Krista had friended me on a neighborhood FB board. I remembered her as a little girl down the street whose mother was a nice lady. She bought seeds, greeting cards and nuts from me when I knocked on doors at approximately between the ages of 8 and 12 or so, as a budding entrepreneur.

I learned that the word garage sale didn’t mean someone carving out their garage and selling it through a classified ad in the newspaper from her.

We bought an old hi fi she played records on at her sale on Graham Street, across from my first school, Graham Hill Elementary.

I still appreciate buying and selling things, now more so online; eBay, Etsy, Craigslist, and FB Marketplace.

They were a younger family and had the appearance of people that would be happier with life than what I thought I saw at home.

They had been at one of the tables at my Bar Mitzvah.

A couple years after living on my own as a teenager in LA, I heard from someone that Mrs. C had died.

My mother confirmed after speaking with her old friend from PTA and Cub Scouts, Mrs. Kaufman.

I was told that she had had something like a nervous breakdown. She had reportedly gone to some kind of an institution and was told she that she was going to have to leave. She apparently drank something to make her sick so she wouldn’t have to leave, but it killed her.

I hear my late mother’s voice in my head when she said to me; “She was a very lovely lady”. Searching for clues, or whatever, she recalled that she had served brandy alexanders at PTA meetings and it had brought a certain elegance to those events.

In the last couple of years, Krista had publicly shared the recent loss of her father at a more normal life span age, although still a “too soon”. She also posted a picture of her mother and referenced her suicide from the perspective of the child who survived. Reading the word “suicide” decades later, gave me a different perspective, and a recognition of the nuance that gets lost or changed as stories are told and information is passed from one person to another.

This week, a post came up in my FB feed from Krista’s 2 children sharing the information that their young mother (Krista, Mrs. C’s young daughter when I was a child) had died and the obituary would be in the Seattle Times this Sunday. Her death does not appear to be something that was expected.

Unexpected death is a different yet significant animal in the dark kingdom of grief.

It struck me with extra sadness to read this, even thought they are not part of my day to day interactive lives.

Something about the circle of life. Having observed it as a young adult, and now seeing sudden loss of the surviving child, now, from the perspective of me being a soon to be senior self.

As a point of reference, this is not my personal loss, not someone I’m “mourning”.

It is a reflection on how people that we may only know briefly in limited time frames, are woven into the fabric of what makes us who we are.

I hope her children are able to find a peace to move forward in their lives.