Donna was the most fervent Elvis fan I’ve ever personally known. (Maybe even the only one.) I learned the hard way never to make fun of “the king” in her presence, although that was a challenge for me in the mid-’70s when Elvis was in his chubby, rhinestone decline.
Yes, Donna was quirky, to be sure, but her keen wit and honesty were refreshing and engaging. And thanks to Facebook, I was reconnected with this high school classmate for a short time, just in the nick of time.
She’s gone now—too young, it seems to me—and I will forever regret not knowing Donna better than I did.
We grew up in the same town and labored side by side for one hour every school day for three years on our high school yearbook staff. I teased her about her obsessions with Elvis and “Gone with the Wind,” and she relentlessly ragged me for sitting at the “cool” lunch table.
Our high school orbits intersected in only a few classes, but I discovered that humor can create a wonderful bond between even the most unlikely comrades.
Thirty-five years after graduating from high school, Facebook brought us together again as Donna made it her mission in 2010 to gather our high school class for a reunion. She crowned herself “Queen of the Reunion” and her pre-event hype on Facebook kept us all entertained and engaged.
I missed the reunion. It was held in my Indiana hometown, I was in South Carolina, and we had a lot going on here that summer. But pictures of the event on Facebook made me smile as I saw Donna wearing her crown and performing a queenly parade wave for the camera. Her radiant smile and the impish glint in her eye hadn’t changed a bit in three-and-a-half decades.
I continued hearing from Donna after that. She came up with some hilarious “quizzes” for her Facebook friends. Reading those posts lifted my spirits and made me smile on some days when I was battling my own health demons and desperately needed to laugh.
Donna and I then became friendly competitors in an online Scrabble game, and the format allowed us to engage in some banter with every move we made. It felt like we were back laughing together in the yearbook room, and my life was enriched by her renewed presence in it.
And this time around I wasn’t too “cool” to appreciate her quirkiness.
One day I received an uncharacteristically serious message from Donna. She wrote about our high school years, saying I was one of the nicest people she knew back then.
I was floored. I always thought she considered me a bit of a snob, what with all that ribbing about sitting at the “cool table” … where, I’m ashamed to say, I never thought about inviting her to sit.
Her words poured new grace upon old, festering guilt left over from the days before God made me a “new creation” in Jesus Christ and helped me begin to see people as He sees them.
Not long after Donna sent that message, she disappeared from Facebook and stopped responding to my Scrabble moves. Then came a post from her daughter asking everyone to pray because Donna was in the hospital fighting for her life.
Sadly, she lost that battle, but I’m so thankful I got to be there in some small way before Donna died, to pray for her and to make sure she knew I thought she was, indeed, very “cool.”
It was a powerful reminder to take advantage of opportunities to reconnect with people.
We never know when an opportunity might be our last … or turn out to be God’s surprising path to healing.