At the end of my first year in college, I fell in love with the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. We had gone to kindergarten together, then he moved away and I moved away, but we reconnected when I started college and he was about to go into the Air Force. I loved him madly and we got engaged, and three weeks before our wedding date he broke up with me by mail, quite viciously.

This was in the days of the Vietnam war, and my friends at college were Jesuit-taught and trained, yearning for peace and justice. Most of us were undergraduates, but there was a contingent of seminarians and Jesuits and graduate students. The weekend after my Air Force fiancé broke up with me, I met Michael. He was a seminarian off for the summer, looking for the comfort of like-minded students, and he was close with several of our group. That very first night, when I was shaking and wounded and my friends gathered close around me, Michael held me in his arms.

We did stuff that summer, all of us. A lot of it was just hanging out, on campus or off, but we had parties and went to Mass (we called it liturgy) and read to each other and argued about peace and holiness. We all went on retreat and searched out adulthood and love and what it meant to be truthful.

One weekend, we took a beach house together. There were eight of us. The first night, Michael and I went out to the beach way after sunset. The ocean was as dark and gorgeous as I had ever seen it, blue-black and covered over with grey clouds. We stood for what I remember seemed a long time, I was leaning with my back against him and his arms were around my shoulders. A lone figure came walking along the water’s edge, playing a flute. It was magical and otherworldly and incredibly beautiful. As the flute player moved out of sight and hearing, it began to thunder, and we scurried back to the house just as the rain began.

There was kissing; there must have been. I don’t remember that, I do remember the warmth of his presence and his arms. In the fall I went back to school and he went back to seminary, and we kept in touch of course, as did our whole group. Eventually he did leave the seminary, and we remained friends for a time although both of us moved on to other relationships and other lives. Maybe a decade ago he tried to reach out to me, but I was not well at that time and he was not comfortable communicating online and so it did not happen. I learned of his death this week. His nickname for me was “Kitten.” I did not know then that I was deathly allergic to cats. The last paper note he wrote to me, all those decades ago, he signed off with “God bless Kitten.” Oh Michael, She did.