I seem to spend so much time thinking about death lately.
I was absolutely gobsmacked yesterday when I IMed an old friend to get an update on her health — she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer less than two months ago — and the reply came from her sister that she had died Saturday.
Apparently her cancer was further along than she had realized.
I have lost three close friends in the last eight years, all of them younger than me. One died of a brain aneurysm, one of complications from diabetes and then my friend Christine the other day. It’s strange how quickly it can happen. Three months ago she didn’t know anything was wrong and now she’s gone.
I haven’t been affected that much by death in my own family other than a brother-in-law who died of cancer in 2020. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all lived long lives. Everyone in my generation — four siblings and four first cousins — are all past 60 and still alive.
I didn’t cry when my parents died or when we buried them at Arlington Cemetery. I did shed some tears after my friend Tom died in 2016 of an aneurysm. He was just 64 and deaths like that are like cosmic bad luck. I was sitting alone in the Denver airport waiting for a redeye flight home to Georgia and the tears came.
In the release Christine’s siblings sent out about her death, they said there wouldn’t be a funeral service, but they encouraged her friends to share memories of her at her best and brightest.
Christine and her son Jeff Miller
My memories of Christine are all old ones. The last time I saw her was 1973 or ’74, but in the early ’70s, three of us haunted the bars in Washington, D.C., three or four nights a week. It was me and two Chrises, one of them Christine and the other Christopher. Most of the time we went to the Montage on Connecticut Avenue, a bar that died to make way for a Metro station.
I remember when male Chris and female Chris would slow dance and he tried to hold her close, her response was just two words.
“No grinding.”
It’s funny how just typing those two words and remembering actually made me laugh.
Maybe the funniest story involved a fourth friend who will remain nameless. He was the only one of us whose life was on track at the time. He was the only one of us who had yet to lose his virginity, and with Christine’s family away for the weekend, she offered him the use of her bedroom while the other three of us went downtown.
Nice, huh?
Not so fast. For some reason, the three of us wanted to make sure that if our friend bragged about it, he would be telling the truth. So we came up with the idea of bugging the bedroom for proof. It was six years before “Animal House,” but we were thinking we might hear something like this.
The male Chris was an electronic wizard, so he set it up and warned us that what he had for a receiver might not work all that well.
As it turned out, it didn’t. Except for one cry of “Bullshit,” we didn’t hear anything at all on the tape. Which is just as well. Our friend told us nothing had happed, and all three of us were sort of embarrassed by what we had tried to do.
I finally confessed what we had tried to do many years later, only to learn that Christine had told him about it years before.
She was feisty and funny, but deep down she was good.