Not an old friend.
Never met her in fact.
She was a (triumphant) rival for an old boyfriend’s love. Wee UD spent some years feeling hatred for her.
And then all that youthful passion and rivalrous intensity was over and we both grew up and married (neither of us married the old boyfriend) and she became a scientist at NIH and ol’ UD, well, you know…
But though she was a golden girl with everything going for her – blistering beauty, intellectual as well as artistic brilliance, Bronx-bred cockiness – she got only half a life, and she suffered a lot. Family and health woes beset her, she died barely into her sixties, and her end was seen to by the Hebrew Free Burial Society.
It has gradually become important for UD to make a pilgrimage to her grave.
To – I suppose – make amends for the hatred UD felt for her, and to honor her exuberance and her suffering.
The man who runs her obscure resting place responded to UD‘s email and gave her directions to the place, and to her old rival’s gravestone. So that is what UD will try to do tomorrow (try, because the place is open only on Sundays for a few hours and UD suspects no one ever goes there and so maybe although it says it’s open it won’t be open) and she will write about it here.