One day, she was here. The next, gone.

Earlier this week, my friend’s husband posted on Facebook on her behalf:

I am heartbroken to inform everybody that early in the morning, on Friday, February 21st, Vivian Luk, my dear wife, soul mate, and mother of our child, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.

She was gone. As a teenager, we met each other on a yahoo group, and we kept in touch over the years through blogging and the like. I finally met her in person more than 10 years later for dinner. Then when I was in Vancouver, we met. And I stayed over at her husband and her house. It was a brief moment. Where I was delighted to discover that a friend who I met at such a distance was such a lovely, sweet person.

She was younger than me. And to think, when I said goodbye the night before I left Vancouver, I didn’t know that I wouldn’t see her again. I thanked her profusely over Whatsapp and rode the train to Seattle. That was 18 months ago. Several months later, she gave birth to a lovely daughter who I followed on Facebook. She was never a photo-whoring mother and delicately posted photos with wit.

Funeral homes often say that they see the elderly the most. But when it came to young people, those were the worst. To think, that there was no devastating journey to the end, but only a shocking surprise ending. The incomplete answer to “I’ll see you tomorrow” and tomorrow never arrives.

I can’t help but admit that I thought of my own mortality. Then the people close to me. What if they disappeared tomorrow? What if I wake up and right next to me, they are just gone? Movies and TV can’t possibly prepare me for it. Because as Cheryl Strayed so aptly put it, one would simply be in “i-lost-[insert name] world”.

2 thoughts on “One day, she was here. The next, gone.

  1. This is one of the things that terrifies me. What if, one day, someone just stops posting and disappears? I’m sure I’d eventually hear from someone else that he/she died, but it’s terrifying to think about. I can’t imagine someone younger than us dying. I’m really sorry to hear about your friend Vivian.

  2. Thanks for reading. It’s heartbreaking…more for her family and her one-year-old daughter who won’t really know her mother.

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