2014
cicely
maura @ 5:17 pm
It’s the last day of November, and I can definitively say that I am ready to put this month behind me. It’s been a hard past few weeks.
A close, longtime friend of ours died suddenly at the beginning of the month. She was our age which, I’d hasten to add, is much too fucking young to die.
We all first met in our first round of grad school, just over 25 (!) years ago. She was fun and smart and kind and funny. We lived through some of those early tough times in archaeology grad school together, then she switched to new media. During my break from grad school when I worked in new media too, a bunch of us went to a web conference in New Orleans (paid by our jobs!) which was delightful. We watched Buffy together and played Magic together and ate Japanese food together and she always talked to Gus like a person and he liked talking to her about the videogames she was playing (which were often the same ones we were playing). She came to Thanksgiving dinner at my family’s once in the ’90s which was a literal trip, and since we were here for Thanksgiving this year we’d planned to ask her if she wanted to come over for a casual Thanksgiving, NBD, Jonathan’s making 3 desserts and spatchcocking the turkey, want to stop by?
And now she is gone and it’s hard. Hard to drive by the Japanese restaurant where we took her for a belated birthday dinner in September, which was delicious, chicken hearts on a skewer and all. Hard to see a preview for the recent dumb Godzilla remake at the beginning of some other movie we Netflixed that I can’t remember right now, because it reminded me about the fun we had on that hot hot day 2 summers ago when we got Japanese dinner and saw Pacific Rim at the IMAX on the Upper West Side which was awesome. Harder still to see ads for Mockingjay, because we’d seen the last 2 Hunger Games movies with her at the Ziegfeld because the screen is hyoooooooge and now we can’t see this one with her because she’s gone.
She’d lived in NYC for as long as we’d known her, as long as we’ve been here, and her family’s in the South. We’ve been helping as much as we can with arrangements and dealing with her apartment, such a small thing to do for so many years of friendship. I wish I could do more. We’ve had Twitter and email conversations with her other friends, friends we don’t know, and some of her neighbors too. We’re still not on Facebook but of course there’s conversation there as well that we’ve heard second hand. She was well-loved, and it is lovely to see these tributes.
But I’m sad, still sad.
2 comments on “cicely”
Thanks Emily.
Maura,
I am sorry for loss. It’s so hard to understand why anyone dies, especially when it is someone you love.
— Emily