In Memoriam, Sort Of

My best friend’s mother died yesterday. She was 89. She had been in poor health for several years. Her death was sudden and shocking and painful. It is one of the great canards of bereavement that it can be anybody’s “time.”
My best friend’s mother was an important part of my life for 39 years. I remember barging into her bedroom many years ago, with a friend, and offering her and my best friend’s father Cokes. Fortunately, they were amused. Very fortunately.
I remember sitting at her kitchen table planning a beach trip with my best friend’s youngest sister. One of us referred to the other as middle-aged. My best friend’s mother summoned her full regal hauteur and declared, “You children are not middle-aged!” At the time we were 37.
On a more somber occasion, my best friend’s mother took me aside and with great earnestness thanked me for loving her daughters. As though that is difficult.
My best friend is the second of four sisters. Her elder sister was married and had a career in a congressman’s office by the time I entered the family orbit. She was glamorous and accomplished, possessed of a robust laugh and a dangerous wit. And, I was convinced, adopted, as she is the shortest of the sisters and the only blonde.
My best friend’s younger sister is adventurous. I’m quite certain that she can clean and gut a caribou or a moose or whatever it was better than Sarah Palin. And she is, as she will attest, the only woman with whom I’ve ever slept. We were both fully clothed, but that did not detract from our moment.
My best friend’s youngest sister was a partner in many crimes. We enjoyed numerous adult beverages in our youth. She is in love with language. She is a cracker-jack editor and ready to celebrate her friends’ creativity and her own. In the inexplicable way of fate, she is a bit of a lost soul.
My best friend has four children who are, in every way that could possibly matter, my nieces and nephew. Her oldest daughter was born in October of 1988. I became sober on September 17, 1988. That none of those children have ever seen me drunk is the part of my life of which I am most proud and for which I am most grateful.
How to speak of my best friend? She christened me “Piggy” at a time when it fit, but I have been more delighted to be “Piggy” with every passing year. She made me fall in love with Starbucks. She pulled me from a deep and dangerous slough of despond. She also loves language. She is a wizard with words and with a camera. And she is utterly fearless.
But none of that quite captures it. I believe that if you can make a list of reasons you are describing like. Love is richer and more mysterious and not defined by lists. A friendship of 39 years has to be more love than like. This one is.
It is not fashionable in my set, but I believe in heaven. I believe in an afterlife where things that have been taken are given back to us. I know my best friend’s mother is in my heaven. Alert and tart, she is straightening out the place and brooking no dissent.