In 1975 I met a fellow student at the University of Delaware. Mary's father had just died and we found ourselves talking endlessly and getting to really like one another.
We rode our bicycles everywhere and cooked and ate great food and when the semester was over we bicycled to Allentown, PA to see her mother.
By the following December we headed down to Georgia for their family Christmas gathering, and it felt like there was good reason for the family to be meeting me.
Soon after she broke it off, and later I found out she had fallen for a less-than-ethical, married professor twice our age.
I still feel like she was emotionally trying to replace the father she'd lost.
Over the years we stayed in touch, she in Atlanta and I in Delaware. Every March we'd exchange newsy birthday cards, our births being all of 14 days apart. We kept our respective distances; her life was hers and mine was mine, but there was always, always a ton of mutual respect, despite the pain of our parting.
This last March she wrote of how the graphic design business was slow but improving, how she was traveling to Europe with her brother and his family, and running in marathons. I last saw her when I was at a nursing conference in Atlanta in 1999. I'd brought a three inch high stack of photos and we ate Indian food and she got to see my five children growing up in pictures. She'd never married. We walked all over Stone Mountain that next day and talked of people who had been in our lives back in 1975 to 1976.
Tonight my wife texted me asking how soon I would be home. I thought she was annoyed I was again at my parents' place for endless hours helping them with their latest crises.
When I got home she told me I had received a call from Mary's brother; calling to say that Mary had succumbed to breast cancer...
I'll be in Atlanta this thursday for the Celebration of Mary's Life.