The day that our kids left, while we were in the midst of trying to reschedule James’ flights to New Mexico because his plane was badly delayed, we got an e-mail telling us that Gigi had died.

Gigi was Judie’s roommate at Smith and really her best friend, other than her sisters. She lived in the house next to mine when I was on exchange at Smith and then the next year she came to Bowdoin on exchange and lived in the adjoining suite in the Senior Center. During that period, she met and fell in love with my suite-mate, Paul Weeks. They eventually married and lived happily in Maine, where they had two children and, more recently, two grandchildren. Because they were up in Bangor, we never saw them as much as we wanted, but the bond between the four of us and especially between Judie and Gigi was unbreakable.

She wasn’t like the stereotypical image of women at Smith. Maybe it was growing up on the beach at Long Boat Key in Florida and I imagine it had a lot to do with her mother. She was just a free spirit. She played a stand-up base that was considerably taller than she was and had a stuffed animal head hanging in her room. She was up for any adventure. Because I am away from our photos, the only photo I have is one that my friend Chris sent to me yesterday. It is the two of us at the Carnival of the New World, a multi-media show I co-organized my senior year at Bowdoin in which I convince Gigi to be one of the dancing girls. (They did two numbers–one a kick line (with me) and the other a sort of Busby Berkeley umbrella routine).

Don’t we look young?

In the past decade or so, Gigi has been in varying states of poor health. She developed skin cancer from working for many summers as a life guard. She had a whole series of surgeries. We discovered that she had an indomitable toughness and an ability to weather adversities that would have been too much for a lesser person. She never lost her sense of humor and remained a great friend to many.

This is a loss that we will never really recover from. Our hearts go out to Paul and the Weeks family, as well as to her many friends who I know were devastated by the news.