Doorknocking

Last summer, before Sarah died (B.S.D.), I was surfing the net catching up with various people in my life in my nosy way, and I Googled my law school ex-boyfriend. He was a dual JD/MD degree candidate and very serious about medical school, and I knew he ended up in the Midwest (at the most topnotch residential match for radiology). Around the time Sarah was a toddler and first receiving so many confusing diagnoses, I would reach out to him via email to mediate the radiology wars over interpretation of her MRIs and potential diagnoses du jour, and he would do his best to advise me. But we gradually lost touch like most people except as LinkedIn contacts.

For some reason in July 2022 I gave him a brief shout out on LinkedIn, and I told him I saw a reference on the net to the fact that he and his wife had lost their older son in a tragic accident. I apologized for not conveying my condolences to them sooner. He thanked me and we ended up chatting about our careers, politics, law school gossip; the usual range of subjects. His adolescent son’s death was just a small footnote in our shared e-conversation, but it was also the reason I had reached out. I don’t know if I would have initiated contact if I hadn’t seen a reference to the boy’s death online.

Less than a month after I contacted Mazen on LinkedIn, Sarah woke up dead. I don’t have any definite philosophy of the universe that tells me these events are connected, or that we are all just actors in a predetermined set piece, but it makes me wonder about how the universe tilts and the reason for the connections we make. I hope and believe this connection helped prepare me in some way for what was to come. I know I reached out to Mazen several more times after Sarah died and despite the fact that he’s not at all an emotional guy, I felt I could tell him how crazy and despondent I felt. He was a resource for me.

I remember him telling me that I would have dreams of Sarah knocking at the door and trying to come home. I haven’t had those yet. I’ve had very few dreams of Sarah, maybe because she is on my mind so much during the day. Of course if the real Sarah had been able to walk up to our door and knock or come through, I would have been thrilled to pieces.