About an hour ago, just as we sat down to enjoy a simple Sunday dinner, I found out that I’ve lost my friend Elaine Vickery. She passed quietly last night in Santa Rosa, California.

Elaine and I first crossed paths when I was a little boy, and she was a young painter. Sometime in the late ’60s.

My father introduced us, and even though I don’t remember the meeting itself – I was too young – Elaine has, over the past five years, oddly enough, come to feel like part of my entire life. Like one of those threads you don’t see, but that still holds important chapters together.

She had been battling various illnesses for a long time, increasingly so in recent years.

But if I’m being completely honest, I don’t think Elaine died of any of her illnesses. I think she was simply tired of being alone. Her relationship with her son was fraught – neither easy nor good – and she got to see him – and her two grandsons – far too rarely.

I actually think Elaine died of a particular kind of sorrow – the kind that doesn’t sound very dramatic, but still eats you from the inside out.

Our contact really took off when she reached out to me five years ago – at the beginning of the pandemic. After that, it kept going, sometimes daily, until it abruptly ended yesterday. Her son Nate sent me the news a little while ago in a text.

In our correspondence, Elaine was consistently warm and generous. She could be gentle, but never mushy. She didn’t hold back on either critique or praise when I sent her projects I was working on, and that’s exactly why her words mattered. She wasn’t an applause machine. She was an artist – with real integrity.

Art was, naturally, one of our recurring topics, and I loved her naïve, direct painting style and her illustrations.

But Elaine was more than her creative output. She had a rare openness – an “artist’s mind” in the best sense: reflective, philosophical, curious, with a dry wit and a knack for naming feelings with precision when the energy was there, and the pain had eased.

Over time, I also understood something as human as it is brutal: Elaine’s mood swings were often pain-driven. I suspect anyone who’s lived with chronic illness can relate to that sentence.

The tone of her emails followed her body. When symptoms flared up she grew darker, more catastrophic in her thinking, more preoccupied with death – and with that question no one should have to ask, but pain can force on you anyway: Is it worth the fight?

When she felt better, she was lighter, funnier, more forward-looking – as if someone had turned the lights back up in the room.

She also carried a persistent fear of being a burden. At the same time there was a longing for closeness – with her son, her grandsons, her friends. And even with me, in that strange way that can happen between two people who don’t see each other often, but still become important to one another.

In her writing, there was both pride and vulnerability, sometimes in the very same sentence. Sometime last spring, Elaine began confiding in me about the need to create meaning as she could feel life shrinking.

She tried to organize her small house, sort things, plan, distribute her artwork – and she spoke openly about hospice and assisted dying. It wasn’t a cry for drama. It was more an attempt to make sure the final chapter, at the very least, was her own.

I thought about visiting Elaine in California. I thought about it many times. But as so often happens, I kept putting the trip off, prioritizing other places, other obligations.

I put Elaine on the “later” shelf. And now there is no “later” – only “too late.” One of life’s hardest lessons is that you think you have time, until you don’t.

I will remember Elaine as a friend, as an artist – and as a bright, affectionate person whose baseline optimism and humor made our emails and messages both inspiring and entertaining. Even in her fatigue, she was someone who could still see color in the gray. Someone who could point to what was beautiful, even when she herself struggled to reach it.

Rest in peace, dear friend.