Linda’s daughter Sandra was my best friend. For whatever reason, I never saw Sandra again. I do remember my mom’s sleepless nights and once I overheard her talking, she said “I should have gone and seen her, she called me to talk, but I was just too tired to go and visit her.” She felt guilt and pain about her friends death for many years. Every once in a while mom would remind me how she met Linda. It seems that after a painful miscarriage, Linda was walking our neighborhood and cut across the field close to our house. Mom said hello to her and they never stopped talking. Until.
About twelve years later, after I returned home to live, my mother had news for me. It seems that Sandra had committed suicide. I knew from my psychology studies that parents who commit suicide often pass the trait on to their offspring, but I didn’t know that it really happened until it did.
As children, Sandra and I had been very close. We were alike in many ways. We both liked to stay close to home and we both were enamored with our mothers, it was the kind of similarities that gave us an instant and unspoken understanding of each other. We were comfortable together and didn’t have much need for anyone else.
Then there is a gap, because I lost Sandra. Then there was an ending because Sandra lost her life. So who remembers her and her mother? Are these endings final? When you are gone and there are none to remember you, are you more gone than perhaps the day before, when you were remembered?
