Forgive Me, Nechama

The other night, I googled my former best friend. We hadn't spoken in years, and the last contact I had with her was twenty years ago after I'd moved across the country and she wrote me a note telling me she missed me and that she thought of me every morning when drinking coffee from a mug I'd given her many years before. Mad at her at the time for what I though was ignoring me after her daughter was born, I showed the letter to my then boyfriend, and he suggested that I ignore it, so I tossed the it aside and never answered.

Still, I thought of her from time-to-time over the years and tried looking for her on classmates.com, but never found her. I looked for her younger sister, too, but nothing came up. I tried googling her, but a lot of people have the same name, and I knew that none of them were her.

The other day, I decided to type in her name along with that of her husband on google and found an obituary with her name on it. My friend, Karen, had died suddenly two years ago at 51 and one-half.

I will never have the chance to apologize to her or beg her forgiveness. I will never be able to reminisce with her about the time I took the five-hour bus trip to visit her at her Michigan college campus one winter break. Standing in the corridor in her dorm one morning, I announced said I was hungry. While my voice rolled down the corridor, she turned to me and said, "You are so stupid. Do you want to get us kicked out of here?" Then we snuck into the cafeteria and ate. Or the evenings we snuck into a community center's garden and planted a sign with a cryptic message on it. The sign made it into the local paper and no one ever knew who it was, until now.

I now see that Karen was about the only friend I ever had, the only where that was that easy repartee, the one that made hours seem like minutes and how many friends do you get like that? Like my father once said, "You are lucky if you get one friend. All the rest will be acquaintances."

I found her husband's name on a social networking site and emailed him. He said she had wondered why I never answered her, and all I could do was apologize for being foolish and immature.

I will light a candle for her and say Yizkor, a memorial prayer that is said during Yom Kippur and on the last day of Passover, and I will buy some trees in her memory in Israel because I know how she loved plants and trees.

If only she could know how sorry I am and that I hope in some way that she will forgive me, if I could just learn to forgive myself.