Death of a Facebook Friend

My dates are a bit hazy, and serve more as place markers than as documentation. The last time I saw Carole was nearly a year ago at the retirement party for a woman she had hired as a receptionist in 1989 -- when she was office manager for the non-profit at which I work. When you work at an organization for more than twenty years, each one seems to blend into another. But it seems to me that Carole retired in 2001.

A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer sounds like a death sentence. So when I heard Carole had been diagnosed in 2004, I thought it was terribly unfair that the woman who had worked two jobs for most of her adult life was stricken just as she said she was going to take life a little easier. I want to think she took the trip to Ireland she'd always dreamed of, but I can't be certain.

Still when I saw her last year, I would have had no idea that she was living with such a serious illness. She told me she was on Facebook and the two of us agreed to “friend each other.” I now feel a bit guilty that I never had the opportunity to write “Happy Birthday” on her wall or comment on that photo of Carole with her grandson at the hockey rink.

When I think of Carole, an image of a petite woman with short, thick white hair, engaging blue eyes, a voice made gravelly from years of cigarette smoking, and a heavy Boston accent comes to mind. Her first job was as mother of seven, and then ultimately as “Grammy” to fifteen. Her paid employment included 17 years in the customer service department of Sears before coming to the non-profit housed in an old townhouse on Beacon Hill, a place worlds apart in terms of workplace culture. I was 38 when she arrived, and she was 51.

Carole was in charge of hiring administrative staff, and we sometimes clashed about the qualifications most desirable for my assistant. Having grown up with few of the opportunities I’d been given, Carole’s sense of social justice seemed to demand that I recruit an assistant without a college degree.

My tone probably could have been kinder when I explained to Carole that being an assistant in the communications office of our non-profit required a higher level of polish and writing ability than that of a clerk at Sears. But I'm still thanking her for preventing one of my first news conferences from turning into a disaster.

As per my request, she ordered a mult box to accommodate reporters from all the broadcast outlasts I hoped would be attending. When I asked her to have the box set up in a charming space with Oriental rugs and antique furniture, she responded with her own question: “Bonnie, where are you going to plug it in?” Carole was right. The mult box needed to be in a modern space, a lot less charming, but with the appropriate electrical outlet.

Despite our differences, we shared confidences. Early on, Carole told me she had six boys, but that she had once had a little girl named Patricia. While crossing a busy street with an older playmate, her daughter, a second grader at the time, was struck and killed by a car. It’s the kind of thing nobody every gets over, and Carole still struggled without letting the grief incapacitate her.

Knowing I row on the Charles, Carole later told me she had grown up in what was then a working class section of Cambridge, in a triple decker right near Magazine Beach, and attended Catholic schools. Her father had been lost at sea during World War II, and her childhood had not been easy.

She loved saying her husband, Ritchie, looked like Stacy Keach, and he did. Though neither of them were fancy people, she indulged him when he bought a yellow Cadillac, and he her when she wanted a second home in New Hampshire where he began carving duck decoys. As a couple, they vacationed in Disneyworld, and loved it.

I hoped I could say something that would make Carole feel better the day she walked into my office perhaps a few years after my own first husband had died of cancer. Perhaps she thought that because I had been a doctor’s wife, I might have some explanation for the memory lapses Richie had been having. He was only in his fifties at the time, and I honestly hoped that the stresses of an economic downturn might be causing him to be distracted. Six months later, a group of us headed to Saugus for Richie’s funeral. Lung cancer had metastasized to his brain.

Last Thursday, I got a Facebook message that I thought was from Carole. Alas, it was from her son, Richard, who had gone into her account. He wanted me to know that after five years of battling pancreatic cancer, his mom had died. Details about funeral arrangements were included.

My husband, Dennis is part of the Greatest Generation, and thought it weird to spread the word via Facebook. As a boomer, I thought it was very sweet and loving of Carole’s son to use Facebook – in addition to more traditional means such as Legacy.com and a death notice in The Boston Globe.

After sharing the news, via both Facebook messages and email with people I knew would want to know, I wrote on Carole’s wall: “May you, Richie and Patricia rest in peace in one home. You lived for your children and grandchildren and your love for them always showed. You will be sorely missed.”