Press Send
This morning I got a “Facebook memory” from my long-ago high school friend. I wanted to reach out to her, but didn’t. Mind you, I graduated from high school almost fifteen years ago. Mind you, she’s dead.
When I imagine this friend now, I imagine her on the doctor’s inspection table, being told her ovarian cancer had a 20% survival rate. I only know that fact now (and isn’t everything we remember influenced by the future?) because my ballet teacher recently got diagnosed with the same stage of ovarian cancer. Her GoFundMe page relayed this brutal fact: by the time we feel any pain, it’s already too late.
By the time people become only Facebook memories, it’s hard to remember them except in their most glaring circumstances, in a doctor’s office where I wasn’t even present.
In her case, she lives on in this short piece of writing, my reflections of her now fact for the reader, when my memory of her is very much flawed, and only centered on my view of myself.
For, what else does a girl do in high school but relate the rest of the world to herself, first and foremost?
In high school, I didn’t know a thing about working memory, or death when we least expect it.
It’s not fair, perhaps, that this is what I think about when I think of her. She posted on Instagram two months before she died, saying: my body has changed so much because of chemo - “I don’t recognize myself in the mirror most days.” I thought of my lame attempts at diminishing my own bodily frame, even during the time in high school when I knew her. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. No: it’s like comparing a death sentence, on one hand, to an insecure white girl with a complex on the other. We were perhaps never going to be the same.
I wonder where she’d be now, had she lived longer. I wonder if I’d still see her social media posts and flip past them, or linger on them. If I’d see the version of herself she’d want me to see.
Or maybe that’s just me relating the rest of the world to myself, first and foremost.
When her sister posted she was dying, and to reach out now with any last words to her, I wrote a short, uninspiring paragraph - that I would miss her and remember her. But then I thought, she doesn’t need to hear from her long-lost “friend” on her deathbed. I was probably as self-centered then as I am now.
That’s perhaps not fair to myself, is it? Harsh, I guess. Looking back, I was probably right that she wouldn’t want to hear from me. But how would I know?
This morning, when I got my “Facebook memory”, I pressed “post”, to share it. Or maybe I didn’t.
What do you think I did?
It’s never too late, I suppose.
She deserves to be remembered, a phoenix out of her own ashes.
No matter how flawed memory is.