves feeling sad knowing she passed and I guess fairly sad realizing how old we have all gotten. 8th grade was a very long time ago.
ETA: It wasn’t COVID, it was cancer that took her.
I recently (maybe six months ago) looked up a high school crush. First girl I went to Homecoming with (which seemed a big deal at the time). I’d say she is one of two women in my life that “got away” (by which I mean I should have worked harder to keep…a lot harder).
She seems to be doing great and I am happy for her. I’m fine and doing well myself but there is still that “what if” in my head. I don’t dwell on it but it’s there.
That was 35+ years ago. Truly water long gone under the bridge. But it’s still there in some small way.
I’m sorry for your loss. You obviously cared for her because you thought of her and feel sad. I can relate.
After I lost my parents, I became involved in my first serious relationship within a year. I think I was trying to compensate for the loss and invested a lot of feeling in him. After graduation, my brother sold the house and we moved to Chicago, and I never saw him again. I think about him occasionally and wonder what became of his life. Were I to discover he was dead, I would feel sad about it also.
My freshman year of high school was hard. I went from a small private K-8 school with a graduating class of 8, to a large public high school with a freshman class of over 400. At the time I didn’t know I was autistic, so everything was a little harder than it should’ve been. The first day of freshman year this girl talked to me-- a nerdy, nervous, awkward 14-year-old boy-- and I left that first day not feeling quite as nervous, awkward or nerdy. She and I never dated or anything, but she always remembered my name and would talk to me throughout those four years of high school hell. Probably the only female friend I could claim in those years
Anyway, after high school, she got a job waitressing the graveyard shift at restaurant where me and my friends would frequent after the bar every weekend. She and I always remained friendly, she was a very nice person and we would chat a lot over those late-night potato skins and coffees. After a while, my friends and I stopped going to the bar and eventually that restaurant closed. She and I lost touch
Then a few years ago I found out she died of alcohol poisoning at the age of 33. This was about 16 years ago. Right about the time my wife and I were expecting our first kid, she spent a week brain-dead in a hospital bed before her dad decided to take her off life support. It broke my heart then and still does a little now. She never married or had kids, and she was an only child. Her death probably shouldn’t have hit me as hard as it did, but she was truly a lovely person to me in an otherwise torturous four years of my life. I wished we had stayed in touch better.
These kinds of deaths really make you feel the passage of time right in the ol’ gut.
I’m at that right age where I “like” reading HS obituaries.
No, no, not like that! These are people I used to see every day for between 4 and 13 years, and then suddenly graduation day was here, and I never saw them again or heard a word for 45 years.
I’m sad it takes an obituary, but i have a form of “closure”. I now know all about their lives, what they did, did they get married, have kids, whatever. And if it was someone I was smitten with,like I read last year, then I can see she did good. (I haven’t seen any of my classmates obituaries where I want to say “…and good riddance!”, but I bet they are out there, too.)
It’s interesting how the passing of people who you knew, but weren’t really tight with, can affect you.
I remember a couple of folks, one guy from high school who had a stroke at the age of maybe 50, and a girl I met post college, friend of a friend really, who died of an opiate overdose. I think about them way more now that they’re dead than I ever did when they were alive.
In the fairly short time between leaving the Navy and my getting married, I lost two of my Navy friends. Both obviously way too young.
One of them was a really good friend and should have been one of my groomsmen. Lukemia took him. My other friend killed himself under terrible circumstances.
But even the 4 friends that made it to my wedding I’ve lost contact with. One I email once in a blue moon. The other 3, nothing.
Probably doesn’t help I don’t Facebook.
I’m happy to say there were no fellow students from HS that I’ll be happy to see dead. One teacher passed and I’ll admit to not shedding a tear over that guy at least. Also one old boss from my last job before becoming a programmer. That guy was a complete sleezy asshole.
I had a good friend in high school. After we graduated we went our separate ways and I never saw him again. I found out years later that he had been shot dead in a dispute with his girlfriend only a few years after we left high school. I think about him regularly.
Can no longer remember her name. That was 8th grade. I went out with her once after high school, not a memorable date. That was almost 50 years ago, and almost that long since I’ve thought about her at all. And I just remembered her name, but I think it’s better left as a blurry memory.
Sometimes it’s better not to know. There was a lovely young woman who was briefly my lover in college (we both realized it would never work out for long) and I drifted away after our time together.
A couple of years back I found her online through a College update newsletter - she had gotten married shortly after college, had a child, and divorced. The child was autistic, and from there she fell into an anti-vaxx, then conspiracy theory black hole, and was supporting violence against those providing / forcing such things upon the ‘sacred bodies’ of the people.
During college, she was a devout wiccan (I know, I know) who preached that you should never wish harm upon another lest it return upon you three-fold.
My high school started a reunion page on Facebook which I have followed in a desultory way, but last year someone posted a list of everyone in our high school who had died, and I was shocked. I mean, we’re all in our early 60s, but still.
That sent me looking for old coworkers and college friends, and some of them had died as well.
The passing of people we grew up with, our friends / peers / classmates, brings our own mortality close to home. I recently found out a classmate died in a plane crash near where I live today (I don’t live near where she and I were classmates). We weren’t really friends but we were friendly, saying hi as we passed each other in the halls, that kind of thing. So we weren’t close but somehow her passing was such a shock. Maybe it had to do with how she died, in a plane crash.
Another girl, and she did not pass away, but I recently reconnected with the first girl I ever kissed. I don’t live near where I went to junior high school. She’s married with kids and it was a nice reconnecting, and meeting of her family.
And no I did not tell her she was my first kiss. But it was a nice memory to recall. There can be something magic about that first kiss. There was for me anyway.
I recently re-connected with a good friend I had 30+ years ago and lost touch.
I was shocked (and interested) to hear how many former classmates/friends were lost in those intervening years. I had not kept track but he had. I was a little shocked…also felt a tiny bit good I was the last one standing (not really last but felt a bit like it).
Mr VOW and I are both in our 70s. I posted about the utter surprise that our “tax guy” of over 40 years died last year. Other than it being damned inconvenient, he was a *contemporary. * And a friend.
Mr VOW’s brother had a long-overdue angiogram to check the condition of his cardiac arteries. Mr VOW had a “Widowmaker” heart attack in 2020, and we advised all his siblings to get checked out. Brother-in-law finally did. His Widowmaker cardiac artery was 80% occluded, and he stopped breathing in the cardiac cath lab. Off to surgery, where he had three bypasses done. He’s recuperating well.
The older you get, the more often mortality slaps you in face everywhere you turn.
When we were all college aged, I jokingly proposed a tontine, where we all bought something and the last survivor got it. One of the group derisively said “That sounds like something Col. Potter would do!”, and that ended that.
That guy turned out to be the first one of the group to die. Went into the hospital and never came out. He wasn’t even 60.
Potter’s tontine didn’t work out very well. I think there were at least 5 involved and Potter “won” while he was not even retired. That’s horrible mortality.
Potter’s true age varied by episode, as he said he lied about his age to get into WWI. Which would put him in his early 50s in Korea. In other episodes it’s stated that he’s in his early 60s.
Of course, it’s even easier to “kill off” characters that never even appear on screen than it is ones that are portrayed by actors.