One Story, Two Sad Endings

I had known the truth for some time. But there was plausible denial.
Before there was Facebook, the way to answer "What ever happened to …" was to Google. Debby had a common last name. But when my search came up with a fund at a shul in the small Pennsylvania town where she grew up, the connection was unmistakable.
It’s rare for people other than millionaire philanthropists to have funds named after them while they are still alive. But not impossible.
It's close to 30 years since that last night of camp when we met. It hadn’t been a good summer, I didn’t make many friends. Debby came out of the blue and, in six or seven hours, made the whole trip worthwhile.
Although we spent the entire night talking, I can’t say I learned much about her. At 14, insights into the soul are rare, opinions and worldviews long from being formulated. When morning came we got on separate buses, hers to her Philadelphia suburb, mine to New York City. We vowed to pick up where we left off next summer, probably knowing deep down what the odds were.
The letters kept up for months, and there were occasional phone calls. When she came to New York with her family, I was out of town. I didn’t make it back to camp the next summer. We had some pointless fight, lost touch, and never saw each other again.
I recall a letter out of nowhere a few years later, awkwardly asking me what I was doing and whether I had a girlfriend. I didn’t, but for some forgotten reason never responded.
Twenty-eight years later the camp fund in her name made me worry, and wonder. I thought of calling the temple to ask, but didn’t have the nerve, ultimately convincing myself that the fund was set up by an adoring father to honor his daughter. I took comfort in the absence of the word memorial.
Then came Melissa, a voice from the past who found me on Facebook. We met that same night at camp, when the fading summer and looming bus-ride home erased all barriers of shyness and fueled a frenzy of eleventh hour acquaintances and address swapping. Melissa remembered Debby but hadn’t heard from her in years, she said at the time of initial contact.
Weeks later, another Facebook friendship with another lost campmate brought the awful truth home, and it arrived in my inbox immediately after.
Debby died in an accident, apparently struck by a car, probably just a few years after I had met her. I’ll never know how old she was, what she was doing at the time, or anything more than that vague epitaph. The acquaintance said he’d heard she had been going through a troubled time, but was getting her life back on track when tragedy struck.
Shortly after I heard the news, I found myself singing James Taylor's "Fire and Rain" to myself, the salient lyrics being "I always thought I’d see you, one more time again." Somehow I imagined one day we’d get in touch and get together, maybe with our spouses and kids, and laugh about juvenile naivete and innocence.
Rare is the marriage that blossoms from a relationship that began at 14. There was never any chance of anything rekindling between us, and 21 years ago, seven after my time with Debby, I met the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my children. There are, of course, no regrets.
And still, there is a sense of loss. If time, fate and circumstances prevent the seed of a relationship from blossoming, we like to think they are at least loving someone else, and perhaps we are a warm memory in their past.
Can you lose someone you never had? How much of a void can such a distant memory, no matter how cherished, leave?
There was a photo of us together, moments before we parted, the sleeplessness showing. I always looked at it sadly because of what was unknowable at the time: It was our last moment together.
The more cruel unknowable was that this girl who came out of the blue to brighten my life was doomed. When I close my eyes, I wonder if she died too quickly to know what happened to her, if she was alone when she died, or if she had a chance to say goodbye to her family. And if she was happy at the time.
The picture is in an album that disappeared somewhere in my parents’ house, and it’s painful to think that it, too, may be lost forever, leaving only the dim impression in my brain, and the speck of her face in a camp yearbook group shot, as proof that it ever happened.
Aside from Melissa, my old camp pen pal, there was no one to talk it over with. She suggested I reach out to Debby’s parents, tell her what their daughter once meant to me. I didn’t see anything productive that could come out of that.
Instead, I wrote out a check to the camp fund in her name, for more than I can afford, but less than a fitting tribute. Maybe it will help some14 year old boy go to camp, where a girl will come out of the blue to brighten his life.
And hopefully that story will have a happier ending.