Delilah

Tonight I found out that an old friend, Delilah Wooldridge, passed away on Monday night. She and I were pretty close back in high school - in fact, she was probably the closest thing I had to a "girlfriend" up to that point. I never met her in person, but we dated for about three years via myriads of IMs, e-mails, phone calls, and snail mail. As with anything, those three years had their ups and downs, and eventually she broke it off to pursue something else. It was pretty soon after that I let it go and forgave her, mainly because I understood that an exclusive relationship with someone long distance was something that was difficult to maintain.

Either way, we reconnected late in 2008 when I got a message from her on Facebook out of the blue. She told me she regretted the way we lost contact, but she would like to reconnect, so we did. We talked a bit about life and kept up with each other loosely, through a once-every-couple-weeks text conversation. She liked to send me pictures of her ferrets, and for awhile there I got one every day, which I liked a lot.

Delilah had changed in the four years we didn't speak, but she still seemed, at her core, the girl that I met back in the year 2001. When we spoke, whether on the phone or online, you really could get a feel for how witty she could be and how much she had genuine affection for me. Life was difficult for her now, I could surmise that much - she had a job that she didn't particularly like and made lots of plans for moving to places that weren't Oklahoma that really never came to fruition. But she trotted along, still hoping, still making those plans.

A couple anecdotes about the Delilah I knew. When we first met, we did so in a chatroom, so we were basically just anonymous strangers. After a couple weeks of talking to her regularly, we steadily revealed more and more about who we were. One day she consoled me when we had to put our cat George to sleep. George was sixteen years old (nearly a year older than me, if I remember correctly) and had been suffering from cancer for an extended period before we took him to be euthanized. Delilah said not to worry, that she'd do her best to make me feel better, and that she could be my new cat. Hence, her nickname, Kitty, since she always hated her name. That's what I called her until we lost contact in 2004.

I remember the loneliness Delilah seemed to have when her family moved to Oklahoma from Oregon. I had never moved, much less to a different state, at this point in my life, so it was hard for me to empathize, but I did my best to try and make her feel better. I distinctly remember the times she would be sitting at school, waiting to be picked up by her parents, when she would call me and we'd talk for awhile. If I helped her even a little bit to grow accustomed to her new surroundings, I'm glad.

Delilah took her own life on Monday, September 12. She was twenty-four and six days old - her last birthday was September 6. I found out tonight when I was listening to music at work and stumbled across an Everclear song. Everclear was the only band she liked when I knew her previously - her musical tastes had expanded since, of course, but I will always associate her with that band. I listened to the song and brought up her profile to post it there for her, and on her wall were the messages that alerted me to her passing.

It's difficult to think very rationally about the situation in the haze of confusion that I feel right now. I wish I could have done something or said something that would have compelled her to get help, but the truth was that I never would have guessed she was depressed or would be likely to take her own life. That seems to be the trope, though, about people who commit suicide - nobody could have known, nobody would have guessed. And the other universal truth? It can never be undone.

I miss you, Delilah. I wish I could have met you before you died. I saw a side of you that was tremendously sweet and beautiful, and I hope that you are at peace.