Closure...sort of

Nearly a year ago, at a moment when I thought I was just talking to myself here, I made a little post about the death of someone I knew chiefly on the Web. A perverse fate saw to it that it was the post that got picked up and repeated and in general got more play than most of the press releases I wrote in my PR days. The post attracted a snotty little reply from someone who found it offensive that I thought it possible that C, my friend, had taken her own life. My riposte was, um, chilly.

Until today I hadn't gone back to the thread that was my source of information. Leaving the denouement in the air was my act of denial, as if I could open the site again and read "oh so sorry, big mistake: she's alive and well."

C is not alive and she did end her own life.

One person from what had been her gaming site persisted and confirmed this. It was some solace to read that her memorial service was crowded with people whose lives she had touched in some way or other. Those people, her gaming friends, and someone like me--somewhere in the middle--have one thing in common. We all feel that somehow we failed her, that somehow if we could have better communicated our love for her in life, her life would have gone on.

Or not. Some fears are too primal and impenetrable, and it may be that no love can overcome them.

This tragedy has a coda yet to be played out. Until it is, I think closure may elude me.