Tonight a friend is dying.  She is not a close friend, not someone I talk to all the time, not someone I have ever socialized with much, but a friend nevertheless.  She is dying of cancer as we speak.  Her sister, Susie, is here from Alaska to tend to her.  Susie was one of the first people I met in California, she worked at SF General with me.  She was a bit older than I, a native Californian, talkative, exuberant, full of energy, always smiling.  She is a river rafter, capable of being the “captain” of the raft (or whatever you call that person – basically the person who scopes out the river, sees where you’re supposed to go, and yells at you a lot to ROW! ROW! ROW! especially at the rapids.  Row or die, I guess.)  She had bicycled all over kingdom come.  She went to law school.  She had great parties at her house in SF. She was auntie to my children when they were little.  She left SF to go to Alaska and find a husband, which she did.  Susie makes plans and follows through.

The first time I met her sister was on a river rafting trip.  She is just as nice as Susie.  I loved her the minute I met her.  The next time I saw her was when Susie was pregnant, and visiting me.  We stopped at a Garden Center at which point Susie collapsed in sweat and lightheadedness.  I took her to the hospital where she miscarried.  I called her sister, who came and took over the care for her sister.  I remember looking at each other, our common love for Susie and sorrow in our grief exchanged in our eyes.

I saw her again after Susie’s second, successful pregnancy.  She held a gathering at her house for Susie’s friends and her baby daughter, and regaled us with stories of her string of foreign exchange students.  Her two children were growing up – how does that happen so quickly?  I still liked her just as much as I liked Susie.  How rare is that? Two stellar sisters in one family?

Two years ago she helped me when we had the foreign exchange student from hell.  He was from Brazil, which was her favorite country and she had hosted many Brazilian students.  She took him for a weekend and confirmed that it was him and not us, and that he should have been screened out of the program.  After that she told me to grab Al and come to the city – she had found all the blues clubs and wanted us to join her on Sunday afternoons for great blues music.  We never got around to it.

Now she is dying.  I probably saw her a total of five times in my life, but my heart is breaking as I write.  We shared Susie.  She was always a bright spot in my life when I did see her.  I don’t want her to go quite yet.