My friend Ruth died this morning.

She was 49 years old.

She had cancer.

It was quick.

I first met Ruth in a Wal-mart parking lot in the Summer of 1996. She was the sister-in-law of another friend of mine, and a group of us were going to Illinois, where I was running a once-a-month game of D&D. I don’t think that particular game survived much longer than that session, but from that point on, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Ruth, her husband, and a growing nucleus of friends.

Most of this group were people that I knew, a couple were girls that I had dated/was dating, and our primary activity was gaming. Board games, role-playing games, sci-fi and fantasy nerdiness.

Ruth was a kind-hearted, generous person. She was loving, caring, and decidedly upbeat, at least most of the time. Ruth and I had many lunchtime conversations, and we discussed a great many things, History, philosophy, religion. Deep personal things.

At that time, I was still pretty active into weightlifting, and so I shared with her my knowledge of exercise, and all of the positive benefits that it can bring a person. I told her the mantra that I tried to live my life by, which was “I will not break, I will not falter; for my will is iron, and my desire is pure.” She adopted this into her own workout routine, and told me she drew strength from it.

When I entered into the world of filmmaking, Ruth was one of my biggest supporters, and told me many, many times how proud she was of everything that I had accomplished. She, who had made her way through the byzantine labyrinth of academia, proud of me, the uneducated man who stumbled his way into cinema.

She had a way of inspiring people and bringing them together in a way that I had never encountered before, and likely never will again.

In recent years, we drifted apart. The old group broke up. This happened for reasons many and varied, and altogether better left unsaid.

I’m sad that it happened, yet happen it did, and people went their separate ways, but Ruth and I never entirely lost contact. We’d speak on the phone once, maybe twice a year, but the kinship was still there, that spiritual cord which binds good friends together was never cut.

I talked to her on the phone a few weeks before she died, and remarkably, she sounded upbeat, and very much like her old self. She did become a little down as she brought up her terminal condition, but I interrupted her and said “Kid, we ALL have terminal something. It’s just a matter of time.”

She laughed at that and said “Brother, ain’t that the truth!”

Can a spirit that strong ever truly die?