Desmond

I met Desmond Fitzgerald in high school. We went to Mamaroneck High, a conventional, large, suburban school. In a sea of girls who seemed to care mostly about clothes and football players, Desmond was unique. It is almost certainly unfair to characterize most of the girls that way, but I’m sure it’s a fair characterization of Desmond. There were interesting boys, her brother Ryder was one of them, boys who stood out from the norm, who were were interested in electronics or jazz and beat poetry. But in my view, there were few unconventional girls. It was a rather lonely time for me, and Desmond was one of the few girls I was genuinely glad to see in the long school hallways, standing out with her lanky frame, her uncurled hair, and her careless (but very hip) clothes. The Fitzgerald kids came from an interesting and unconventional family. Their Dad was an artist, and I did a few modeling sessions for one of his classes. (It turns out it’s a lot more work to sit still than you might think.) At some point in my friendship with the Fitzgeralds, my little sister, Tamar, four years younger than I, met Ryder.

Tamar and Ryder eventually became sweethearts, and after she graduated from high school she moved in with Ryder. I was already off to college by then, but of course I knew about their relationship. Tamar and Ryder lived together for several years, and then, as young people do, they went their separate ways. I too had gone my own way, moving first to Santa Fe and then to San Francisco, maintaining none of my high school friendships. Tamar married and had two sons, though of course the story is a lot more complicated than that. She divorced years ago, when the boys were still young, and after her divorce she and Ryder reconnected, and they are together still. Through their renewed connection I knew a little about Desmond’s life, I saw her a few times in the last couple of decades, and I knew that her health had been very poor for most of her adult life. She died on December 18th.

I can’t write a eulogy for Desmond, as I knew so little of her adult life and our teen years together are so distant. But her death has brought floods of memory for me, memories of how I became the odd kid I was when I met her in high school, of how our lives diverged after high school and then came back into contact in recent years. Tamar’s experience of reconnecting with Ryder parallels our late sister Shayne’s experience of reconnecting with her high school sweetheart, Bill Woodson. It’s largely through their experiences that I’ve revived some of my girlhood friendships. That, and weird coincidence. I was introduced to a woman my age at the home of our friends, the Augusts in Palo Alto. She stared at me a little and asked what my maiden name was – she recognized me from high school, where we had been in the same grade a continent and decades away. Desmond’s death has made me think about how our lives intersect and diverge, and then sometime reconnect. At this season in my life I find the re-connections oddly powerful. They are triggers of memory and triggers of measurement and assessment – what have we done since we knew each other, how have we changed. I know my life has been continuous, that one day has led to the next, that I wake up each morning very much the same person I was when I went to sleep the night before. But in some ways my younger self seems almost separate, a different being. My life looks more like a series of discrete chapters than a continuous line in the rear view mirror.

Desmond’s poor health had weakened her physically, but she still seemed like the girl I had known, still marching to a unique drumbeat, still seeing below the conventional surfaces. She still didn’t care about clothes or football players.