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So I just found out that my childhood best friend’s mom died of cancer…almost a year ago.
This girl and I were inseparable from ages 8 to 15, at which point we basically drifted apart, as many friends do when they reach high school and develop different interests.
She moved across the country after high school, and I remained with my parents. My friend’s mom stayed put, continuing to reside in the family home just a few blocks away from us.
Three or so years ago my dad bumped into my friend’s father, who informed him that my friend’s mom (the father’s long-since-ex-wife) had cancer. My dad paid the mom a visit just to check up on her, but he could tell that she was tired and didn’t really want to talk about it, and so we were cautious about visiting and never worked up the courage to do so.
However, I would still check up on her status several times a year to make sure she was still alive. I would Google search her name and then “obituary” to make sure she was still among the living.
The last time I did that was around June of 2023, and I found no obituary or death notices. Well just the other day I did it again, since it had been a while since the last time, and I found that she had died in July of 2023.
I’m not going to lie - I cried a lot when I learned about this. I honestly was never fully comfortable with this woman when I was a child, due to how strict she tended to be with her daughter and how timid I was, but learning about her death really upset me. I’m a giant baby who still lives with my parents, even at 33, and I’m extremely, extremely attached to them. My reasons for crying so much over this woman’s death were largely selfish - because her daughter and I were best friends as children, and so I naturally imposed onto my friend my feelings of how I would feel losing my own mom. Somehow it hit closer to home than even deaths in my own family (aunts, uncles, etc) because I saw myself in my friend.
Honestly I don’t even know how to get in contact with my friend - she’s not on social media, I don’t have her phone number, email address, etc.
But let’s say I find out how to contact her…WHAT DO I SAY? “Hey…so I just did my annual death checkup on your mom and found out that I’m almost a year late…um, condolences?”
What do I do? Do I send flowers? A card? Do I do nothing?
Help.