How long do you keep friends alive on FB?

I was startled this morning to see that Nancy was having a birthday because Nancy died several years ago.  Nancy was the girlfriend of the best friend of my ex-B, who also died several...well more than several at this point....years ago, but he wouldn't even update to Word for Windows, insisted on writing his fiction on Word Perfect so it's not surprising that he wouldn't have a FB page so I am reminded of his birthday only if I'm melancholy already.

But Nancy was a with-it kind of girl and so naturally she did and we automatically friended when it was possible to do so and tacitly and mutually agreed to not follow other each because we didn't have that much in common really.  I first met her as P's girlfriend one Thanksgiving a thousand years ago.  She had a big apartment in a nice brownstone in Brooklyn.  She was a translator (Spanish) in the court system in NYC and was so good that a Nicaraguan friend of mine thought she was Puerto Rican when she first spoke to her.  Her real love was translating French Langua D'oc troubadour poetry into English.  She told me when she visited that part of France, the people couldn't understand how a Jewish woman would be interested in that language.  It would be like, they said, one of them deciding to translate Yiddish into French.  She was learning jazz piano and singing and occasionally she would jam with B who was learning jazz saxophone and she was not bad.

That Thanksgiving B and I were greeted at Nancy's brownstone by P's mother who immediately pulled pictures out of her clutch purse of all the women P had been involved with and I could see why P hadn't spoken to or of her for years.  She and her husband had been pharmacists and had several famous clients although the Pharmacists Code of Secrecy or some such kept her from dissing and the promise of really juicy gossip kept the attention on her a couple minutes longer than she deserved.

The turkey was late getting done--as it usually is--so everyone was plenty looped by the time we sat down to a dinner served on a white tablecloth Nancy's grandmother schlepped across the steppes of Russia escaping from enemies who were probably pissed that Jews had enough brains to learn Langa D'oc and speak Spanish like Puerto Ricans and learn jazz piano late in the game.  Faint with hunger and clumsy with wine, I knocked my glass of red wine over and red creeped across the heirloom tablecloth like blood in a horror movie.  Salt came out.  Hysteria reigned.  I was banished to a plastic tumbler.  Later when someone produced a spliff Nancy derided it and him as childish and immature.

Our relationship didn't get off to a good start.  Never took off.  A little respect when my first book was published by a respectable house.  That's it.  Although I always admired her, I found her as scary as a strict schoolteacher.   I would never measure up to her exacting standards.

It occurred to me one day last year to see "what's Nancy up to" and I found out she got sick then died not long before.  And today is her birthday.