She had this laugh when we were kids. It was the kind of laugh that bubbled up from a giggle, sort of came in spurts and starts while she had this shocked look on her face, as if she wasn’t sure that she had laughed. She’d be quiet, look at me with huge eyes, then again, that giggle. To keep my laughter from ballooning into the next room, she’d clamp one hand tightly on her mouth, and the other, more tightly on mine. I was younger. Michelle always knew better than I did.
It was crystalline, her laugh. It was the kind of laugh that you imagine when you think of girls getting into mischief, being silly, being children, really. We got excited about everything and nothing. She sounded like a bell when she laughed.
She was a girl’s girl: all pink, all laughter, all sweetness, and a steadfast friend. Australia was a far place to move and in 1989, it took 3 weeks for our teenaged letters to reach eachother. We corresponded for years and years, then drifted. When we did meet occasionally, the transplants had changed her as I imagine two liver transplants would change anybody. She no longer laughed freely. I cursed her illness for robbing her of the pink, for making her suffer. Australia never inched closer.
Yesterday was her birthday. She turned 38. She passed away this morning, here in the city, waiting for her third transplant. Despite being in a coma for three weeks, it seems she held on, just to make it past her birthday. Michelle would likely do that, just to save her parents and sister the grief of that terrible irony because even in the end, despite the long absence of that musical laugh, she will still be the same girl of my childhood - ever loving, ever sweet.
