Before I start, let me make clear to you that I am not feeling sorry for myself, that’s not the purpose of me getting up here and doing this. Actually I don’t quite know what my purpose is, getting up here in front of a crowd, and telling my story----or my lesson.
This is going to sound weird, but in the fifth grade I had a boyfriend. And it wasn’t one of those “I’ll give you a flower and we will be pretend boyfriend and girlfriend until the weekend and we forget”. His name was Max, and he was the tallest boy in the fifth grade, and I was arguably one of the shortest girls, so automatically we were an odd pair. And I always adored Max’s mom. She had this bright red hair, and she would wear these amazing clothes. She would wear these great boots with flare jeans and huge belts, and she just rocked it.
My mom and Max’s mom got really close--- best friends for a while. But kids grow up, and things change, and life goes on. Max and I “broke up” because we were going to different middle schools, and life moved on. We didn’t keep in contact and neither did our moms, and it wasn’t like we had a nasty break up, I mean we were twelve.
I always looked up to Max’s mom. I remember missing her, but eventually forgetting ---moving on. People don’t forget where they are when certain things happen …. Where you were when you heard JFK was assassinated or when Osama bin laden was killed.
So … six years later I’m on my way home from a singing lesson, and my best friend Mckenna calls.. The first thing she says is, “Was Max’s mom sick?” and I had no clue what she was talking about. It was so random, I hadn’t thought of Max, much less his mom in forever.
She said, “He put a status on facebook saying that his mom passed away this morning”. I looked over at my mom --- her hand over her mouth, shaking her head in shock...Hearing that this youthful, awesome, energetic woman had passed, was hard to process, because …… because … I never did say goodbye. And this rush of guilt comes over you, and the bottom line is that there is nothing you can do. You can’t turn back the clock and change the fact that you didn’t call or reach out and it hit me like a pile of bricks, and I sat outside of my dressing room crying thinking, “I don’t deserve to be crying right now, I didn’t even know her for the last six years of her life.”
So why am I telling you this? Because, I really believe that she would want someone else to hear this story and get to say, “Hey! Long time no talk!” to a loved one … maybe go home tonight, and call their mom, or their grandpa, or an old friend just to say hello, to ask how the kids are, or how work is going, and maybe ask if they want to grab dinner sometime.
So this monologue is a tribute to the most awesome, rocking, stylish, hilarious woman that I never said goodbye too.