Saying goodbye to a friend I never met

Hedie Epp and I first connected over a column I wrote in October 2023 about my mother’s dementia.

Someone she knew had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and she emailed to say my column had prompted her to get in touch with them.

“I look forward to reading more of your articles,” she wrote. Her email signature included a quote from Romans in the New Testament: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone … Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

I was intrigued, as it hinted at some inner turmoil.

A year later, I heard from Hedie again on a different topic. This time she told me a little about herself: “80, never married, no kids.”

I was impressed by her articulacy, her ability to convey tone — sarcasm, irony, wry humour — via email. She would offer a salutation and then cut to the chase, raising existential questions that many people grapple with: What’s the point for my existence? What’s the meaning of life if you live it alone?

I noticed that she was now using a different maxim as her email endnote: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”

It was a quote I valued as well, and one I had used in my own writing. I enjoyed our exchange of ideas and hoped to hear from her again.

Before long I proposed a phone call and she was receptive.

“I’m always distracted by how weird I look on video calls, and by phone I won’t even have to comb my hair!” she wrote, and I could hear the smile in her words.

We had a grand chat. Hedie felt like someone I would love to know — sharp, funny, with a dry sense of humour and a keen sense of observation. She was well read, a seasoned traveller and culturally sophisticated, with a huge appreciation for the arts. She told me about her career and her volunteer work, her choir and her clog dancing.

She still used emoticons, which was charmingly old-school, and was a self-professed “techno-saur.” She told me she had visited St. John’s that summer and was thwarted in her attempt to see Cabot Tower on Signal Hill by a change in the weather. (Newfoundland is nothing if not predictable in its climatic unpredictability.)

“What a shock that was to see how fast the dense fog rolled in!” Hedie wrote.

She told me that her name was pronounced “‘HAY-dee,’ to rhyme with ‘shady lady’” and sent me a photo of herself at 18,000 feet at Mount Everest base camp. I loved the twinkle of mischief in her eyes and her sartorial flair — she was one of those people who could make a burlap sack look chic.

Our email conversations continued, and we soon moved on to topics beyond what I was writing about in the Free Press — life, death, family, relationships. “It’s a little scary trusting thoughts and feelings to someone else, but I do trust you,” she wrote. I trusted her as well, and awaited her replies with eager anticipation. She had become a true friend and confidante.

This year, I floated the idea of her coming to visit my husband and me in St. John’s. I wanted to see Hedie in person, and to hear more stories about her remarkable and exciting life — from working as an extra on a film set in Rome in the 1960s with Sam Elliott and Ryan O’Neal to making an appearance as “an elegant old lady” in Begonia’s video for the anthemic My Fantasy Life in 2025. She had a trip to Europe planned for May and then she would see, she said.

When I hadn’t heard from her by the middle of June, I wrote to ask about her adventures and to encourage her to come. A month went by with no reply, which was completely out of character. Something told me to Google her, and when I did I was shocked to find her obituary, with Hedie smiling back at me from the same Mount Everest photo she had sent me herself.

She had died two days before my last email to her and I had no idea. “Passed away peacefully in her sleep,” her death notice said.

Now I find myself awash in sadness for the loss of this person I will never get to meet. And I remember the lines she wrote to me when I was about to lose someone I cared about.

“We never forget,” Hedie wrote, “and the sadness of missing them returns often over the years, together with smiles in the recollections and the feeling of love for them which never goes away.”

Rest in peace, dear friend. May strains of Haydn and Schubert follow you wherever you go.

Pam Frampton lives in St. John’s.

Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com