Seeing a friend for the last time is beautiful tragedy, I think.
I remember seeing my youth pastor for the last time back in high school.
We ate a BBQ lunch with my friends in the sun and talked about the coming summer.
It’s mostly a blur now.
The died that weekend in a small engine plane crash and dozens of lives were never the same.
I like to think of what might have been.
But the life, the death, and the final memories I still hold, – I think – are some of the most human of emotions.
I saw our dear friend John Rollins for the last time on New Year’s Eve 2000, at Cinnamon Hill, when I was there to see in the new millennium with my husband, John, and our baby, Jake. As John Rollins walked out of the house into the balmy evening, wearing his pink golf shirt and white trousers and wishing everyone a happy new year, I said good-bye to him and thought to myself very clearly, This is the last time I will ever see him. He died of a heart attack while taking his afternoon nap that spring, in his offices in Wilmington, Delaware.