There’s nothing quite like unrequited love. It’s a different kind of heartbreak than that from a breakup, I think. I know of what I speak, starting with my one-sided affair with Speed Racer.

One of my one-sided loves had a strength and staying power I’d not anticipated.

In a move totally out of character, fueled by I don’t know what–desperation?– I confessed my feelings. In writing, of course, not in person. I said “out of character,” not momentary insanity.

Of course, the verbal insanity confession would have at least produced instant results. In the days when remote communication happened via either written word or the family landline telephone, response time lagged.

For days upon days, I tensed at every ring of the phone and raced to the mailbox. Eventually, I received a letter relegating me to the friend zone long before that term had been coined.

Over (much) time and in the wake of my one requited love, feelings faded. My days and my heart filled with a new love, new life, new home, and then babies with only a rare, fleeting thought given to that heartbreak.

Of course, questions occasionally niggled. Was he happy? Did he have a family of his own? What did he do for a living?

Google was little help beyond its slew of ads for people-finding services, and I was not a lovesick stalker. Some people simply choose to live a life entirely outside of social media and the Internet. (God bless them. There are many a day I wish I were one of them!) If neither Google nor God would satisfy my idle curiosity, then there was nothing I needed to know.

And yet the curiosity persisted, both by the occasional stray thought by day and the random dream at night. (Lest you think these thoughts or dreams something unseemly, they were innocent, I promise.)

These persisted over the course of years, and finally, in the past year or so, I decided these conscious and subconscious recollections of my friend were a nudge to pray for him.

Just to be sure my prayers for him weren’t outpacing prayers for my husband, I upped my game there too.

And if I was wrong–if these thoughts and dreams were meaningless beyond my own nostalgic musing or curiosity, then so what? No harm done. Extra prayers all around.

Last fall, after yet another uninvited guest appearance in my dreams, I dragged a chair across the hardwood floor of our bedroom, positioning it in front of the sagging closet shelf where I unearthed a floral tin so full of letters its lid won’t close.

Inside lay letters from a variety of high school friends as they made their way through colleges, universities, and a student exchange program. And letters and cards from him.

In the attic, I sorted through several brown bags of daily journals recording the tedium of decades of ordinary days sprinkled with love, loneliness, frustration, anticipation, and a slew of other unnamed emotions.

Had I inflated our relationship over the years? Specific memories had long since faded, and I’d more recently acquired a novelist’s imagination. Were my memories wistful fabrications meant to distract me from existing relationships that required a level of selflessness and sacrifice I was reluctant to live?

These pages held the truth, faithfully recorded on ripped spiral-bound pages, Shoe Box greeting cards, and cloth-bound diaries.

I pored over letters, mostly about nothing, but filled with humor and encouragement. With genuine friendship.

I skimmed the journal entries, reliving the hours passed between classes in the university library or walking across campus. Real conversations happened about classroom lectures, shared interests, hobbies, and dreams.

I tucked the letters back into their tin and replaced it on the closet shelf. The journals were returned to their brown bags in the attic.

Our friendship had been real, as had my feelings. A living, breathing human being lay on the other end of those thoughts, out of reach, but real just the same. I would continue to pray for him when he came to mind.

Then last month, in a micro-moment of boredom, while pondering what task to tackle next or waiting for a slow site to load, I said a prayer and opened a new browser tab. What did Google have for me today?

Maybe it would offer me an inkling of what had become of my friend. A LinkedIn profile, a Twitter account, a letter to the editor, a family photo.

Unlike prior searches, my results didn’t turn up a list of sites with sketchy address information and the tantalizing prospect of discovering a criminal record or divorce decree.

My face slackened, and I pushed away from my laptop, shaking my head.

A death notice.

One from around that time in the fall that I’d been rummaging through those old letters and journals.

Death shouldn’t have been a possibility. Not for a man so young. Not for a guy who hadn’t aged beyond twenty-two in my memory.

My heart sinking faster and hurting deeper than it had when I’d read that kindly worded friend-zone letter, I clicked. Surely his name had merely been attached to an obituary page. Perhaps an elderly family member had died. That was it, right?

Wrong.

I say with confidence my friend’s death was not a “good” death. You’ve seen these notices. The kind without a photo of the deceased and only the barest of information. No “after a long illness” or “with his loved ones at his side.” No cause of death. No public burial.

And most heartbreaking to me, no Mass of Christian Burial.

Shell-shocked and not trusting my own instincts, I sent it to my husband to read. He got the same vibe: not good.

Hours later, I opened my copy of Day by Day with Saint Faustina and read the daily reflection. The quoted passage from the saint’s diary regarded a “soul in agony, who was dying without the Holy Sacraments.” The reflection and prayer urged me to prayer for the dying, especially those meeting God without benefit of the sacraments.

That was my charge then, to pray for him. Pray hard for him.

In the past weeks, I have done that. Was this why I’d been hounded by his memory for so long, well beyond reason? To pray for him?

I’d often wondered why our paths had crossed at all. What purpose had our friendship served beyond providing some companionship during lulls in our schedules?

Why had I endured yet again the aching loss of a love that would never be? Because that was recorded on those journal pages too. Loneliness and a longing for romantic love. To be special to the person I found most special. Was that sadness, rejection, and self-pitying heartbreak all for naught?

What if it were something more? What if a glimmer of my attraction to him, that persistent and unrequited love, was meant to sustain DECADES so that now I could pray for him?

What if the reason our paths had crossed was so that I would pray for the repose of his soul?

What if now, so many seasons later, I could take all of the long-spent tears, the aching heart, and suffocating dejection I felt in my early 20s and unite it with Christ’s suffering for the sake of a man I no longer knew but once did?

What if my husband, the man who did requite my love, had a faith solid enough and a heart generous enough to tell me, “You need to have Masses said for your friend. Lots of them.”

“We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.”

Romans 8:28

My prayers and sacrifices are small, and I may have completely misinterpreted my relationship with my friend, the recurrent thoughts of him, and the scarce information divulged in his death notice (though my gut says I haven’t).

If so, I have confidence that not a prayer or sacrifice will be wasted. God and His Blessed Mother can make use of those merits as they see fit. Worst case, I look foolish. It’s happened before (see above: letter confessing my feelings); it’ll happen again.

I share this because for me it’s a rare glimpse at God’s magnificent plan. It offers me hope in trusting Him through heartache and suffering, however and whenever it may come, knowing that His plan is bigger and better than mine. Bigger than a single life or a lifetime, even.

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:9

Even if I’m too blinded by self-pitying tears, immaturity, or self-centeredness, His words echo: “I AM WHO I AM.” (Exodus 3:14)

“But, as it is written. ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard , nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him,’ God has revealed to us through the Spirit.”

1Corinthians 2:9-10

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