Barbara: Dear Abby,
I am very sorry to hear
you’ve passed away. Especially knowing that your long illustrious life ended
with Alzheimer’s. I hope you didn’t suffer too much, and that your loving
family didn’t suffer too much letting you go.
When I heard the news, I knew
right away that I had to write. I didn’t immediately take stock of the last
time I read your column (which was long before your daughter took it over), but
I did have a visceral memory from my fraught adolescence of me pouring over those letters to and from you. I would skip past the dire world
news and go straight to your advice column. In many ways, that ritual was much like my
experience reading blogs now—unrelated people coming together from far and wide
to share their humbling, difficult, complicated, tragic, nasty, romantic, sad,
confused, loving experiences living in this complex world. For the first time
in my life, I saw people bare their souls. For a naïve, inexperienced, soon-to-be woman like me, it seemed impossible that people would be so
open and honest, revealing hearts and lives I either related to with every
fibre of my being, or ones I was fascinated to discover, or ones I hoped I’d
never ever have to encounter.
How did you do it? You were
so brave and honest. You were funny. You said things that didn’t offend me,
that opened my eyes. You didn’t pander or patronize. You shot from the hip. You
were gracious and decent. Wasn’t it hard, exhausting, to be so wise and
patient? I don’t think so—because we never heard that it had been either one or
the other. You were graceful and kind about your role as therapist to the world
(aka North America). You showed us by example that we could learn from our
mistakes and change our views in a changing world. You showed us we didn’t need
to hide our mistakes and fears behind closed doors, but that we could come out
and share them with others so they could learn from them too.
If not for you and the trend
you began and the example you set, why, none of us might know how to do this
online/internet/social media thing with any social grace. You led the vanguard,
baby. You showed the way it ought to be done. With kindness and compassion and
good common sense.
Thank you very sincerely from
the bottom of my heart for teaching me so much about the human experience.
R.I.P.
Love, Barbara
(Dear Readers, if you don’t
know to whom I’m referring, Dear Abby was/is a daily advice column that ran
from the late 50s to present day. Pauline Phillips wrote it until the early
2000s until her daughter took it over.)
Deb: Dear Abby,
You spoke to a generation, nay, several generations about brave and
bold gentility. You were of your time and beyond your time. Rest in Peace.
