Reconnect, now.

"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?" 
– Stephen Levine

A woman I used to work with in Washington, DC, died on January 12, 2005.

I was shocked and angered on many levels: first, I was shocked that she was 72 years old. Having never known her age when I worked with her, it’s just that I believed her to be closer to my age than to my mother’s.   Secondly, that she died of cancer – I’m furious that people continue to suffer from and die of cancer in such numbers. (Just an aside: How does this continue to happen? Where are our funding priorities in this country? Is there something I should be doing?). And thirdly, that unbeknownst to me, she lived (and died) just 3 miles from my house.

We worked together in D.C. for 8 years; I always loved her pixie sense of humor and fun. She was good at her job and supportive and just a bright light–some people are. When my oldest daughter was born, my colleague gave her a little stuffed seal that Emma still loves these 12 years later. The gift was a seal because her name was "Ceel." She was playful like that.

After I left that job, we stayed in touch for a while, and then not. Life just went on; I traveled too much, and we lost touch. Ceel wrote a series of wonderful, empowering books for girls about career options, like Cool Careers for Girls as Environmentalists and Cool Careers for Girls in Construction that I bought for my daughter over the years. But as much as I thought about her every once in a while and wondered where she was and how she was doing, I never reconnected with her.

A mutual friend emailed her obituary to me last week.

Ceel moved to Asheville in 1999; my family moved here in 2002. We didn’t know. We were just a few miles apart for over 2 years and didn’t know it. I couldn’t have saved her from cancer, but perhaps I could have helped her, learned more from her, told her how much my daughter enjoyed her books, made her laugh, laughed with her, read her poems by Billy Collins in an overly dramatic voice, opened her window shades for her…something.

It’s too late now.

Her death somehow reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s "Mrs Dalloway" in which Clarissa often muses on the connections between people:

"It was unsatisfactory..how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter–even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that…perhaps–perhaps."

Ceel lived and died just miles from me and we never rekindled that happy spark that we had when we worked together. Somehow it feels all the worse because she was so close. Are there people from your past that you think about and wonder about and would be sad to find it’s too late to reconnect? Who are they? Where are they?

~*~ 37 days: do it now challenge ~*~

It’s a simple challenge: pick up the phone and call someone you need and want to reconnect with. Find them. Tell them what they mean to you, how they’ve influenced the way you think and see the world, or just how much you miss them and think of them. That’s all. You know what? It’s a cliche, but true: tomorrow just might be too late.

"Much unhappiness has come into the world because of…things left unsaid." -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious thing." -Randolph S. Bourne

(If you have girls in your life, either your own or those of friends or family members, Ceel’s books are perfect gifts to help them see that they have many, many options in life. Let’s keep Ceel’s dream and legacy of options and empowerment for girls alive.)

Note to Self:

DONATE LIFE

Death is a fact of life. Organ and tissue donation can save lives. Tell your family of your intent to donate. Having that little heart on your driver’s license (in the U.S.)  isn’t enough – if you don’t also have a signed and witnessed donor card in your wallet, get one.