A community of women mourn one lost too soon

The temptation to write about violent protests in the streets was nearly overwhelming this week. Watching the carnage, the looting and the mayhem in Charlotte, and hearing the excuses of those who almost unbelievably tried to justify the violence as a reckoning long overdue, made me want to jump in and shred the pretensions and idiotic rhetoric of the malcontents.

The temptation was powerful, but with the exception of a few pithy comments on Facebook, I resisted. That’s because there was something much more important to talk about, something that transcended the things that drive the cable TV ratings. It was personal, and it was sorrowful, and it means little to the Walter Cronkite wannabees who spend their time breathlessly narrating the agitprop childishness of renegades.

But to me, it was more important than anything happening anywhere else in the world.

This week, a high school classmate died of cancer. She was just 55, a few months older than me, and much more beautiful than I ever was or ever will be. Anna Marie was one of those people who effortlessly achieve perfection, at least in the eyes of those who watched her navigate the crazy world of a teenager in the 1970s. She had big brown eyes, a jaw of geometric perfection, mounds of light brown hair that didn’t frizz (damn her,) and the kind of grace that couldn’t be extinguished by a Catholic school kilt and knee socks.

The thing that distinguished Anna Marie was not the fact that she was beautiful, which she was. The thing that set her apart in the yearbooks and in the memories of those who mourned her premature death was her sweet nature, her egalitarian view of friendship, her genuine sympathy and her unalterable optimism. I didn’t know her very well at Merion Mercy, even though our class was really quite small compared to so many others. We traveled in different circles, but I had warm, albeit fuzzy memories of her loveliness.

Enter Facebook. Sometimes, I think Mark Zuckerberg should be shot for creating this forum where crackpots from every walk of life can wage their rhetorical battles against virtual enemies and people can tilt at their personal windmills. The week I spent in Rome cleansed my soul, because I stopped posting and reading about politics and spent my time uploading photos, a troubling percentage of which were selfies. Distance from the social media polemicists, of which I suppose I’m also one, was as necessary as water to a man dying of thirst.

But I realized that Facebook does have its rare positive side, one that emerged with sad irony when Anna Marie died. One of my old classmates started a conversation among those of us in the Class of ‘79, pulling together as many people as she could to remember our beautiful friend. The comments started slowly, but built to a happy crescendo with photos from our yearbook exchanged (saddle shoes and Farrah Fawcett flips were de rigeur at our school,) reminiscences about the girl with the megawatt smile and the doe-brown eyes, requests for information about lost friendships and promises to get together when we could.

And as I became a part of the threaded conversation, following its stream of consciousness meanderings, I realized that these women had been with me during the happiest moments of my life. They say that youth is wasted on the young, and that’s probably because we don’t realize what we have while we are living it, tasting it, hearing it, touching it, holding it in our arms. We might have an inkling of the value of our unburdened days, those of us who pause long enough to have an existential thought. But for the most part, teenagers don’t stop to examine our lives, to measure them against what we hope they will turn into or what we fear they might never actually be.

Listening to women who shared four momentous years with me, from 1975 to 1979, was a reminder that we really are not islands, entire and isolated unto ourselves. Even when we don’t realize or acknowledge it, we impact others the way a pebble dropped into pool of water sends its ripples out to the far perimeters, touching edges that the pebble will never reach.

These women of the Class of ‘79 have gone on to create adult lives, as we all do unless God has plans to take us home prematurely. Their names were, for the most part, changed from the years when I knew them, or extended with the surnames of their husbands. Their faces, though, were very much the same with only a few wrinkles, some different hair colors, but the same sparkling eyes and exuberant spirits that characterized the women of Merion Mercy Academy.

Becoming a part of that conversation was like walking back in time, accompanied by a soundtrack of Loggins and Messina, the Carpenters, Jim Croce, Lynnrd Skynnrd and the storytellerstar of our Soph Hop, Stevie Wonder and his Songs in the Key of Life. I felt a little bit like Emily in the last act of “Our Town” who realizes, too late, that what matters are the people that shared our glorious joys with us. This quote came to mind: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”

There is something eternal about each of us, and it isn’t just the eternal soul that good Catholic girls are taught to cherish and protect. The constant and unchanging thing about human beings is that we will always keep trying to connect, and maintain those connections even when life puts miles and years between us. It is excruciatingly sad that it often takes death to remind us of the vitality of life, and this yearning for connection. But if that is the gift that death gives, we should accept it.

We, the women of MMA in the Class of 1979 remember Anna Maria Bonfini Burgio, who was a beautiful pinpoint of light in our youthful days, and who – from heaven – has pulled us back to each other and to our first, best selves. Rest in peace beautiful one, you are mourned, remembered, and celebrated. Until we meet again.