The months passed, and so did the urgency. I still hadn't called her. Then she hit some sort of internal threshold, and couldn't come into work anymore. People tell me that her health declined rapidly towards the end. Then she was gone. She was 35, and I never called her.

At the end of the summer of 1996, I was preparing to leave the project I was working on at the time, and start a new one at the north side of town. Cathy coordinated a cookout for all the disparate people and groups on the project (there were at least a half-dozen companies involved then), and it all went swimmingly. At the end, as we were one of the last people to leave, we helped out on some of the cleanup. I asked Cathy if there was anything else I could do, and she told me no. That was the last time I ever saw Cathy.

There is never a better moment than now, especially when death is involved. In the case of Una's grandmother, she was in the hospital in May with a variety of heart and lung ailments. We flew up to see her, and even though she was gruff about it ("why did you spend all that money to see me?"), it was obvious that the outpouring of attention and concern aided her recovery. In Cathy's case, I couldn't be bothered to pick up the phone. I don't think about it too much, because as I said, we were never too close, but it still bothers me. It's a nagging feeling at the back of my mind. Something was lost, and I don't know what, or where it could be. But it still bothers me.