My sister, who recently moved back to our hometown in Florida, sent me a sad email just now. She said that she was looking through the local paper and saw the obituary of a friend of mine from middle school twenty years ago. It was hard to believe, so I looked up the obituary on the Internet to see if it was true. Sadly, it is true. I see also that she will be buried in the same cemetery that my friend Joey was buried back when we were both in high school.
J.J. Clay was one of the smartest and sweetest people I have ever known. I feel super-geeky to mention this, but she sticks out in my mind not only for her personality, but for the fact that she was the one who beat me out for Student Body President in 8th grade. Even though I hated to lose, I had to admit that there couldn't have been a better person to beat me.
Even though I had lost touch with her somewhere along the way, it still bums me out to hear the news. Her obituary in the Pensacola News Journal doesn't say what happened to her, but it does say that she had a 8-week old baby. I wonder if there were complications with the birth. In any case, 34 is way way way too young an age for a person to go.
My heart goes out to her family, to her husband and to the four young children who lost their mother.
UPDATE 6 Nov 2004: My sister wrote me back to tell me what happened to J.J. She said that, yes, she had recently had a baby. When she returned to Turkey with her family (her husband is in the miltary) she told her mother that she wasn't feeling well and that she was going to go rest. She fell asleep and never woke up, dying of a brain aneurysm. So amazingly sad.
gee...so sad :( i mean it, i nearly cried while i was reading it.