Edel Coffey: If you don’t get in touch now, one day it really will be too late
Picture: Bríd O'Donovan
I first met Margo nearly 20 years ago. I was a newly-minted journalist, and she was an etiquette expert in her seventies who, in her time, had worked as a nun in Africa, and then later as a teacher in Cathal Brugha Street college. I contacted her to get a quote for an article I was writing. By the time we had finished our phone call, we had agreed to meet for lunch. She was that kind of person. She made friends wherever she went.
From that point on, we met regularly for lunch. It might have been an unusual friendship, a woman in her twenties and a woman in her seventies, but Margo was quite simply a lot of fun. Irreverent, entertaining and always positive in her outlook. But as the years went by and life and career got busier and busier, we saw each other less and less. We sent cards from time to time, updating each other on our lives, but by the time I left Dublin in my late thirties, I had lost touch with her.
A few years ago, having spent many years telling myself I must write to Margo, I finally sent her a Christmas card, updating her on the latest news and life happenings and apologising for not having been in touch. Somehow though, like the script of a bad movie, I forgot to include my new address. I chastised myself when I realised and promised to write again soon, this time with my contact details and a request to meet for lunch or a coffee. But, as is often the way of life, I just didn’t get around to it.
I thought of her regularly over the last few years, always saying to myself whenever she came to mind I must get in touch with Margo but it got pushed down the list by the grocery shopping, the dinner to be made, the medical forms to be filled out or the countless otherlittle details of life that demand our attention with more urgency, more immediacy than the friends we mean to get in touch with.
It had been almost a decade since I had seen Margo when last week, for some reason, she came to mind again. I googled her name on my phone and was saddened to see her death notice. It turns out she had died just a few weeks ago.
There was part of me that knew, of course, that one day Margo’s death notice would inevitably be the thing that I read when I searched for news of her.
People grow old, people get sick, people die, and our chance to tell them how much they mean to us dies with them. I’m not sure why the death of a friend we have lost touch with is so affecting, particularly if they have not been a part of our lives for some time, but maybe it’s because we are robbed of the intention to get back in touch with them and we come face to face with what we knew all along — if you don’t get in touch now, one day it really will be too late.
I can still hear Margo’s laugh, the best laugh, somewhere between giddy and mischievous, and it still makes me smile. I wish I could hear it one last time. I have lots of people with whom I have lost touch over the years that I still consider friends. Friends who were of a certain time in my life, or a certain place, or a certain job, but good friends all the same, and people of whom I still think fondly. In my head, these people are all still safe in their hyper-sleep chambers, ever-young, ready to be reanimated by the text I’ve been meaning to send. But Margo is a reminder that they are not.
Quite a few of my older friends and relatives have died in the past couple of years. Friends who I might have seen once or twice a year, as well as people I had lost contact with. When they died, I bitterly regretted not having spent more time with them, seeing them more often or being a more attentive friend, better at keeping in touch, better at ensuring when the news of their death came that I was somehow more at peace with it, better equipped to deal with it.
Thinking of a friend often is not quite the same as letting them know that you are thinking of them. I realise now that I should have sent the text, written that note, every time I had the impulse to do so. Instead of saying I must text Margo, I should have just done it. Because today will always be the best day to get in touch with the people we are thinking of and to let them know we are thinking of them.
