This is a story I never expected to write.
A dear friend, Monique, died suddenly yesterday at age 43.
We were colleagues and friends at Stetson University, where we taught in the Management Department, and in fact, Monique was responsible for my getting into teaching, the job I’ve loved the most in my career. Back in 1996, long before I was truly qualified to teach at the college level, she suggested me for a teaching position in the department. Eventually I was asked to step aside in favor of someone with a PhD, but as I approached the end of my own PhD program, Monique brought me back to Stetson to teach in 2005 after my replacement left.
But I knew Monique well before Stetson. She was in the management PhD program at Florida State in Tallahassee at the same time my husband Randall was in the marketing program. I was a bit suspicious and jealous of Monique back then since she was young, pretty, single, and spending a lot of time with Randall. But she soon met and married Chad, the love of her life. Beginning in Tallahassee, Monique and Chad, who did not want children of their own, developed a special bond with our two children.
When she came to Stetson to teach a couple of years after Randall had begun to teach there, she instantly developed a reputation as a superb and student-centered teacher. Two weeks to the day before her death she had won Stetson’s most prestigious teaching award. She was universally beloved by her students. All the RIP notices on Facebook yesterday called her the greatest teacher students had ever had.
Many students also called her a mentor, and though she was a dozen years my junior, she was a mentor to me, too.
Monique and I were close in the sense that either of us could always have called on the other in a time of need (and I called on her far more than she called on me). But we did not spend huge amounts of time together. So one of the many tragic aspects for me of her too-soon death is that I didn’t know that much about her story.
She was adopted. She grew up in Columbus, GA, a city I visited long before I knew her and dubbed the most depressing city I’d ever been to. She was a good and attentive daughter who spent countless hours helping her mom move and acclimate to Florida after Monique’s pharmacist dad died. Monique really liked to have a good time. She had a deep, throaty, infectious laugh. She and I shared a Myers-Briggs type — INFP. She loved the Beatles. Chad called her Moni, and so did Randall and I.
Is that really all I knew of her story? One of the lessons I have quickly learned from her untimely death is that life is, of course, too short, and you never know how quickly and suddenly your opportunity to spend time with someone will be cut off. The other hellish aspect for me is that I had tried to say goodbye to Moni before we moved to Washington, but we couldn’t work it out. I thought our move might mean I’d never see her again, but I could not have imagined it would be this way.
If there is any comfort to be had, it is in the fact that thousands of stories about Moni are out there, carried by hordes of former students, along with family, friends, and colleagues. Because she was such a shining light who touched so many lives, stories of her by those she taught, mentored, and loved will live on and on.