When I started grade 1 in my rural Canadian school I met my childhood best girlfriend who lived on the next farm down the road from our place. We were inseparable after that first day of school and we'd go on some wild boy-ambushing adventures in our rural countryside that I would contrive and she would follow through on. I'd send her in to do the dirty work as I watched from the sidelines, while highly commending her gallant efforts those few times when things didn't work out as I'd planned for those nasty boys.
One day in our grade 3 class, the school Principal came in and told her in front of the class that he'd just received word that her father had died on their farm and she was to return home immediately. I left the class with her because she lived beside our farm and I convinced the Principal to call my dad to come and pick us up to take her home, which he did.
My 8 year old best girlfriend didn't really register with the new reality in her family for quite some time thereafter, but during that week of her dad's funeral she told me with very light, very happy composure that she herself will never live beyond the age of 29 and that when she dies, she will be cremated!
At the time, 29 years of age was an age reserved for 'old people' in my 8 year old's mind, so her dying at the age of 29 seemed to be a reasonable presumption of her own morality, at least to me it did.
Then after we stuck together all through high school and then took different paths in life after our graduation day celebration, we lost track of each other completely.
Just a few years ago at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, I went home to my parent's farm to make sure they were understanding what was going on and while I was there, my mom and I stopped into the community cemetery to place flowers on a gravesite where one of her friends had recently died of Covid.
It was a familiar cemetery for me because that was the same place my childhood girlfriend's father had been Interred when we were both 8 years old as we both stood by his open grave on the day of his funeral beside her grieving mom.
Leaving my mom for a moment at her Late friend's grave site, I wandered over to my best girlfriend's dad's gravesite to rekindle those old memories of him from my childhood, when all of a sudden I almost fell to my knees as I read my girlfriend's full name etched within the granite of her father's headstone. 🥺
There was her name, directly underneath her dad's name along with the date and year she had died, which was actually the day of her 29th birthday.
The worst part for me was that she had only died 4 months prior to me arriving there in the cemetery that day. A small brown patch of square-cut grass where her Urn had been Interred in front of her father's headstone had still not had enough sun and rain to spring that patch of brown grass back to green again since the day she'd been cremated 4 months earlier.
Somehow when we were both 8 years old, she could see how it would all unfold for herself when she shared her intuitive knowing with me which I never forgot.
