A good friend comes into life late and leaves too soon
It’s funny how you can be friends with someone these days over
the Internet, a person you rarely see but is no less dear for that.
And then when you lose that person, it’s no less devastating.
Our path to friendship was a little odd, but perhaps not so
strange as things go these days. Barbara and I both went to Harbor
High School in Santa Cruz; when I joined up with Facebook a few
years ago, she was one of the people from our class who found me
there.
A good friend comes into life late and leaves too soon
It’s funny how you can be friends with someone these days over the Internet, a person you rarely see but is no less dear for that. And then when you lose that person, it’s no less devastating.
Our path to friendship was a little odd, but perhaps not so strange as things go these days. Barbara and I both went to Harbor High School in Santa Cruz; when I joined up with Facebook a few years ago, she was one of the people from our class who found me there.
Barbara had taken a much different path than I had. She’d continued living in Santa Cruz, became a nurse, and then took care of her ailing mother for a long time. I had moved around, worked for newspapers, got married and had kids.
To be honest, when she friended me on Facebook, I barely remembered her. And then we started messaging each other, and somehow we ended up knowing each other better than we ever had back in our teens.
“I don’t know if you remember me at all, I don’t remember too many people from HS,” she wrote me in the beginning. “But I do remember you. And I kept to myself, due to my fear of no one liking me.”
Barbara had a lot of friends on Facebook and was constantly posting pictures of the flowers in her garden, as well as chiming in on other’s posts. Her sweet spirit shone through whatever she did.
Barbara and I had some things in common, including the fact that both our fathers were doctors, we grew up in the same area, and in high school, we both wanted to be writers. I did go on to be a writer; Barbara wanted to get back into writing and photography, and we had many conversations about that.
She wanted to write but was not sure what to write about or how to go about doing it, and I told her what I tell everyone: Just write. That’s what makes a writer.
Barbara had a grave heart condition that kept her confined to home much of the time; she wanted to write about that, about what it was like taking care of her mother in those final years, about her family, and about medical matters. I encouraged her to go with whatever it was that was most meaningful to her.
I saw her at Christmas time when we went to a concert in Santa Cruz with some other high school friends, and she looked great. We talked for a long time and had a wonderful evening, and made plans to get together soon.
It never happened.
Although we could not know it then, her time was running out. She wrote to me recently, “We’ll get together, cause I’m going to prove those Mds wrong, again. I did it in 95. They said ‘you’ve got 1 day to 1 mo. to live.’ And here it is almost 16 yrs later. So I believe in positive thinking and prayer.”
And yet it was not enough. Barbara Terry passed away recently, June 4, at Stanford Hospital, in the arms of people who loved her. There has been an outpouring of love and emotion on her Facebook page.
For someone who was afraid no one would like her, Barbara left this life with a multitude of friends and people who cared about her deeply. I hope she felt loved, in the end.
And if not for Facebook, I never really would have known the real Barbara. Who says technology is heartless?
