Why Do Some Vanish From Our Lives?

Sometimes I think that the rings of a tree are the perfect metaphor for our lives.  When you look at a tree from the outside the only thing we notice is how fat or skinny it is.  How short or how tall.  Sadly as humans we are not Sequoias spanning the ages and when our tree is cut and ceases to live we find the story of its growth between each ring.  Some are pitifully narrow while others are wide signifying a lot of growth during one year of it's life.  I think if I was a tree a close analysis would find one short period spanning a single year from 1987 to 1988 where there was enormous growth.

I lived in Vienna, Austria during this time attending a foreign study program. After extensive research into foreign study possibilities I had decided on the Institute of European Studies.  It seemed the perfect opportunity to combine living in Europe with cultural awakening, the forbidden cloak of Eastern European Communism and just being independent, far away from home.  Eager to pursue my studies I took a copy of the curriculum to the guidance office at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.  I started my studies at Willamette University in Salem Oregon but for economic reasons decided to return home for my sophomore year.  The guidance counselors at UAA took a look at my foreign study program filled with courses in language, Austrian Art and Architecture, Eastern European History and Politics and quickly pronounced they would not accept my credit.  It was far too exotic for them.  I turned back to my original university and was told by Willamette, not to worry, they would accept everything.  Willamette had just secured my triumphant return for a senior year.

Patrick (Me), Carey, Eric, Rose, Karen

So with the next two years of my life planned out I ventured across the ocean to a life of completely taking care of myself.  I recall some of the students complaining that no one met them when they arrived.  I on the other hand understood completely why no one did.  This program was not a tour, it was a chance to live in a foreign world and learn to survive.  A chance to be just another resident living in one of the most beautiful cities on the planet.

My first semester there I became friends with several people with whom I still maintain contact.  There was something about the commonality of experience that brought us together.  While in retrospect it was a very small window of time the experience created a nearly inexplicable bond.  I can't imagine how we all became so close in such a relatively small period of time but we did.  I can still list their names in my mind like it was yesterday.  Eric, Dwight, Dawn, Debbie, Ed, Tom, Ranjit and of course Carey.    The circle expanded, Monica, Laura, Karen, Pat, Victor, Rose, Lisa, Mike... the list goes on and on, each still as vivid today as they were yesterday.  Each frozen in time as they were.  A few have been updated to include our balding heads, expanding girth and aging forms.

Not to slight anyone but during that time a few of us became exceptionally close.  Eric, Dwight and Carey were my core.  When Christmas came a number of them departed to go back to their home schools while a few of us remained.  It was a lonely time, I missed them dearly yet Carey stayed with me and her presence seemed to fill the void.  From the position of a forty-four year old long since married man I will confess at this late date I was deeply attracted to and infatuated with Carey.  She had wonderful intellectualism that I craved.  She was cute and brilliant yet she existed outside of the mainstream.  Carey appreciated diversity and the extraordinary.  I recall one night laying beside her.  We had been out late and she let me sleep in her room.  She had a single bed and both of us lay beside each other.  I kissed her shoulders and touched her back yet I knew in my heart it would never be.  It didn't matter.  The mere fact that I was beside her was all that I needed, all that I wanted. 

Carey

Carey for all her exceptional brilliance dealt with deep personal insecurity.  I will never understand how such a beautiful intelligent woman could feel that way about herself.  Such insecurity was my domain, not hers.  It existed in my own self doubt and while she must have felt the same about herself, in my mind, she had no reason to.  Carey was the type of woman that seemed to thrive on dysfunctional relationships.  She fell from one to the next always believing she could change her partner.  In truth she was mostly a victim of her herself. I think perhaps the only way she could find an answer to her own insecurity was by partnering with someone less secure than herself.  The result was a stream of insensitive losers and an inability to recognize those that truly loved her. 

Carey eventually graduated with advanced degrees in sociology and philosophy.  I wonder if her years of study were in truth an effort to understand the impossible.  To rationalize life and to discover the barbarity in the way some live their lives.  Perhaps then, and only then, she could understand herself. 

Carey trusted her friends and I know there were times she felt betrayed.  I think this forced her more deeply inside herself.  There were few who appreciated her for the beauty of her mind and the sensitivity of the woman within.  I don't think I ever hurt her, I never meant to if I did.  On the contrary, I wanted her to always think of me as the one person in life that would never judge her.  The person that would always accept her no matter what complications surrounded her.  As I confessed a few paragraphs before this while never her lover I did love her.  I suppose I still do.  I guess that's why she never really leaves my mind.

We stayed in contact as our lives resumed back in America.  I married and visited her once with my wife at a college where she was teaching in Ohio.  At one point she visited my mother at her Kentucky home.  At that point Carey had returned to the life of Academia and was teaching at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.  I was living in Bolivia at the time yet it was so important to me that she actually took the time meet my mom.  This was near the end of my mother's life and there has always been something very peaceful to me knowing that she shares a memory of her. 

Carey eventually married and then vanished.  I don't know why she did and it has been something I have struggled to understand.  There has been no other person that has cut themselves off from my world that I have missed as much as Carey.  My list of reasons is as long as a child's Christmas list yet none seems to make sense.  I wonder if I hurt her or if her husband told her to leave her old life behind.  Maybe this was her decision.  Perhaps she needed to break from all her past in order to build a new life.

While trying to understand I have never been able to accept.  I know where she is and what she does.  She is a full professor now at a small private university in Wisconsin.  She lives again in an academic world that has always felt so comfortable to me.  It is a world of books and thoughts.  Of enlightened conversation that solves the worlds problems.  I have tried to write to her, tried to call yet she has never answered.  As the years go by I still try to remind her that I am  here with the hope that she will someday reach out to me. When I search for her name I find the comments of her students.  They often reflect the woman I once knew and I am sure still exists.

I always hoped that in some way I was as important to Carey as she was to me.  If anything hurts the most it is the concept that perhaps I was not.  Still I forgive this.  I forgive this as a symptom of my own insecurity, the same kind she suffered from so long ago.

I suppose with each passing year it is harder for her to respond yet she need not fear.  I would welcome her as if it was yesterday filled with quiet relief that my wonderfully intelligent friend has resumed her place in my life.  Sometimes I think of just taking a few days off from work and driving up to her college.  Perhaps I would appear at her office door during student consultations.  I wonder if she would recognize my bald head and tummy. 

My tree is still living and each year I grow another ring.  None has equaled that year so long ago yet perhaps were she to ever come back one might come close.  Why friends come and go is a mystery to me.  A mystery as dark as a night with no moon.  Some people are so special and it is hard to conceive how they could ever disappear.  Carey was and still is one of those people.