Vituary: Ramona

How do I decide when to write a vituary? At the beginning of the project I expected I would start at one end of my friend list and work through them. This has not proved to be the case.

So I suppose I write vituary’s when I feel like it. But that seems so ridiculous, writers have to write all the time, not just when they feel like it.

But wait, this is not about me, it is about Ramona. Ramona and I met and became friends a little more than 10 years ago. She is from Montana and we connected through Girl Scouts. Looking back through old Girl Scout pictures though, I found her photo, so we must have met before then sometime. Her sister was my camp counselor for years and her mother lead the Girl Scout council in Montana.

But we did not really connect until I moved to DC. Through the years we have had many an adventure together: from the first time I went to her house and kept getting lost for 4 HOURS, to moving her 80+ year old friend, to shopping at Nordstrom Rack, to road trips to New York and the Eastern Shore, to retrieving lost mufflers on the side of the road in the middle of the night. We were “Montana sisters.” She was there when Linda died and then when Jack died. She always would pick up the phone for me.

Until she didn’t.

Which I suppose is the impetus for this vituary.

If the purpose of the vituary is to tell people you love, why you love them, before they are dead, the corollary is that the person must listen.

So, I love Ramona because she is crazy, because she can drink most men I know under the table, because she came to visit me in Germany, because she spends her life doing all good things for other people, because she started her own business, because she can tell a really sad story and make you laugh at the end, because she too can start a one-match fire, because she is grounded and frugal, because she talked to me for hours about men who should not have mattered, and because she always picked up the phone.