The Story of Kelli

This anecdote isn't funny, but is something that I thought I would share. While I was growing up, there was a girl in grade school that I had a major crush on from first sight in first grade all through sixth grade. Not only was she pretty, but she seemed like a nice girl. I won't give her name, for fear of libel/slander/whatever. Alas, her niceness didn't seem to last. When I returned to school in seventh grade, she like everyone else suddenly seemed to go insane. I never have seen such a transformation from pleasant or at least neutral people to hateful people as I did in the transition to junior high in seventh grade. Looking back, I wonder if the water supply had been poisoned.

Kelli was a cheerleader, and like many other people thought it was funny to mock me. After this happened a several times, we had an intense exchange with the result that she never bothered me again. We also seldom spoke after that. I think we had a couple of brief "it looks like rain" sort of conversations in high school, but nothing extended or personal. That was fine with me.

In college for the first year or so I stayed in contact with my few close friends from high school, though that soon changed as time wore on. During that period, I heard that Kelli was taking dance classes in college and had found that she had a cancerous tumor in her leg. Pretty serious stuff. I remembered that we had once been friends, and I decided that I shouldn't hold some silly things that she did in junior high against her. It was tough, but I bought a card and wrote a note. Now currently I can have a tendency if I talk too much to put my foot in my mouth. Back then, I was a little worse. I'd put both feet in my mouth, which would result more often that not in falling to the ground on my butt.

Whatever I said to Kelli, it was heart felt. I merely told her that I and my college friends (at least those that did that sort of thing) were praying for her, and I must have said that because of our strained relationship after junior high that I wasn't sure that I should contact her. Something like that.

Some time later I received a response (which I didn't keep.) It's hard to understand what people mean from what they say. I remember her saying something to the effect of "Thanks for the card, I appreciate the prayers. I know how hard it must have been for you to send this card." I took it that she was getting in a bit of a barb, since I must have laid it on too thick about our estranged friendship in the original card. That was my reading of the tone at the time.

I heard that she recovered and grew back her hair, and I didn't really think any more about her until several years later when we were 28. My mom sent me a clipping from the newspaper. Kelli had a recurrence of cancer and had died. It shook me a great deal, that someone so young and fit could succumb like that. Though I had never realized it consciously before, I guess there had always been in the back of my mind this idea that I might see her again someday and feel proud of myself and what I had become. You know, a sort of "So there" moment. Now that wasn't going to happen. I remembered our friendship in grade school more vividly after that, and I really was shaken.

The moral of the story? I don't know that there is one, other than you never know what is going to happen and when. If you have something to say to someone, don't put it off.