Sometimes you lose a friend because you grow apart, and sometimes there is a misunderstanding or a great betrayal. But you can also just plain lose someone.

They stop writing. Letters are unanswered. When you try to find them, they are gone. You can’t find them. Not on Google, not on Facebook. Not in direct searches.

I wish I knew where Sandy has gone, and whether she is okay. I will call her Sandy, not her real name, to protect her from searches other than my own.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that not hearing anything from Sandy is not good. When you add up all the facts, her disappearance is ominous.

I met Sandy and her family at our tiny local library many years ago. It was clear that she and her husband were homeschoolers; the kids were with them on a school day, and they were all excitedly grabbing books to read. Although at the time I was not homeschooling, we had before and would again. I saw a kinship.

Sandy was perfect friend material. She had come across a blog I had written about belly dancing while researching our area, her new home, and was open to trying out the classes. She was calm, grounded and a great mother and we had a fast friendship, while it lasted. We had many play days where my youngest played wildly with her four sons and baby daughter.

Her kids were great and I found her compatible as well. Open and curious, her mind was fresh and unconventional. She was always studying something new and had graduated from art college with a gorgeous portfolio of drawings and illustrations.

I didn’t know a lot about her past but she did tell me about her childhood and the wild parties her parents had when she was a vulnerable child. She told me this in response to my telling her about my youngest being sexually assaulted at four years old. She also told me that she was, as an adult, alienated from her parents.

I felt like her name, which was a tiny bit fanciful, might have been her own creation, and I was right. Later when I was searching for her I found records of her birth name and the place and date when she changed them.

I didn’t like her husband. He was arrogant and supercilious. But she seemed content enough so I didn’t make any assumptions about her marriage. I assumed a couple has their own needs and compromises and it was not my business. Maybe I am a bit of an idealist, or a realist, but I don’t pretend to know what makes couples last together.

The local women in my hamlet did not take to her. I heard gossip about her from my old ladies and I found it harsh. They assumed she was in a religious cult of some sort because she wore long skirts and someone else falsely suggested that she was trashing the house that she was renting. This was patently untrue. She was the type of woman who would fix a hole in the wall herself. I stood up for her when I heard false stories, of course.

The old gossipers seemed, in the cruel manner that women save for their own sisters, to be most critical of Sandy for lumbering herself with five children. I suppose they had quickly read the domineering nature of the husband, and instead of offering empathy or sympathy, were angry at Sandy for putting herself in such a vulnerable position.

I was definitely not sad when the horrible husband took off to the west, leaving her alone with five kids in a run down rented home in a strange town. We carried on our play dates with the kids and she seemed perfectly happy.

As a single mom she managed very well with a strict budget and a good attitude. I was surprised by her diet for her family. I still fed myself and my kids a loose diet with plenty of sugar and crap food and she fed her kids on a strict diet of fresh home cooked food with no sugar or flour. Her kids were all strong and bright and rarely sick.

I thought her diet excessive at the time, but I held my tongue, and now I see she was not wrong to reduce the poisons that affect the gut and brain. She may have been critical of the diet I fed my family but we gave her each other space for separate styles and opinions. As my stomach began to show signs of breaking down, she probably worried, but still she did not try to convert me. She minded her own business and so did I.

We had great play dates with our kids and great gabs so I was sad when her husband returned with a plan to pack them all up and take them up north and faraway. I dropped by the worn old house to say good bye and he was playing really roughly with the boys, hanging them upside down by the feet or clutching their legs mid muscle while they laughed hysterically. They were excited to have their father back and my pal seemed content to go along with the reconciliation.

Did she want to go with him, or to be free of him? I don’t know. What else could she do, five children deep? The children still loved their father, they were confused by the rough play but willing to take affection in any form. Anyway, what could I do but wave good bye?

Once she was gone we kept up through letters, which was really nice. The kids wrote each other and she sent long letters describing her most most recent home and her plans for gardening and homesteading. She did not mention her husband much but she did comment once, from a small remote northern town, that she could not afford snowsuits or mittens because her husband had spent the money on something else.

The last time I heard from her she was setting up once again in a remote northern town with her children. The children were getting older but not grown yet. She wrote to me that she had been in a car accident in her last location and suffered a brain injury. The insurance payout had freed her to move again, this time without her husband. She was on her own again, this time because she had left him. 

She told me that she had been staying at a women’s shelter in her last location. I still had not heard much about her husband or their relationship but this detail made me aware that things must have been pretty bad.

And more bad news, in her new home that she had acquired after the accident she had discovered that he had tagged their phones so he could follow their texts and know where they were and what they were talking about.

I didn’t quite understand the nature of her brain injury. She said she felt fine and competent but had empty places where memories and connection used to live. She was trying all sorts of odd treatments to recover, ice baths and heat lamps were described. I remember her describing running outside in her slip in the cold to wake up her immune system, which I thought was endearing and eccentric.

The last time I wrote I may have complained about my gut, as usual, and told her about my child transitioning. My child wrote to his friends to tell them about the life transforming change. But then we never heard from her or the kids again.

For a time I thought she dropped me due to my pathetic attempts to eat healthier and my worsening health and stomach. I thought she was tired of hearing my moaning about my gut. I also wondered if she and her kids were uncomfortable with my youngest’s transition from female to male.

But thinking about it, I knew it was not her style to be judgmental. I couldn’t see her cutting us off. And then my brain began to gather the data. All the building warning signs. The shelter, the accident, the move, the tracking on their devices.

So what has happened? Did he come back and she has been with him since in an isolated rural home with no wifi? (not an unlikely scenario considering her feelings about health and political views). Is she alright? Did he say she should not keep in contact with us?

Did my friend end up in a psychiatric unit? Is she in danger? Has she already been hurt? Or is she just fine, in a sad way, accepting the limitations of her life and her brain injury.

Putting together her history, I have to give credit to the old gossips. Crabby old women that they were, they were right. She had saddled herself with an abusive man and had too many children. She couldn’t easily escape. Maybe their anger was based upon their impotent frustration at knowing they could not stop the inevitable.

What else could Sandy do, five children deep? Do you desert your children to save yourself? What a terrible choice. I know a woman who has done this, and my heart breaks for her.

Do you stay and possibly die at the hands of your raging, controlling husband. I know a woman who did that. She died this winter.