For Toni
A small tribute to a coworker from my years at the grocery company's corporate office. We were never friends outside of work, but she is someone I still think about, and she deserves a place in the history I keep here.
I worked with a lot of people over the years at the grocery company’s corporate office, and most of them have faded into the general blur of coworkers you spend years beside and then lose track of. Toni never did. She is someone I still think about often enough that she deserves to be part of the history I keep here, so this is for her.
What she was like
Toni was the person who did the things at a corporate office that most corporate people quietly hope someone else will do. The retirement parties. The send-offs when somebody was leaving. The holiday decorating. She was almost always the one in the middle of it, organizing, making sure the moment actually happened. Every office says it values that kind of thing; very few people actually pick up the work, and she did, again and again.
She was a little shy, a little on the meek side. What I remember most clearly is her voice. It was a small, soft, genuinely cute little voice, kind and friendly and gentle, and it always struck me as far too small for the size of the spirit behind it. There was a lot of warmth packed into a quiet person.
The honest part
I want to be straight about this: I didn’t really know Toni outside of work. We weren’t friends in the after-hours sense, and I can’t tell you much about her life away from the office. That makes writing this a little awkward, because a tribute usually comes from someone close. But you don’t have to be close to someone for them to matter to you. When I left that company, the thing I said I would miss most was the people, the way coworkers become the texture of your ordinary days. Toni was a real part of that texture for me, and that counts.
The people who worked alongside her the longest remembered the same things I did. That she was kind and generous and quietly compassionate. That she was a good listener who could brighten a day without making a thing of it. That she paid attention to how the people around her were doing. None of that is the kind of detail that makes it into a job description, and all of it is the kind of thing you remember years later.
A note about the photo
I owe her an apology on this one. I don’t have a good picture of the two of us. Taking a photo with a coworker you enjoy being around just wasn’t something on my mind back then, and now I wish it had been. For a while the best I had were a couple of candid shots I’d cropped down, the kind where she happened to be in frame, never a proper portrait. Eventually I found the photo at the top of this post on her Facebook, her smiling on the rocks by the ocean, and that felt like a much better way to remember her than anything I had. If I ever turn up a better picture of the two of us while going through old photos, I’ll add it.
Goodbye
Toni passed away on May 29, 2019, at 59, in Union, Missouri, where she was laid to rest. She left behind a big family, including nine grandchildren, and a lot of people who thought the world of her.
I didn’t know her well, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But of every coworker I’ve ever had, she’s one of the few I still find myself thinking about, and that says something about the kind of person she was. Rest easy, Toni. You were one of the good ones, and you are remembered.