I came to work on the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the office was still pretty quiet; a lot of people were still out. One of my friends, just down the hall, was out too. I missed her, but she often took Mondays off, and she'd been sick a lot lately, so I didn't worry too much. I looked forward to seeing her on Tuesday.
I found out on Monday afternoon that she'd died. Quite suddenly. She'd had something like a massive stroke on Saturday night, and had lasted perhaps a day, and that was that.
Ah, me.
She was so funny. She had a deep very droll voice, and a very dry sense of humor. I'd come up behind her, and she'd turn in her chair and look at me for a moment, and say: “What do you want?”
And we always cracked up.
A few days before Halloween this year, a lot of the parents in the office brought their kids in for trick-or-treat through the hallways. I could hear her from my office. She didn't know what the costumes were. One little girl was Wonder Woman. “Are you Super Woman?” my friend asked her. I could just hear that little girl fuming at her, from fifteen feet away, through the door. And my friend was giving little bags of chips to the kids for their treat. And with every kid, she'd say: “Do you like chips?”
During a quiet moment between trick-or-treaters, I finally went down the hall and told her: “I know who you are. You're that woman in the neighborhood who doesn't know what the hell is going on at Halloween. I'm surprised nobody has egged you yet.”
And we cracked ourselves up again.
The last words I ever heard from her were as she left on Wednesday night: “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said as she passed my office door.
God, I miss her.
Listen, kids: do not miss an opportunity to tell people you care for them, and do not miss an opportunity to be kind to them.
Because you just never know.
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