Something nudged me to write this. I cannot explain it more precisely than that. A quiet insistence, arriving around what I believe may be the anniversary of her passing, though I don’t know the exact date. I have learned to follow these nudges. The invisible forces that accompany us through life tend to know what we need before we do.
She was my manager. The last time I saw her, I was 30 and she was 15 years my senior. That was almost 18 years ago, and I found out nine months after the fact that she was gone.
She was 63. Still young. Still, by any honest measure, in the middle of things.
I have lost colleagues before. Not all of them to the slow drift of careers moving in different directions. Some died suddenly, while we were still working together, still sharing the same hallways and coffee. That kind of loss has its own texture. There is no distance to cushion it, no time to prepare, no gradual fading that might soften the blow. Just presence, and then absence, with nothing in between.
But there is another kind of loss that gets less attention. The colleague who moves out of your daily life through the natural motion of things. A firing, a resignation, a restructuring, a new chapter. You lose touch, not from any failure of affection, but simply because work relationships live inside the container of work, and when the container changes, so does everything in it. You are not family. You don’t belong to each other’s private worlds. No one is obligated to find your number when something happens.
And so you go on living, assuming they are out there somewhere, still themselves, still moving through the world. Until one day you find out they are not.
She was a people manager by title and by genuine vocation. She had studied it and practiced it and refined it with the seriousness of someone who understood that managing people is not an administrative function but a human one. I remember learning about situational leadership and telling her that I was trying to place her within it, to identify which style she used, but she kept exceeding the categories. She spanned almost all of them.
She smiled and said: “Yes. I work hard at that.”
No false modesty. Just a quiet acknowledgment that excellence is intentional. She was the kind of manager her whole team of twenty wanted to celebrate. We took her to Olive Garden for her 45th birthday. We had other outings as a team. I can still see moments of them vividly.
Our one-on-one meetings were not in conference rooms. We did loops around the mall beneath our office building, and we always ended up in Williams Sonoma. During one of those walks she was very honest with me about how she truly felt about working. She replied, “I have been around the block.” I heard it and filed it away. When my mid-forties came around, I felt exactly what she felt.
We were talking about my work one day, not long after I had started the job, when she looked at me and said: “You made sure every bolt was screwed on tight.”
I felt seen. Specifically, carefully seen. I went home and wrote her an email, opening up in the way you only do with someone who has already demonstrated they will handle what you give them. She wrote back and called it an insightful analysis of myself.
I remember the morning her mother was coming to visit. She walked into the office giddy like a child, a joy she could barely contain. She swept me and a colleague up immediately and took us to breakfast. No agenda. Just her happiness, offered freely to whoever was nearby.
At 45, she was a grandmother. A six-year-old grandson. An infant granddaughter, a girl, I believe. Her mother was still in her life, still coming to visit.
I remember telling her that she was truly rich. I meant it exactly as I said it. Not metaphorically. Rich. Full. Surrounded by people who loved her and needed her and called her grandmother and daughter and all the names that accumulate around a person who has lived well.
She had to walk me out the door in 2008. I hold no bitterness about it. The world was coming apart that year, and she did it with dignity. What I remember most is the tear she tried so hard not to let fall.
That was the last time I saw her.
I walked out. Almost 18 years passed. I carried my frozen image of her, the 45-year-old woman who did loops at the mall and lit up when her mother called and knew how to see people, and I assumed she was out there somewhere, still being exactly that person.
She was not frozen, of course. She kept going. She kept growing. The infant granddaughter grew up. The six-year-old grandson became a young man. Her mother aged. She herself moved through nearly two decades of life that I have no access to, years of change and accumulation and becoming, right up until the moment she stopped.
This is the part that philosophy cannot resolve for me. It can only name it.
We freeze the people we lose at the moment we lose them. We carry them in amber, vivid and specific and permanently the age they were when they last stood in front of us. But they do not freeze. They keep living without us, becoming versions of themselves we never get to meet. And when they die, we mourn twice over: the person we knew, and the person they became.
I grieve the woman I knew at 45. But I also grieve the woman she was at 63, the grandmother with more time behind her than ahead, the woman who was looking forward to retirement.
I think about the colleagues I have lost over the years. The ones who died suddenly while we still worked together, their desk still warm. The ones who drifted away and died in lives I was no longer part of. We spend so many hours with these people. We know their habits and their moods and the particular way they handle a hard day. We know them in the specific, unsentimental way that proximity creates. And then one way or another they are gone, and we grieve them in private, without ceremony, because we were never quite family.
But that does not mean they did not matter.
I wish I could have coffee with her. I wish I could ask her about the last seventeen years.
This was published on Substack on June 2, 2026. https://noorvoss.substack.com/p/the-version-of-you-i-never-knew