A Belated Goodbye

I finally found out who A was referring to in her 2006 recap blog entry—which highschool friend it was that killed herself. Because I had left Toronto for so long I was no longer in the loop to stay up-to-date about the gang. Only today, almost eight months later, over dinner with R who’d recently come back to Hong Kong did I get hit with the ton of bricks.

I had tried to decipher A’s blog entry before, horrifically running a list of names in my head. But never would I have thought it was Eva.

Eva was one of the first friends I made at BA. I had just switched schools and she was in my grade 11 homeroom Religion class. We were never particularly tight, but I’ve always liked her. Everyone liked her. She truly was the sweetest girl I’ve ever known: smart, pretty, genuinely kind, just perfect in every way. From what I heard, everyone who knew her went to her funeral.

It’s devastating enough to hear people dying young. But nothing is sadder than to learn about someone’s suicide. I’d think a lot of her friends felt some level of guilt for not being able to recognize the amount of emotional distress she was under and reach out in time. Even I do, and I had seen her no more than three times since highschool graduation. The last time and the only time in a long time I’d heard from her was a brief message on Friendster in 2005, in which she sounded just like the cheerful positive Eva I knew.

Whatever it was that drove her to end her life, I really hope she’s free from now.