Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
She Came from Beyond: Thoughts on Our Dear Friend Nadine
I’m not even sure how I became friends with Nadine Darling. Yesterday I clicked on the “See Friendship” link on Facebook, but Nadine had swapped out profiles not too long ago, so that was a dead end. I know it was after I left Massachusetts in 2016, because I was upset that we lived 15 minutes away from each other and never got to meet in person. How could a fellow writer live so close to me and I didn’t even know about it? I find myself with all these questions that are now unanswerable.
I suppose I met her through our mutual friend Kelly. That makes the most sense. Another person I love and have never been in the same room with. The internet is incredible, sometimes. I am sure I am not the only one who has been told over and over again that internet friendships aren’t real friendships, but that’s bullshit. Of course they are. Some of my very best friends are people I’ve never met. I met my husband on a message board in 2005. Nadine met her husband on the internet, too, and she loved him more than people in movies love their spouses. She loved him more than anyone has ever loved anyone else, I think.
Nadine was someone I considered a close friend.
Everything about her was hilarious. She had changed her name to Nadine after Nadine Cross in The Stand. If you know what that character arc is like, you’ll appreciate this information. She was obsessed with horror movies, The Simpsons, and shitposting. She was a meme queen. She was convinced her dog looked like Bill Skarsgård. She was still getting hate mail for trashing the movie Rudy over five years ago. Once she sent me a book about Market Basket because she was as tickled by the prospect of loving things quintessentially New England, like I do.
She was a laugh riot. Take this excerpt from an interview from SmokeLong Quarterly, about what she would say when in a fight:
“Well, I’ll just live in the toy store, then!” It makes perfect sense to me in the moment. You can also file that under, “you’ll be sorry when…” as in “you’ll be sorry when I’m living in the toy store, playing with all those toys.”
Listen: Nadine was magical.
She was a devoted mother, supporting and doting on her sons and daughter, sharing their hilarity and accomplishments with us all. Last fall she and her husband discussed moving, and she said she wanted to go back to Oregon, where her parents had lived.
The first house they found was her mother’s house.
After the deal fell through, they packed up anyway, heading to Oregon to see what they could find.
They stayed in a hotel and had to evacuate because of the fires. The fires stopped right before their hotel room. She posted a picture of the burnt grass edging the property line. As if a fire was going to stop her. It would never happen.
In the end, the bank gave them the house anyway.
A house surrounded by hummingbirds, her mother’s favorite bird.
Magical.
I’ve been writing this for four hours now and it seems so futile. There is no way to fully encapsulate how amazing Nadine was. She was someone who was not afraid to admit that she fucked up sometimes; she was someone who would gently tell you when you fucked up so that you could do better. She was someone who would defend her friends at the drop of a hat. She hated racism and misogyny and was vehemently supportive of trans rights and Black lives. I hate the thought of someone reading this and thinking “Ok, she posted Simpsons memes a lot, big deal”. If you knew Nadine, though, you’d know it’s impossible to describe how amazing she was in some editor’s letter from a grieving friend. You just sort of had to know her.
In November Nadine landed in the hospital with liver issues. No big deal, she said. But when they did further testing to consider a transplant, they realized she had metastasized cancer all over. They couldn’t treat the cancer because of the liver; they couldn’t treat the liver because of the cancer. She died at 12:12 PST on December 14th. 12/12 was her wedding anniversary. Ken posted to Facebook, “My artful love to the end.”
She came from beyond and then suddenly she went back, she was gone.
The reality is life is unbearably cruel a lot of the time. It takes and takes. We are not entitled to a long life, a second chance, an “I’ll get to it later”. Nadine is gone and we are all left with a Nadine shaped hole in our lives. She’s gone and we’re all left without solid ground to stand on. We didn’t even get to say Goodbye, We Love You. I think she knew that, but still.
We are resharing the three pieces we ran from Nadine, and I hope you will read them. Below you will find links to additional work, as well as to her book, which is increasingly harder to find. Some are lost in the ether, and I am trying to find copies as best as I can. These are just a few pieces.
I struggled a lot with writing this. It’s just so overwhelmingly sad and unfair.
We love you, Nadine, Queen of Our Hearts.
Please consider donating to Nadine’s family.
-Kolleen Carney Hoepfner
“Second Greyhound to Portland”- Opium
“Aquarium”- SmokeLong Quarterly