This is a creative non-fiction essay, discussing the last five days before my friend Maryclaire passed. I was in Yuma, AZ and learning a lot about the place and myself. ​

Yuma is an idiosyncratic city unlike any I had yet experienced, and it brought out the best in me.  I have lived in many different places, from cosmopolitan Paris to its African foil Bamako, where, though capital of Mali, most buildings are one floor and all roads but one are unpaved.  Yuma has a singular identity premised in part on its complex past, one that fights Starbuckization tooth and nail.  There, I found beauty in a regional center that others cast aside as remote and boring.  I also took the first steps in a personal journey that would bring me a deeper understanding of my own past as well as a new understanding of the need to be more fully present in the here and now. ​

The sudden and bewildering death of Maryclaire provides the cataclysmic moment of what just may be my life's principal storyline.  Henceforth, there is what came before 12 December 2015 and what came afterward.  This sudden and startling tragedy forced me to break free of the complacent manner in which I treated relationships, because I realized, too late, that I had presumed that I could catch Maryclaire up with my travails--depression, eating disorder--at a future date.  Her death represents a low point propelling the denouement: do I pull the covers up over my head and give in to the darkness, or do I allow myself to heal and to grow.
 
The deep feelings wrought by tragic events forever change us.  In her emotionally astute essay "This Is It, My Pet Pachooch," Bonnie Friedman notes that she had been "drifting" before the death of her sister, but Anita's passing helped her understand that "life is short and mustn't be wasted."  I, too, choose to honor Maryclaire by effecting positive change in my life.  Since her passing, I have reengaged my creativity via wordsmithing, begun a running regimen, and focused a lot more attention on relationships that are important to me.  Like Friedman, "I only wish it hadn't taken the loss of my sister to rouse me." ​

I am a professional historian, and a nearly obsessive eye for detail serves me well as I reconstruct, for example, systems of urban labor in nineteenth-century Morocco.  As I grieve the loss of my friend, I find myself sifting through the past--this time my own--with the keen eye of a practiced expert.  I search, desperately at times, for tangible evidence--documents, photos, material objects--that reveal something of the ways in which my life connected with that of Maryclaire.    
 
In one instance, only days after Maryclaire's passing, I spend an hour, maybe more, searching for a worn blue tank top that I borrowed from her around 1986.  It would be a coup to find something physical that could be touched and passed around to our high school friends Susan and Cindy.  But I can't find it.  Its petite size, I vaguely remember, had taunted me, reminding me that I had gained seventy pounds.  An unwanted reminder of Binge Eating Disorder, the shirt, I am forced to conclude, had been relegated --carelessly, I now chastise myself--to the rag bin.                 

​I received what would have been--pre-the-passing-of-Maryclaire--an innocuous promotional email from Ann Taylor that I would have sent straight into the trash.  But a flash of silver and gold caught my eye, and it stirred memories.  I had to investigate.  As I thought, this company was promoting an end of the season sale on flats.  I looked at the simple design and the matte metallic surface, and my mind turned to Maryclaire again.  The shoes reminded me of her signature look when we lived together in Boston.  Was there ever a time when we shared an apartment on Knapp Street in Somerville or Fairmont Avenue in Cambridge that she didn't have a pair of silver flats?  No.  Like an exotic bird, she was drawn to shiny objects that sparkled and so made her stand out from all the sparrows that tend to populate the American northeast.