Hildegarde

Okay, that’s not exactly nice.  Or sensitive.  Or something.  Bu when I get really weirded out, I start to gigle.

I do want to get back to all the things we’ve been sort of talking about–especially whether I, as a taxpayer, am getting my money’s worth when it’s spent on public “universities” that provide only theoreteically “practical” programs–but I will point out here that when administrators say they’re being practical, they don’t mean they’re keeping those programs that have real utility in the real world.  What they mean is that they’re keeping those programs that attract a lot of students as majors.  If entrail diviination pulled in packed classrooms and forty graduates a year, they’d throw money at it in fist fulls.

That said, here’s my minor little mystery for today, because it’s on my mind.

My college’s alumnae magazine came yesterday, and in it there were two short and uninformative notices that one of the women I’d known best in my years in Poughkeepsie had died, this last December 21st.

Now, I hadn’t seen this woman in over a decade.  I think the last time I talked to her at any length was when  Bill was diagnosed with cancer.  And it wasn’t as if the announcement was necessarily a big shock, since when  I knew her she smoked between two and three packs of cigarettes a day.

It wasn’t, in other words, a big emotional deal, really, just a little creepy, until  I got an e-mail from a mutual friend this morning, saying that he had googled to see if he could get some information and ended up with finding nothing but two newspaper articles about a woman with “the same name” who lived in the same town having a series of traffic accidents.

Now, this woman imigrated from India at a young age, and her name–Renu Narang–is not usual.  I couldn’t see what was confusing this guy–if there were stories about a Renu Narang having traffic accidents in Westport, Connecticut, then it almost certainly had to be the same Renu Narang.   It wasn’t likely that there would be two people with that name in one of the most heavily WASP enclaves in the United States.

Then I googled myself, and I saw what his problem was.  The woman in the stories was reported as being “62 years old,” which would make her almost five years older than the rest of us.

The age difference is weird–if it had been only a couple of years older than the rest of us, I don’t think  I’d have thought anything of it.   There often gets to be a lag in educational attainment when people immigrate.  And if the age had been much higher, I’d have just assumed it was her mother the stories were talking about.

Common sense says that this must be the same person, but it’s still odd.

And what’s odder still is the content of the reports themselves.  The incidents are the kind of thing you’d expect to hear about a DUI–first, backing into a lot of cars in a parking lot, then jumping the sidewalk and crashing into the side of a bank–but there was no mention of alcohol in any of the reports, and if the police had suspected that alcohol was involved, there would almost certainly have been mention of it.

The incidents, as reported, read almost like the start of a murder mystery, especially so because nobody seems to have been high.  I can see it all as the opening to a Miss Marple.

In the day to day world, though, it’s most certainly something mundane–a series of small strokes, maybe (her mother had a very major stroke very young–or even small heart attacks.  The second of the incidents occurred on December 9th, and she was dead twelve days later.  There doesn’t seem to be an obituary available on line, and the notice in the alumnae magazine was stark and uninformative.   She died.  She was living with and taking care of her disabled parents.  End of story.

This makes the second death among people I knew in college that is strange in its details–one woman was murdered–and about the tenth among people I knew, period.  The rest of them, though, were fairly mundane–one young woman had an aneurism in her thirties, a couple of the earliest co-ed admits died of AIDS, one woman had breast cancer–and it’s a little odd to think that so many people who were relatively young have died. 

But I  knew this woman better than I knew any of the rest, and the details are very odd.

Information blackouts always do strange things to my head.