Episode 15: The Last Text

for a preface, see my work stories home page.



I have only one protected message on my phone.

Dated November 30, 2015, 7:59 pm:
We work it out :-)

A former coworker (let's call her Sunny) and I were working on swapping shifts over the holidays, and that was her last message to me.

Rewind about four months from that message to when I was new at my current job, and you'd see that Sunny was driving me crazy. Sometimes she would instruct me on how to do an elementary task. Sometimes she would display complete disorganization, leaving everything until the last minute when it would magically come together. She'd be standing there, flushed and chipper. I'd be around the corner with all my hair torn out. I couldn't decide which I preferred - the laid back chaos of working with Sunny, or the tense machinery of working with Manager.

She started to grow on me, nonetheless (as did Manager). For one, Sunny had joined our work team a month before I did, and both of us had the common experience of being "hazed" by the fiery rage of our coworker Dragon Lady, who marks her territory on each new employee the way any animal does.

Then Sunny's teenage daughter Tuneful joined the team, and she was like a mini photocopy of her mom. Both were flustered and haphazard in their work-style but also full of ideas, random knowledge, mirth, and music. It was touching to see and hear how Sunny blissfully lavished love on her kids. Once, she came to drop off Tuneful for her shift, and before leaving she pulled her close so they were hugging cheek-to-cheek. "Love you," she smiled, speaking with intense purpose as if it were the last time. I think of that often now that she's gone.

Sunny loved her kids, but talk was her passion. She would talk about her estranged husband, talk about her boyfriend, talk about motor racing, talk about cooking, talk about her summer home in a trailer in the woods. She loved talk. She was an artist, and talk was her medium.

Sunny passed away sometime during the night after she sent me her cheerful text, November 31, 2015. Almost a year ago now. Turns out she had been spending the night in her truck (not at home, because she couldn't stand her husband). Tuneful found her the next day. She had died of a massive heart attack and no one had been there to witness it or call for help.

Her three kids are growing up without her. I can't imagine. Every time I clear the messages from my phone, Sunny's remains. I see her last text and remember her life, her spunk, her easy-going manner, and the way she loved her kids. It's a final message, and I'm still trying to understand why it had to be final.

"We work it out," she wrote to me, followed by a cheesy smiley face, so true to her sunny character.

And we're still here, still trying to work it out.