Saying Goodbye To A Friend: Last Moments Of Tears, Honesty, Love

NORTH FORK, NY — My beautiful friend lost her battle with a cruel, insidious cancer last week. She and I met exactly 25 years ago; we lived in the same apartment building when our babies were just a year old. She'd heard that my mother had died and she came by to say how sorry she was.

From that day forward, we were so close. So many memories. When my son had a fever in the middle of the night and she came over with her baby on her hip, a thermometer in her hand, and helped me get my baby into a tepid bath, staying with me until the fever broke.

Trips to apple orchards, the Halloween parties and trick or treating, birthdays, summers at the Remsenburg house, the night HBO aired the Bee Gees special where I brought the white roses and we had our own party, just the two of us, drinking champagne and jumping up and down. Bryant Park, shrimp cocktails and laughter, my son's Off-Broadway show, so many times that meant everything.

But the thing that always kept our hearts close was the constant texts, Facebook messages, the fact that no matter how many years or months or miles separated us, one message, one text, and we were talking as if we were at the same kitchen table with our cheese sandwiches and Diet Pepsi.

One day in Los Angeles last year, she called to talk, and in that hotel room, far from home, I sat on the bed and talked to my friend for hours. I sent photos of the outfit I was wearing because she wanted to see my new jacket. She was like that, she wanted to hear the details, and she remembered every single one. She remembered what I'd told her, about the smoked salmon a friend always served for lunch, a story I'd told her months before.

When she was your friend, you were a lucky woman, because no one was more true and loyal and loving. She loved her children, her mother, her partner, her friends with a pure heart and so much compassion and loyalty. She loved her work and she excelled. She loved art and books and music. She loved dinners at nice restaurants, she loved fashion, she loved a beautiful outfit and bag. She treasured the gifts we exchanged over the years, just as I do. I have a little Campbell's soup mug that she gave me right off her shelf one year just because I liked it. I have a skirt from her closet that she gave me, because she thought it would look nice on me.

My friend saw the beauty in the simple joys in life, a delicious home-cooked meal (her spinach pie is my all-time favorite), her sweet cats and dog. She delighted in the things that made her house a home, including the time she decorated her bathroom with beautiful plants and candles and photos, or a gorgeous antique roll-top desk that she loved.

A mother first and forever, she loved her children fiercely and worked tirelessly, always, to give them everything.

We spent time together when she was very sick, and I can't believe, even now, that we'd found ourselves in that room, facing the unthinkable, no way out. There was a sacred feeling in that room, though; a sense that the words we said were almost holy in their importance. I don't want to share the words we said then, they were ours and ours alone, words I will tuck in my heart and keep forever during the long days and nights ahead when I won't be able to text or call her, ever again.

On that night, she gave me something, a present she had carefully wrapped in tissue and put in the drawer of the hospital nightstand. It was a Hummel that I'd given her years before, so long ago. "I've always loved her," she said. "But now it's time that she goes home with you."

I've lost family members before. My mother, my grandmother, my uncles. Each loss a new emptiness to get used to, to learn to bear. But I learned something when my friend died: It's different, losing a friend. With a parent, you are assigned a role you've had for life, dutiful daughter; there are words you exchange, scripted over years and well worn scenarios. When you are a parent, you are the strong one, the support, the one they can come to, always.

But when it's your friend who is dying, who is lying there, helpless in the face of the inevitable, there is only the truth, stark and looming. This is the person who knows all your stories, your secrets, your moments, both ugly and beautiful. This is the person you've been your complete, most real self with, who has been Thelma to your Louise, your partner in crime and precious confidante. In those dark moments there is some light and joy in knowing that she and I, we were able to transcend the walls of that room, to break through the oppressive, sterile cocoon of inevitability and despair and feel as though we were just as we had always been, two friends talking, sitting on the bed and having a sleepover. There was relief in being able to share those once-in-a-lifetime conversations, to say the words that all too often, never get said.

"Aren't we lucky," she asked me, "that we got this chance to say goodbye?"

Since I got the news that she was gone, I have been fighting this urge to run, to get on a plane, fly far away, to walk on the beach for miles and miles and miles. Anything. Anywhere, to get away from that enormous, gaping truth. But there is no place, nowhere to go, where the truth of her leaving will not exist.Without her texts and calls, it's just too quiet.

I honestly don't know what I am going to do without her, for the rest of this life. So many tears. I can't imagine that it's true. It's definitely not fair. She wasn't ready yet to leave; she had plans and dreams. She died on the same day my mother died, 25 years ago. I hope she's met my mom now and they are together. I hope she is okay. I hope she knows I will love her every day for the rest of my life.