Moi-moi

"One of these days I might just drive off a cliff and into the ocean," she had once written to me. So when she suddenly stopped returning my calls and emails, I assumed the worst. I'd been calling pretty regularly; I was worried about her. Both her parents had died in the past few years, and one of her granddaughters had toddled into the sea and drowned. Then that fall, her youngest son had been murdered by an off-duty federal agent in a McDonald's on the Big Island. She was, not surprisingly, falling apart. 

 

We didn't have any friends in common and she didn't have any presence on the internet that I could find. I thought of contacting one of her remaining sons through Facebook, but they didn't know me and I felt strange about doing so. I took to regularly checking the Phoenix obits, but there was nothing.

 

Eventually I did track down a good friend of hers, and sent her a message. Two years she wrote back; since she didn't know me, my email had gone into her trash folder. She knew who I was, and said I was welcome to call, which I did immediately. "She talked about you all the time," she told me. "You were one of the few people who was really there for her towards the end."

 

What had happened was she'd collapsed in her garage while her sort-of-not-really-boyfriend and his pals partied inside the house. She died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Though she'd been partying pretty heavily herself lately, they didn't find any drugs or alcohol in her system, and the car in the garage hadn't been running, so it wasn't a case of carbon monoxide poisoning.  The official cause of death was declared to be pneumonia.

A month later, her son came home to find the sort-of-not-really-boyfriend hanging from the rafters of that same garage. 

 

My notebooks are filled with failed attempts to write about Eydie and our complicated friendship. Maybe someday I'll be able to figure out how to do so in a way that does her justice. In the meantime, it's been ten years today since her death. I still miss her, still expect to pick up the phone late at night and hear her voice, slurred and sleepy. "Tell me a story so I can go moi-moi," she would say. And I would tell her a story.