What we don’t know, hurts us.

Working in journalism has allowed me to be something of a hermit. Especially since, thanks to the understanding of the publishers of canvas, I work largely from home so I can be with my 22-month-old daughter.

What this means is that I mostly communicate with the world through email, IM and an occasional phone call. Sometimes, I don’t speak to another adult until well into the evening when my husband comes home from work.

It’s a peculiarity of life in the technological age that most of us face. But today, something happened that made it really hit home how this “peculiarity” has become a serious problem.

Like many of us, I have numerous defunct email accounts. For the most part, I’ve been pretty good about letting people know that those accounts are no longer active and not to email me there, but sometimes things slip through.

Today, I decided to check one of those accounts because I was expecting an email that never came. Well, I figured, the person must have used an old address.

I didn’t find the mail I was looking for but, instead, mixed in with 125 junk emails, I found a note that my long-time friend Michelle Morrisson had lost her nearly two year battle with pancreatic cancer.

As my heart sank into stomach, I looked at the date. August 18th. Then I read the second email about her memorial service, with directions to get there. September 15th.

Because I had not seen this email, I had not been present to mourn my friend who was a woman of the greatest integrity and sweetness of spirit. Goodness came to her as easily as breathing yet she was no goody-two-shoes. Michelle had a wry sense of humor and keenly intelligent way of looking at the world. Every conversation with her was enormously interesting; every moment with her had its share of laughter.

Even as she went through the harrowing experience of trying every available experimental treatment to stay her disease she was still thinking about other people—about me and my infant daughter, about numerous other friends, the charities she held dear, about her aged mother suffering from Alzheimer’s and who, ultimately, predeceased her by a matter of months, and, first and foremost, about her family.

I didn’t get a chance to at least offer her husband David and wonderful children Emily and Michael support in that time—although my shoulder would only have been one of literally hundreds. But, for this, I blame myself.

Why didn’t I call one more time? Why didn’t I just stop by –her home was a mere 2 miles away– and offer a cake or a few minutes to just say “hi” though she was often too weak too talk? Why didn’t I check that damn email account? Why didn’t I read the local papers where her passing was surely noted? Why didn’t I interact in my community more, so that someone would have told me what happened?

There is no good answer. I was wrapped up in my life, cocooned behind a “safe” wall of technology. I chose to distance myself from the larger world and its important happenings.

What can I say now? In my head, I am talking to her. Saying how sorry I am for not being there. How I know her children lost the best mother in the world. How her husband lost the greatest companion he would ever have. How, as the old testament saying goes, that she was a woman whose value equaled a price above rubies.

And how, that when Michelle left it, this world lost a great deal.