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 am flying from Indianapolis to San Diego two days after Christmas.  I will spend New Year's Day next to the Pacific Ocean.  I distinctly remember having sent Maryclaire a New Year's greeting last year from Treasure Island in Florida.   Maryclaire, always busy and trying to catch up, and this even before she was married and had four children, had responded to it on 2 November 2015.  Her text to me that morning began "Hello Dear One" and ended "I'd really love to see you.  Bless."  I read that text message--a four paragraph precious gem--for the fiftieth time. 
 
Maryclaire has now been gone for two weeks: How can this New Year's Day be so different from the last one?  How can one year make such a difference in the lives of so many?   
 
I text Maryclaire's husband Jay from the Chicago airport as I wait for my transfer to San Diego.  There, I will begin to train seriously for the 10 K for Claire.  But just because I am "escaping" from the mundane to a condo right next to the Pacific Ocean does not mean that I have shut down my grief or forgotten that Jay and his family still suffer.    
 
I want Jay to know that I am thinking of him, which is exactly what I write: I am still thinking of you and wanted you to know you and your family are constantly in my thoughts.  I AM going to run a race for Claire on 11 June in Portsmouth.  My training officially starts tomorrow.  I miss her so much and am filled with regret over time lost.  Running to raise money for her scholarship will help me.  As for you and the children, I wish you peace.  I am a phone call away.  Let's talk soon. 
 
My text is wandering thoughts, but Jay's response is short and pointed.  It gives me chills: June 11 is our anniversary.​

The photo is undated, and yet it is clearly a precious memento of a bygone era when we--well, if truth be told--would hang out at bars all too much of the time.  Claire is wearing my favorite green batik dress from those days--perhaps the late-1980s or early-1990s--and she has accessorized it with the necklace known as her "fairy bell."  What is she staring at so intently?  Cindy steals the show in her short blue dress.  With arms extended, she invites the viewer to a seat at our table.  Susan, who today does cross fit and advocates a sugar-free diet, is--ack!--smoking with the refined air of Audrey Hepburn circa 1961.  And then, there is me: I insert myself into the group and so into the lives of these amusing and fascinating women.  As I look at the photo, I wish Steve Jobs had invented the camera-ready iPhone twenty years before he actually did so that we could have captured more of these moments together.  (I suspect Susan, Cindy and Claire--mothers of eight among them--are awfully glad he did not.)