Spying on Acquaintances II

I decided to update my original post of September 30, 2015, because I'm giving up on that activity now. I think that many of my former acquaintances are no longer alive, which means that there is little or no information to find regarding what they are or were up to. It could be possible to find new things on social media, but I don't have or plan to have any social media accounts. If people wanted to find me, that would be difficult, because I don't use my surname on this blog. Furthermore, my internet presence beyond this blog is limited, because I subscribe to DeleteMe, and I no longer make posts using my full name or email address.

What prompted me to make this post is that I had occasionally been following up on a previous girlfriend (1997-2000), Kimberly, for a few years. After I knew her, she had moved to Manhattan, worked at Columbia University and then retired. When she retired she began, in 2014, to self-publish memoirs and novels. She had planned this for a long time, and when I met her in 1997 she was studying English memoirs and journals. I only read part of one of her memoirs and disliked it. I thought that although her writing had proper grammar, sentence structure, etc., she wasn't really very insightful about the situations in which she found herself and mainly just thought of herself as an adventuress. Since I knew a lot about her, I thought of her as an intelligent, energetic person who had wanted to be in the performing arts from an early age, but was never able to find an appropriate niche. Before I knew her, she had tried to be a dancer and failed. When I knew her, she was singing in an amateur choir but wasn't good enough to sing professionally. Psychologically, though I'm not prepared to make anything approaching a diagnosis, she had some sort of anxiety disorder that rendered her dysfunctional in many situations. For example, even though she had boyfriends and one marriage proposal, she never lived with anyone as an adult. Furthermore, despite having an active sex life, she strongly resisted sleeping in the same bed with anyone, even while on vacation. I don't know any of the details, but I suspect that she may have inherited some undesirable psychiatric traits from her mother.

Kimberly's last book was a memoir about extreme back pain that she had been experiencing. When I knew her, she was a fitness buff, and she may have damaged her back in the process. The book is called Swimming to Cozumel and was published in 2023. I haven't read it, but apparently, when she wrote it, she was unable to get successful treatment and was considering suicide. Yesterday, since she hadn't posted anything for some time, I decided to take a deeper look. Kimberly died on November 7, 2024, at the age of 68, and was buried on June 13, 2025 on Hart Island, which is the potter's field of New York City. There are more than a million people buried there, and many were homeless, indigent or not claimed by their families. This was an immense shock to me, and I've been wondering what happened. The records are private, but one could probably get answers from her neighbors in Manhattan. I would guess that she committed suicide in her condominium and did not leave a will or any family information. Her parents were dead, and, when I knew her, she had one sister from whom she was estranged. Her other closest living relatives may have been cousins from her mother's side whom she never met. Her father was well-off, and no one would have expected her to end up in a potter's field. I don't know whether Kimberly had any remaining friends. She herself would not have envisioned this demise a few years ago.

Partly because of this grim, unsettling episode, I no longer intend to spy on acquaintances.