Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Mourning the Unknown

Yesterday, for no reason that I can identify, I thought of someone with whom I worked in the publishing industry in New York in the late 1970s, before I moved to San Francisco. If she was still living in New York I thought I might look her up. Thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to "Google" her. Her name is unusual enough that she would be the only likely subject of the search.

The first thing in which I found her name was a New York Times wedding announcement in 1986. How nice! The second was also from the New York Times, a notice of her untimely death in 2005 "following an illness of several months". I gasped when I saw it.

Even though I haven't seen this person for well over thirty years, or even thought of her until yesterday, knowing that she is no more has brought a shadow to my day.

We populate the world within our own minds, and when we are not in communication with people we know, we assume that all stays the same outside our field of experience. But of course it does not, and I received a reminder of that today.

1 comment:

Marnie said...

I find the longer we live, the more we are reminded of how fragile life really is.