I Keep Dredging Up the Past.
More than a year ago, I browsed the internet trying to find Debbie, one of my best friends from college. She and I had laughed uncontrollably for our entire freshman year, but we’d lost touch. I couldn’t remember her married name, so I typed in her maiden name and her husband’s first name, and I hoped for the best.
That’s how I found her obituary. She had died nearly six months prior.
I felt like I had been kicked in the gut. There would be no more laughter, no one with whom I would have that exact connection. No one who would remember those nights where we rolled on the floor in hysterics. She was just gone. It didn’t seem real, and it certainly didn’t seem right.
Then last week, I got a notification on Facebook and there was my high school friend, Paula, and a link to her obituary. Paula and I hung out a lot – at the skating rink, at the pizza place after the rink closed, and at her house where she had two dogs that were so tiny, I thought they were a pair of slippers. We went to Lake Erie together where she taught me to waterski and hang out on the beach every night. And now … she was just gone.
Both Debbie and Paula left my life decades earlier, of course, but it still forced a pause to read their obituaries.
A couple of days later, for the first time in years, I felt compelled to look up an ex-boyfriend. Unlike my female friends, this guy wasn’t my favorite person. He was abrasive and obnoxious and he lied (my least favorite attribute). I just Googled his name, followed by the word “obituary.”
And there he was, looking exactly like he’d always looked, next to his 2020 death notice. Though it didn’t say as much, I imagine this full-time smoker, who had apparently moved to Florida, was a victim of COVID.
On a roll, I then found obituaries for another ex boyfriend, and a dear friend who’d read a poem in my wedding, and my middle school crush.
I’m not sure why I feel compelled to keep looking for obituaries of people who were close to me in my past. I imagine most people just move on, find new friends, ditch the distant past and keep the happy memories. But I keep dredging up the past and adding another, more current layer.
I’m interested not so much in their deaths as finding out what they did with their lives.
I once spent years trying to locate my 4th grade friend. When I finally found her, I messaged that I’d always considered her to be my “best friend” although I hadn’t seen her since 7th grade. When I told her how many times I’d moved since knowing her, she responded, “With that many moves, it makes sense that you would hold on tightly to past relationships.”
Her response to hearing from me was more realistic: she hadn’t thought about me in years, and she wasn’t about to renew a friendship with someone she considered a complete stranger.
I wonder if my need to revisit the past is an effort to find stability in my life. I wonder, “What if I’d still been hanging out with this person? What would that have been like?”
And then I wonder how hanging onto that relationship would have changed me. Because inevitably, my life has moved drastically away from all of them.
And each obituary reminds me to be grateful that my life is still life. Maybe that’s what matters most.