The Rocky Letters

I received some devastating news this past weekend. After sending an old grad school friend an email birthday greeting, one of many emails I’ve sent the past few months that received no response, I was surprised to get a text not from her, but her husband.

“Hi Gail. This is Dave. I saw your email to Rocky and feel like I should tell you something you may or may not be suspicious of…Rocky has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease with Lewy body pathology…Needs continuous reinforcement and clarification of who I am and what the nature of our relationship is…”

Wow. Did not see that coming.

My dear friend is several years younger than me, putting her in her early 60s. The last time we spoke on the phone, which was maybe a year and a half ago, she admitted to having “word-finding problems” that were concerning enough that she had an appointment scheduled with a neurologist. She said it felt like more than the normal forgetfulness we all go through as we age, more than the “Now why the heck did I walk into this room again?” stuff. She promised me she’d let me know what they found out. And it was the last time I’d heard from her.

Knowing that conversation was just a mere ~18 months ago, the rapid progression of this disease on my friend has been stunning to comprehend.

* * *

Her given name was Veronica, but I never heard anyone call her that. I don’t know when or how she was nicknamed Rocky, but the name stuck. Ironic that she ended up going into geology, or maybe it was just her destiny.

When I started grad school at the University of Texas at Arlington (in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area), I felt a bit like a duck out of water. I was about 5 years older than all the other students starting their MS degrees because I got a job immediately after my BS degree. Unlike the others, I’d considered my education done and dusted—I’d put that part of my life behind me—until the shock of an oil industry layoff in the mid-1980s called me a liar. Unable to find another job, I decided the only way forward was to further my education if I was going to stay in my field.

I must have looked particularly lonely or lost, because I caught Rocky’s attention in the halls of UTA and she immediately reached out to me. We became fast friends, being among the few females in the department and some of the few married grad students as well.

Neither of our marriages survived after graduation. She ended up moving with her second husband (Dave) to a farm in rural southern Ohio, where they both landed teaching positions at Marietta College, she in geology and her husband in petroleum engineering. Rocky grew up on a farm in Missouri and was well-acquainted with all the government subsidies and tax write-offs for US farm owners; she knew how to make that life work. As for me, I got divorced immediately after I graduated and landed a job back in the oil industry in Houston.

We were determined to stay in touch, even though we were now thousands of miles apart. Our birthdays were both in October, and the shared birthday bashes in grad school became mailed birthday cards and long, handwritten letters. For her, she’d already found her new love, so she told me of settling in with her new hubby, her teaching job, and life on the farm with her new cows. For me, it was a long, sad string of bad first dates, lonely nights, talk about my job, and getting to know Houston those first few years.

Another grad school friend of ours named Cy was also from Ohio. He graduated the same year I did and returned to his hometown of Wooster afterward. When I received an invitation to his wedding a few years later, I jumped at this chance to go to Ohio. After attending his wedding, I rented a car and drove south to visit Rocky on her farm. Finally, I saw the idyllic life she built for herself. Their two boys had not yet arrived, but they’d laid the foundation: the ~5 acres, the farmhouse, the cows, the cats, the chickens, the red truck. It wasn’t a life I would have chosen, but they seemed happy and content.

* * *

I tried multiple times to get Rocky to switch to email, but unsuccessfully. “We could stay in touch so much more often!” I would argue. And she would say in her next letter, “I know what I have to do when I’m at work, and it’s not writing emails to friends.”

So we stuck to the old-fashioned, handwritten, way-of-the-Luddite letters. For 30 years. From 1988 until 2018, at least twice a year on our birthdays and Christmas, we exchanged our Jane Austin missives.

Rocky eventually retired from her teaching job at Marietta College just before Covid hit. I was surprised to get an email from her one day, telling me she was at home, clearing out her home office. She was purging her teaching files: class syllabuses, old tests and lecture notes, all her geology notes on fossil field locations, etc. A career’s worth of archives and achievements, into the shredder.

While doing this, she came across all my old letters. She’d saved all 30 years’ worth. She said, “The first one’s from the Mesozoic!” Did I want them back, or should she toss them?

After I recovered from the shock of realizing that she still had all those letters, it only took me about 15 seconds to respond to her email: “Please don’t throw those away. I’d love to have them back, only if you’re positive you don’t want them anymore.”

About a month later, I received a shoebox-sized box in the mail. It was a beautiful painted gift box lovingly tied with a pink satin ribbon. And there they all were, in chronological order. I just couldn’t believe it. As I slowly started to read the record of 30 years of my life, from one divorce, to falling in love again, a second marriage, the deterioration of that marriage and another divorce, a third marriage and divorce, my business successes and failures—I realized it was a more complete chronology of my adult life than any journal I’d ever kept. It was astounding to see it all laid out in front of me.

And then there was that letter. The one I wish I hadn’t written. The one I wish she had thrown away.

Rocky suffered a personal tragedy in midlife involving the untimely death of her sister, who was only in her mid-30s. I found out about this not from a phone call or a personal letter, but in a generic Christmas letter she’d sent out to all her acquaintances. I was so hurt and angry that I wasn’t told one-on-one about this, that I wasn’t allowed to comfort her as a close friend, that this tragic news seemed to be treated as a bullet item in a newsletter…that I sent her a raging letter in return. Among other things, I said, “If ever I needed any evidence that we have grown apart, that our friendship is no longer important to you, I guess I don’t need to look any further.” Thankfully, even after that gross misstep of mine, our friendship survived.

She’d never told me in the intervening years that she’d been saving all those letters, and apparently, she’d been doing the same for her other close friends as well. I sure hope they made the decision to retrieve them, as I’d done. What a gift! This unexpected treasure trove was one of the resources I’d used to write my memoir; in fact, I quote from one of my “Rocky letters” in one of the chapters.

* * *

I haven’t lost my dear friend yet; she is still with us. I called her on the phone over the weekend; she knew who I was and sounded bright and cheerful. They were in the car, on the way to visit their grandbabies. What a relief to hear her voice and to hear that recognition, those sounds of normalcy, which may be fleeting in the months to come. How cruel to think that all this may soon be taken away from her. I’m so grateful that she has Dave, her boys, and her grandkids by her side.

Someday soon, she may forget me. But I know I will never forget her or the amazing thing she did to preserve the record of our friendship.