Googling the Dead

By Raanan Geberer
Originally Published in "Smith" Magazine

Like most computer-literate Americans, I find that one of my main activities on the web is looking up (or “Googling”) people I used to know. But when, a few years ago, I Googled one of my old girlfriends, Karen Dollinger, and found an obituary, I was devastated, even though we had never been “in love” per se.
Karen and I met through an ad I placed in the Village Voice back in the late '80s. Karen was a psychiatrist, very impressive to me, and I really got a kick out of the fact that she would consider me, who had a history of childhood emotional problems, suitable material to go out with. She was very heavy, about 250 pounds, and for that reason, men had avoided her for most of her life. But since I’m really attracted to large women, her body was an incredible turn-on. I couldn’t get enough of her, with her gigantic legs, ass and breasts, and sometimes we’d have sex several times in a day.
I would play little verbal games with her:“Karen, could you look at the clock and tell me what time it is?”“Eleven o’clock. Why?”“What do you think we’ll be saying to each other at midnight?”“Oh, please fuck me!”“And what do you think we’ll be saying at one o’clock?”“Oh, PLEASE, fuck me!”
Karen and I had a strange relationship — we spent weekends together, but during the week, it seemed like we hardly knew each other. We had gone to the same state university, but outside of music and films, we didn’t really share each other’s interests. She was really into horses, having ridden from childhood, and owned at least one, which she kept at a friend’s farm upstate (I always suspected she was trying to hide the fact that she came from a fairly wealthy background; for example, she had owned a BMW in college, but claimed she’d gotten the money from an accident settlement).
She shared none of my consuming interest in politics — she never watched the evening news or read the newspaper, and once asked me, “Who’s Al Sharpton?” Although we were both Jewish, it also shocked me that she was so non-religious, she treated even Yom Kippur like it was just another day (she described her family, who I never met, as being “extremely white-bread”). Although I’m far from being Orthodox, I have strong religious and spiritual beliefs, and her total indifference threw me for a loop (at least if she’d told me she was a militant atheist, at least that would have been SOMETHING!)
Still, I respected her intelligence, and I liked her lack of pretense and the fact that we had really intense conversations. I might have turned her off a few times by yelling enthusiastically, in bed, about her “big ass” — to me saying this was merely an intensely sexual turn-on, but to her it was probably a reminder of the insults she’d gotten throughout her life.
Then, there was the matter of my asthma, which was pretty serious back then and which made me cough and wheeze constantly. She thought it was psychosomatic and advised me to return to therapy. She would have been better off telling me to go to a good pulmonary specialist, like the one who finally helped me a few years later.
The relationship lasted about nine months — we both sort of understood, from the very beginning, that it was basically temporary, and that at some point we’d move on to other partners. Still, I assumed that we’d always be friends, and I was shocked when she decided to cut off all contact with me (my leftist friend Bert later said this was proof of how “conventional” she was, since, “middle class-type women, unlike artistic and intellectual types, rarely have stay in touch with their ex-boyfriends”). About a year later, another friend, Dan Dinnerstein, answered a personal ad that she herself had placed, and I was relieved when she dropped him after two dates.
The obit said that she lived up in Putnam County and was married with two children. It didn’t give the cause of death — I wondered whether she had killed herself, since she always used to talk about how depressed she was. She might also have died of a heart attack. She herself had predicted this, since her mother had also died of one in her forties.
At any rate, here’s a shout out to Karen, I wasn’t in love with you, I'm still not in love with you, but I DO feel love for you.
And I hope we’ll meet n the next world.