Damn

A very long time ago, I knew a young woman--younger than I am, but not as much as a decade younger--who was a fireball of emotion and action. Never stopping, always full of energy and huge plans, ready to break down or laugh wildly at a moment's notice, she was smart and strange in good ways. She set out to travel the world, and she did. She could never quite find happiness for long, though, and over the years she became more troubled than I knew. She dropped by and visited with some of us a few times over the last two decades or so, but basically we stopped having contact over twenty years ago.

I didn't get to my personal email today until very late tonight; it was a crazily busy day. When I did, I found a note from a mutual friend that this woman had killed herself a week ago in the country where she had been living.

I'm very sad. I remember the starry-eyed young woman. I remember her determination and her energy. I don't know much of anything about what happened in her life over those many intervening years, but whatever led her to that desperate point, I wish she'd made a different choice. More importantly, I wish she could have constructed a life that didn't lead her to want to die.

Damn.