I’m at the age now where I’m starting to lose people, and I’m taking it hard. I just got a message from a friend on the island, telling me that my old friend Sally had died. She was about 88 or so, and had been in really poor health lately, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected. But still.
Sally and I were connected in the oddest and most profound of ways. When Shel and I were thinking of moving to the island, back in 2000, we stayed in a B&B while we were looking around. And that was Sally’s B&B, and her Alabama drawl led us to discover that Sally and Shel’s mother Margaret had known each other in Auburn, Alabama, long before Shel was born. That was mind-boggling to all of us, and caused Shel to say “I can’t go anywhere without my Mom finding out about it!”
And it happened that in that B&B was a newspaper article about a writer’s group on the island. As it turned out, the article was there because that was Sally’s writing group, and it would be meeting the very next day. I’d never written, but thought I might like to, and so she invited me to join them. I enjoyed that afternoon so much that I became a member of that group, and for years we wrote faithfully together once a week.
One thing that happened as a result is that I became a writer, bit by bit. I started in that group, then dared to write here, on French Letters, and then started writing for magazines. And now I have a job where my title is Writer in Residence, and I owe all that to Sally.
The other thing that happened is that as soon as I heard about Sally I immediately thought that I had to tell Shel, because he always remained floored that Sally and Margaret had known each other, and because she was our first friend on the island. And I was thinking that Shel would have wanted to tell Margaret about Sally’s passing, because even though they’d lost touch, there was still that connection.
But then I realized that there is no one left to tell. That story was entirely about people who are now gone from this life, first Margaret, then Shel, and now Sally. Somehow I’m left being the keeper of the story, even though so much of it belonged to them.
So now I’m telling you about it, so that these stories do not fade away forever, and so that the memories springing from that momentous coincidence, what my own mother would have called a fortuitous concourse of circumstance, have a place to live on.
What kind of story is it where all the main characters die at the end? It’s the story of life.