Because I knew you

I sent the Christmas cards early this year, and felt that now annual pang, editing the list, sometimes removing a name, sometimes reducing the names from two to one. 

I met Caitlin in university, through a mutual friend.  She had a thoughtful energy that fitted her in well with our circle, which, up until then, had been mostly made up from those of us who had attended the same high school. She was slightly older, but looked younger.

As we drew closer, she had a front-row seat to the very beginning of my relationship with the Resident Fan Boy.  On the day I married him, she drove me to the church, because I didn't want a fancy car, just a sensible, kind, and dependable friend.

She moved miles away, up to the northern coast of British Columbia.  She married a younger fella, and I was delighted to attend her wedding in Victoria.  They set about building a home in the small community where she taught, and having two carefully-spaced children, as blond as her husband and herself.  I saw her every couple of years, as long as she had family in our area.

After I moved to Hades, I saw her once, when she accompanied her son on a school field trip to the Nation's Capital.  I had lived there less than a year, and was still in culture shock.

I did not know then that I would not see her again.  Not long after her trip east, she developed ovarian cancer.  She'd caught it early and fought it off.  A few years later, it returned, and once again, she prevailed, taking advantage of early detection and good medical advice.

About two years ago -- dammit -- it came back.  My heart sank, but hers didn't.

She set up a blind e-mail for those of us who wanted updates, always written with cheerful and realistic optimism, detailing the latest treatments and giving family news.

Finally, the message I'd been dreading:  her physician was discontinuing her medication because it wasn't adding to the quality of her life, nor to the length of it.  Even then her quiet buoyancy tempered the news.  The cancer was slow-growing and although the prognosis was a couple of months, she had hopes of making it to her daughter's wedding in the spring.

She was gone within three weeks.

I found out in that twenty-first century way; I opened up Facebook one evening, and saw a beautiful recent portrait of her, then realized it had been posted by her family.

A friendship is, by its very nature, symbiotic, though I can't say what my contribution to it was.  Steadfastness?  Loyalty?  I'm pretty good at those.

Caitlin was a model for me, of grace, good manners, and patience.  I bought an SLR camera when I saw her pictures of northern BC.  She guided me to a counselling centre, when I had the crushing realization that I was not what my future in-laws had in mind for their precious son, and there, I learned, at least intellectually, that this didn't matter.  Caitlin's acceptance helped enormously.

I listen to the words of "For Good" from the 2003 Broadway musical Wicked, written and composed by Stephan Schwartz (responsible for, among other things, Godspell), and based on Gregory Maguire's "origin" novel.  It's not a perfect fit; the characters of Elphaba and Glinda, the late-adolescent/young-adult versions of the Wicked Witch of the West, and the Good Witch of the North, are "frenemies".  Caitlin was my friend, period.

However, much of this song rings true. And I should have told her, while she was still on the planet.

In this version, Idina Menzal and Kristin Chenoweth, who created the characters on Broadway, are singing about a dozen years later.