Shelly's 40th Birthday

I found on Facebook out that today is Shelly Baker Butler's 40th birthday. I met Shelly 10 years ago when I hired her to write for a website I was producing. She was beautiful, young, talented, funny, gracious and about to get married. We only worked together for a short while, and then she moved on to a full time job writing for REI.

Thanks to Facebook, I connected with her again a few years ago. I enjoyed seeing photos of her beautiful family on camping trips or family reunions. They looked so happy and together. I didn't communicate with her much, but I admired her from afar, and felt like I still knew her, at least in the fabricated way that Facebook leads you to believe.

I didn't remember seeing her post for awhile, so around December or so, I looked her up to see what she'd been up to. I was shocked to discover, through posts on her page, that she had been struggling with colon cancer, and had lost her fight. She had died just a few days before. She was only 39. She had two little kids, the oldest one was only six.

This news hit me extremely hard. I did a little bit of internet sleuthing and discovered that she had been keeping a blog about her experience with cancer. I read a few of the entries, my heart breaking a little bit with each one. I finally stopped reading when I came to the one where she was telling her daughter that she couldn't play with her before school because she had to go to chemo. I couldn't even formulate words to describe how sad I was to try and imagine what she had gone through, what her babies had gone through, and how her husband is feeling.

How can this kind of thing happen? How can a young, healthy, vibrant woman leave the world when she had two kids who still needed her so much? How do you reconcile your last days in this kind of situation? What happens now? I barely knew Shelly, but I am kind of beside myself with grief that this is possible.

Facebook can be a good thing. It can make you feel like you are still in touch with people and connected to the world. It just gets a little weird when people leave this world, and those traces of them are still here. It could be healing, I guess, in a way, to pay tribute to her life. I didn't know her or her people well enough to be comfortable leaving a message, but today I am reminded that Shelly was here, that she meant so much to so many people. She would have been 40 today. It seems to me that she deserved a lot more time than that.