Recently two long-time friends disappeared from my computer screen. No emails, no Facebook posts.
CaroLyn was my college roommate at the University of Michigan. I was an undergrad, she was a graduate student when we met, already engaged to marry. After graduating and marrying she moved to Texas City. There she and her husband raised four children and she taught linguistics at the community college. We started corresponding very early, first writing letters and later by email. Whenever she or her husband came to the New York area, we saw each other. It was during one of these trips that we met her husband and became fond of him. I traveled to Houston only once and of course took the bus to Texas City to see her. However, although I learned quite a bit about her children from her letters, I never met them.
Monique, a noted pianist and piano teacher, became my husband’s friend in Venezuela, part of a circle of young French people, most of them artists, living and working there. When I married Marius and started traveling to Venezuela I met Monique. She was then already the mother of two girls, Ondine and Ariane. I cannot remember how old the girls were at the time but I have a memory of young teenagers. Monique, having divorced, eventually moved to Honk Kong with her new husband, a violinist with the Honk Kong Symphony.
Ondine and Ariane, came to the U.S to attend college and then moved to the New York area. It was at that time that Ondine lived with us for a while in our New Jersey home. We became good friends and exchanged letters when she moved on. Ondine led a peripatetic life. Her father lived in London, her mother in Honk Kong and she had grandparents in France. Eventually Ondine joined her mother and stepfather in Honk Kong where she became involved with a man and had a daughter of her own.
Again, the family moved. Monique got a job as a professor of piano at Oberlin College. Ondine followed and tried to create a life of her own in Ohio.
To get back to the beginning, when CaroLyn stopped writing for a while, I sent an email and got no answer. Lately Monique had communicated mostly via Facebook. No Facebook posts or emails. She usually called once or twice a year. No calls. Our calls were not answered. What happened to our friends? Were they sick, did they move, did they die? We don’t know, but their children know.
This post is an appeal to adult children. I think children have an obligation to inform their parents’ close friends when a life-changing event occurs and the parents themselves are not able to communicate.
Although CaroLyn’s children do not know me personally, they must have heard something about me and my husband in the more than 50 years of our friendship with their parents. If they went through their parents’ possessions or address books they probably saw something of our long correspondence. If they checked their mother’s emails, they had to see something about me. Here we do run into a modern problem that a young woman that I discussed this issue with pointed out to me. She said “I have to be sure to get the password to my father’s email.” Thank you, Aprile, I did not think of that myself.
I remember quite clearly that when my grandmother in France died, although we already knew this via phone calls, we nevertheless received in the mail an announcement informing us of her death. It was a French tradition to send such announcements, just like birth or marriage announcements. Wanting to know if this was still common in France I emailed one of my cousins. “Yes,” he told me” and “such announcements often include information about the religious or memorial service.” An old tradition worthy of copying, in my opinion. But what chance do I have of convincing anyone today when we get even marriage invitations via email.