I have written this essay now at least five times. What I had with my first draft looked like a final draft to nobody but me, and what I have here looks like a first draft to me and might look like a final to everyone else.

Our lives, as much as we can plan them, are almost entirely composed of accidents, of luck and of random events. That much has never been in doubt to those of us who stop to wonder why we even bother making plans when the Fates sit with scissors and threads in hand, waiting to snip life to its proper end, regardless of how we feel about it.

You have probably read more essays than you care to on “My friend’s death changed me forever”, or “You never know when someone’s last words to you one night will be their last forever”, or any number of other (sometimes painful) iterations of the always painfully simple fact that people die. I think this one might provide an interesting twist to what is otherwise a very simple story: people meet, become friends, then one dies. For all its simplicity it has been done to death, and for all its iterations it remains, essentially, the same story.

Here is mine.

I knew Cristi less than four years. We met online. Ours was not an internet romance; she was not someone I courted from afar, she was a good person and someone I wanted to meet because she was contagious. Her happiness (in spite of, at times, crippling depression) was infectious, her smile was unmistakable, her hair was almost a fire hazard, and colored to match. You’ve read innumerable accounts of people who lived life to the fullest, who took every day as their last, all that. Those people exist in movies and Harlequin romances and not much of anywhere else. Cristi didn’t do that; with three kids (four if you counted her rock star husband, she often said), an impending divorce, financial and domestic woes and a budding romance, she didn’t have time to live life to the fullest, if that meant doing things only to please herself. She had plans to go back to school within six months because she didn’t feel smart enough for herself, but they’d had to be put on hold for a few reasons. She had plans to make a life with her boyfriend and his family (a girl and two boys from a previous marriage).

A few days ago all that was cut short by a little snip from one of the Fates’ scissors, ending Cristi’s thread at 36 years and dealing entirely too many people a crippling blow. I got home from work to read that my friend had died earlier that morning. The grief has been coming out in fits and spurts, much like this essay.

I sat here an hour ago reading what words people can find to express their grief on the message board where we met. Another long-time member cited a poem he had found in college some years ago that seemed to fit this occasion. It appeared to be innocent enough, so I clicked on the link and was taken to a poem entitled "He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead". It is a poem by William Butler Yeats, and on the outside it is rather confusing.

What is particularly poignant about this is that I have a paper due in English 244 three days from now on Yeats. Fate has taken Cristi’s thread, tossed in the result of a man who is unconnected to us (as far as I know) but for this internet message board, and his search for poems with odd-looking names, and given me a metaphorical kick in the butt. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it at first because the odds that, of all the poets in the world, it would be this one assigned to me by my English prof, are so staggeringly small as to be virtually nil. I had planned to write the paper the night before, as I've done time and time again and with very good results. This particular paper is now half done because of a surge of creativity I attribute to Cristi just as another person would say it was random. I don't remember the last time I had so much as a paragraph three days before a paper was due.

Accidents, luck and random events. It was an accident (a seizure, as far as we know) that Cristi died. It was a random event that this man found this poem years ago and remembered it enough to post it. It is some kind of luck that I now use this to heal from something that left me wondering what sort of sick joke it was to make Cristi think life was finally coming together, then give her a seizure at 1 in the morning, have her fall into a bathtub and be discovered there two hours later by her husband.

I want to go to Radford so I can teach people that however preposterous it may seem that William Butler Yeats and Cristi have a connection, there is always a reason. I want to teach everyone that reason. I want to teach them about Cristi, about fate, and about why once in a while you begin a paper more than 12 hours in advance.