In the Now

This morning I got a phone call immediately upon waking up, that my childhood 'best' friend - in those days of innocence, who, when I would tell her to wait for me to finish a sum in math, would answer me with all sincerity, 'I will, once am done', and I would be happy that she agreed to - passed away, possibly a cardiac arrest!
Subalakshmi, also called as Subhasree by her folks, and I, we were best of friends from the age of 6 right through to 12/13, perhaps, after which age, we drifted apart, found new friends, formed new ideas and changed as persons, and lost contact. Through a common relative, I came to know she had also married, got a kid, then another and the usual cycle. She was in Mumbai.
I never think of her, except in passing, while recalling incidents of high schiool, where she became the School Pupil Leader, the favourite of Sr.Crescentia, our principal then, whom I used to 'HATE' and whom she used to 'LOVE' and was loved mutually by the Sister -and I think she told on us or something, a set of friends, and we got suspended from school for few days and were roaming around school without a badge - we were to actually feel very ashamed of ourselves, but, I do not recall ever having felt so much of it, except when my dad was called upon to hear a lecture of how badly his daughter was turning out to be, with Godliness going away from her, and the rest - My Dad gave it to me that day and considered it his worst insult in life, like he was being called to the police station to get his arrested daughter out of bail or something - who gets called to the police station, in my dad's case, the school?
All this is forgotten with the ravages of time and life moves on, but strangely some connections are just snapped for ever. Even then, today, ever since I heard the news, I have been very disturbed. Why? Because it just seems so cruel, so sudden, to go away leaving a 6 yr old and a 11/2 year old kid, today, I am thinking of how it would be for a child to grow up without a mother, how impossible it would be for a father to double up and do justice, try as he might, how her living parents and probably a grandparent, am not sure would be feeling, and along with all this, the realisation that life is so fleeting and the folly of immortality with which we move around, folly and beauty actually, because, no one wants to know when they are going to die, and yet, yet, it's just an instant. It's there, and it's over - one minute you may be thinking of doing up the curtains in your house and the next, you are not there!
What would Subalakshmi have been thinking of doing, what plans she would have made, she was on a holiday, what could be the conversation she would have had with her kids, her husband, her people around? And then immediately, I think, what about me? And same time, think, I should hit the gym, take care, warning signs - all along with the headlines - How fleeting it all is - and so back to the Moments theory - it is all and only in the Now, better be thankful for what is and live it up Now. In the Now, as Nandita used to say when she was 3 years old.