A Fond Farewell to a Friend

Sail on, sail on

Hasn’t 2025 been, so far, the worst? I suppose there are still eleven months during which the year can redeem itself, but it has a long way to go. Starting with the New Year’s Eve terror attack in New Orleans—sharply upsetting given my son goes to college there—and galloping full-on into the fires here in Los Angeles plus the slashing start to the new administration, it just feels cursed.

Topping this bad start with more badness, I just learned that my friend Diane Butler died very suddenly two days ago. She was not old and was very fit, living an active life on a farm—in other words, one of the last people you expect bad news about. But she had a massive aneurysm, the kind of thing that sneaks up and slays you with little ceremony, just a quick hard blow and that’s it.

Diane and I met on Twitter. I wish there were another verb to use here, since “met” implies something that happens in person, and sounds absurd in the context of social media. But we haven’t coined a word for this so far. Anyway, that’s how we first became acquainted. She had a very cute cow named Crouton who became an internet sensation.

Crouton’s fame brought attention to Diane and her partner Beth, who ran an animal rescue in the Catskills and probably never expected that one of their cows would become famous. Somehow, Diane and I ended up chatting on Twitter—this was in the olden days, when Twitter was still a delightful floating cocktail party—and discovered that we lived not too far apart. (I was then living in the Hudson Valley.) I was excited to meet her famous cow, and on that visit, I also met her turkey, a huge, pompous black-and-white bird named James. Before that encounter I had never felt affection for turkeys except as luncheon meat, so my intense emotion, my complete enchantment, surprised me. A few months later, James fathered a batch of little turkeys. Diane showed up one day at my house with four little Jameses in the back of her truck, and thus I became a devoted turkey-keeper. I loved them as much as I have loved my dogs.

A friend who shows up at your house with turkeys is a very special kind of friend, and Diane was special indeed. We had a no-requirements friendship, a self-powered boat of a friendship with zero demand and zero expectations but the warmest, easiest rapport. That kind of friendship is so lovely. I tend to often have high-impact relationships with the potential for big crack-ups, so an easy friendship like ours was especially dear to me.

I have no wisdom about death and loss. I find the math itself baffling: the world contained a person and then suddenly it doesn’t. Subtract one, solve for zero. How does that happen? Where do they go? Have they received a secret sign letting them know they will be leaving and they’re not allowed to tell anyone? I read the most recent emails I had exchanged with Diane; maybe I could find the message there. But no. It was the usual volley of birthday wishes and chit-chat and status reports, nothing profound, nothing coded, everything predicated on the assumption that life goes on and on. How else could we live?

Maybe death is a dumb, blunt instrument that delivers no subtle message, and there is no secret whispered to you telling you it’s time to go. I don’t know if that’s worse or better than attributing to it some intelligence and cunning. Either way, it punches a hole in your soul.

XSusan