[[this is the same article I wrote for Mimi. she has replied to me that it was a bit long, lol,for such a small magazine. i want to thank her for quoting the last part of it in the current issue of WITCH. thank you very much.]]
THE ANGEL HEAVEN LET US BORROW
"When the singer's gone, let the song go on
It's a fine line between the darkness and the dawn
They say in the darkest night there's a light beyond" – All I Know, Art Garfunkel
I had only known her for almost a year now and yet she has become a good friend, a best friend, to me. A close common friend introduced us through the Yahoo Instant Messenger early this year and we used the program as our communication device. It is the only way we can talk anyway since she lives on the other side of the world, in Paris, France. A six-hour time difference also separates us and yet we find time to “talk” to each other. And we haven’t even seen each other in person, only in photographs. Her name is Joelle Maxine Lindley.
Joie, as we call her, came to the Philippines a while back and stayed in the South for three years. She studied nursing in Ateneo de Davao. An acquaintance there told her of this forum, the W.I.T.C.H. Board. I have been quite inactive the time she became a member so we weren't formally introduced. But there's where our friendship nourished. We found out that we have several things in common, one being Harry Potter. Together, we've established a role-playing forum where I'm Headmistress and she's my Deputy. I also got her to sign-up as Rogue in an X-Men role-playing forum I'm a member of. We also laugh at little things and have fun with the smileys at Yahoo.
It was our close common friend who told me the real deal about Joie's health. She is in Paris because she has to rest. She has leukaemia. It was a little disturbing since I never had a close friend who had cancer. But I have to accept it. I know that she was taking chemotherapy treatments but in April, her body started rejecting it. In late June, she flew to Maryland to have bone marrow transplant (BMT). The operation happened on 7 July and it was successful. She came back to France the same week and was online in no time. She was still feeling sick but she found the time to post in W.I.T.C.H. (we are both Girl Scouts, moderators, by the way), in our Hogwarts forum, and of course, chat with us in Yahoo. We talked about how she feels at the moment and how she's still taking chemo once a week. You'll never know from her responses that she was feeling sick at the moment. Our Yahoo midnight conversations only stopped when I started work in August yet we still found ways to communicate: the private messages and the chat boxes. When I worked the graveyard shift, I catch her at W.I.T.C.H. even for a while. And since I have shallow tears, she was one of the W.I.T.C.H.ies who "comforted" me when I told them I cried and got depressed watching the scene where Adrian (played by Seth Gabel) killed himself in front of his mother, Ava Moore (played by Famke Janssen, a favourite of mine) in the Nip/Tuck Season 2 finale. And need I be reminded that she was also one of the W.I.T.C.H.ies who "comforted" me when I told them that I cried when Logan killed Jean Grey in X-Men The Last Stand and that it was the second time they killed Famke in an X-Men film!
Last month, her fiancé has to take the laptop she's using on a business cruise so we missed Joie. She still posts but not as often as she used to. When I checked my introduction thread, a post from her said that my Hugh Jackman obsession has gone to the extreme (oh yes. I love him and I'm waiting for him to get divorced so that we can get married. Ha ha!). She meant it as a joke. And then I got sick and hadn't been online for a week.
I felt a little better on Saturday, 11 November, so I was able to open my email. I found a letter from her. I thought she just wanted to ask me about something but what was written in it shattered my heart. It said that she had begun to feel weak again and that she had to stay in the hospital for the rest of her life. She left it to my discretion whether or not, and how, to tell the W.I.T.C.H.ies that she had to leave all the forums she's a member of. Here I am, ill myself, and then I receive this news. It took a lot of courage to tell the kids at W.I.T.C.H., who love her so much, the reason she had to leave. I don't know if I was going to cry or not but it was a burden for me, that it was me whom she trusted with this. We sent her messages and her friend printed out and read the messages to her.
Joie travelled to her new home on 14 November 2006, 7 in the evening in France. I was at work when I learned from another friend the post that Joie's friend wrote in her blog. I couldn't help but cry but our linking friend said that, as Joie's last wish, the forum continue to be happy, that it's as if she just took a very long vacation and she would be coming back. It only totally sunk in when I saw the teaser poster for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I realised that she will never see the film and that she will never be able to read the series' conclusion.
Everything is a borrowed heaven, as was stated in that Corrs song. We will truly miss Joie's presence so much. Her nyahas and teehees will be greatly missed as well as her bold, hot pink-coloured posts, her ability to make us laugh, her role in our role-playing family as Lola Dionisia, her charm, and probably her dislike for the purple coloured dinosaur. I will certainly miss her telling me about my obsession with a certain Mr Jackman. But as the Art Garfunkel song, used in that fateful Nip/Tuck finale, "But the endings always comes at last, endings always come too fast. They come too fast but the past too slow," the finale will always come.
And for Joie, wherever you are now, we thank Heaven for letting us borrow you even for a short while. Your wish is our command so there will be time enough for tears. This is not goodbye and for every summer sunshine and silver strand we'll encounter, we will remember you. You are our angel.
NOTE: Joie is half-British, half-French and the only Filipino words she knew were lola, bantot, ate, and pasaway.
