I sent Claire a few …

I sent Claire a few …

I sent Claire a few …

I sent Claire a few messages in early March that I hadn’t received a response to, but I wasn’t immediately worried. It was normal for days and sometimes weeks to pass before we answered each other or before one of us reached out simply to say “hi” or “I miss you” or “I love you” or all of those things. But when I went to send her another message a few weeks later and noticed my previous messages had sent as text messages—and not as iMessages that are typical of Apple to Apple devices—while simultaneously noticing that the message I was actively typing was also a text message and not an iMessage—the blue “send” arrow was green—my stomach immediately dropped. My first thought was oh my god, she’s dead. But I know I tend to be fatalistic, so I considered other options: she was too busy with law school so she turned her phone off; she was going through a hard time and turned her phone off; she was in a several week long inpatient program and her phone was off; she got sick of her phone and just got rid of it; she couldn’t maintain her relationship with me anymore and blocked me; she got a new phone and it was an Android, and she hadn’t responded to me for any of the reasons above. I was spiraling and couldn’t make sense of this green message. To be sure of her safety, I googled her full name plus the word “obituary.” I didn’t want to hit “enter,” but my gut compelled me to. I found her LinkedIn but nothing else. Some of the pressure eased, but I still didn’t have a good feeling. I decided to follow up with an email. Still no response.

I didn’t want to think anything bad had happened to Claire, so instead I got angry with her. I willed myself to believe that she had “ghosted”³ me, and I was angry with her for being so flippant toward our relationship and my feelings. I text my friends and told them how angry and hurt and confused I was that Claire had apparently ghosted me, and I asked them if they had ever been ghosted by a friend. I also ran through the list of other possible scenarios with them, and no one agreed with me that she might be dead, especially because there was no sign of an obituary. It just didn’t make sense. Their refusal to jump to the same conclusion I had pacified my delirium slightly. I was a bit embarrassed that I even thought she may be dead. Of course Claire is alive.

³ Definition of “ghosted” from urban dictionary: “When a person cuts off all communication with their friends or the person they’re dating, with zero warning or notice before hand. You’ll mostly see them avoiding friend’s phone calls, social media, and avoiding them in public.”

She may be struggling right now, but she’ll pull through whatever this is because she always pulls through. If she needed to cut me out of her life in order to heal, then so be it. I didn’t want to think of myself as having a toxic role in Claire’s life and therefore needing to be cut out of it, but Claire would occasionally cut out poisonous relationships—good for her!—and I’d much rather have her be alive and safe but no longer wanting me in her life.

But the thought that she was dead would linger.

Months passed before I’d find out that Claire had died. And I let the months pass. As much as I wanted to know, I also didn’t. I didn’t want to know if she ghosted me, and I certainly didn’t want to know if she was dead. I had every opportunity to reach out to Claire’s boyfriend on Instagram and ask, but I chose not to. To this day, I still don’t know what happened to Clarie, and I probably never will. I have a few suspicions, but they’ll always be suspicions. Sometimes I think not knowing confounds the grieving process, and sometimes I think it’s better that I don’t know so that I can’t compartmentalize Claire and the life that she lived to her last moments. She was an infinite number of moments.

I sent Claire a few …

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