25 Years Is a Lifetime

Twenty five years is a lifetime. Years enough to grow up, or think that you have become an adult, finish school, get married, start a family and settle into the welcomed routines and expectations that we embrace as we watch our life unfold. When I try to remember who I was in 1985, the summer I graduated from high school, I see who most of us were at eighteen, someone with more to learn than I was ready to admit. I doubt that I could have considered what life would hold and more importantly what it would feel like. Love, work, failure, laughter, luck, satisfaction and grief filled up the next twenty five years of my life. What did I know when I was eighteen? Now it is seldom, really only once a year, on June 23rd that I ever think back on that last summer, how much time has past and how far I have come.

It was the summer that I graduated from high school and moved from Sudbury to Toronto. From a place that I had spent most of my life to the shining centre of the universe, a place that I would start university and start my life. So obsessed with moving forward and moving on, I skipped my high school graduation. I gave up the chance to say goodbye to the people of that place and time in my life.

Had I gone to graduation, I would have seen Brinda one last time. I wish that I remembered more about Brinda. I wish that we had been friends. I remember her shining black hair and her perfect pronunciation in French class and her grace, if it is possible for someone to be graceful at seventeen and Brinda was. She was wickedly smart and funny and kind, something that I remember as astoundingly rare in the awful awkwardness and solitude of my high school experience. I remember her younger sister Arte was always laughing, walking down the hallway, past the lockers, with her head thrown back, just laughing.

I remember the news on television and hearing about Air India on the radio and then a call from one of my friends but even before the phone call, knowing that Brinda, Arte and her father had been on that same plane. There were no doubts that they were gone. I don’t think that I cried but I do remember trying to figure out why it should be that plane, on that night, going to India, a place so far from Northern Ontario that was a world away. When you are eighteen years old you believe that everything must have a reason.

I am forty three years old and every year, on June 23rd, I think of how Brinda would be and should be my age. She should have been a doctor or an artist or a grandmother. I should be able to see her name on Facebook and ask her if she remembers how much we despised our grey polyester Marymount school uniforms.

I didn’t keep in touch with any of the girls who graduated from Marymount College with me in 1985. They have moved from Sudbury and stayed in Sudbury. They have married, divorced, given birth, buried parents, held public office, and watched their children make them proud. I doubt that any of them have ever forgotten Brinda Pada.