Twelve years ago today, a friend of mine died. She was in her late sixties, older than my parents, but she wasn’t just their friend—she was really mine too.
I’ve written about her several times over the years, mostly in little cameos in essays. Once I borrowed her house for a piece of fiction I wrote in a college creative writing class. I loved her house. It sat on a hillside below the street. To get in, you opened a wooden gate and walked down a short set of stairs into a stone courtyard, shaded by trees. Peacocks hopped the fence, and I saw whole families of them there sometimes—or maybe just once. It made an outsized impression.
I don’t know why we became close, considering our age difference. We met at the Unitarian Universalist church in Palos Verdes, where my dad and I were in the choir with her. She and my mom bonded maybe because they had both immigrated to the U.S., in her case from Germany, and they had similar personalities: warm, loud, frank, and magnetic. Maybe she scooped me up because I seemed to need it, because I was new and sad and not outgoing enough to break into the small group of kids my age at the church, who had been part of the community since they were small.
When I think of her now, my memories are fragments:
The way her speaking voice, halfway to a yell, carried across the church courtyard
The colors she wore: lime green, cherry red, cerulean
The colorful art on the white walls of her house, like a personal gallery
Her daily walk around the golf course near her house, which I remember only in the winter, with fallen leaves around the edges of the green. When she got sick, her long-dormant cancer returning, my mom said, “But she’s so healthy.”
The time she took my hand at a party the summer before I left to study abroad in Japan. She led me from the dark night into the bright church kitchen, where she pulled a ring out of a box and put it on my finger. Her parents had given it to her when she was 16, and now she was giving it to me.
In my memory, she pulls me into the church kitchen and then I stumble back out into the night on my college campus, where I did summer school before leaving for Japan. I’m wearing my favorite green dress and no shoes and that white gold ring with the tiny, winking diamond.
The letters she wrote me while I was in Japan. At first she said she’d make a recovery and come visit. I’m ashamed that I wrote back and told her she could do it because she was strong, to just keep being strong.
Riding the train in Japan from my school in Kyoto to the countryside in Fukui when I learned she had died. The light green, wet blur of spring outside the windows.
Her memorial tile on the side of the church overlooking the canyon
The way my mom looked at her, happy, admiring, a bit deferential, as if looking at a big sister
Her voice, again, in the choir, arguing with the director, calling me over to look at her sheet music, singing full-bodied
I don’t know how best to remember her. I don’t know how she would be now, or during this past year, though I can imagine. I admired her boldness and her practicality, two qualities I have to reach for. Tonight, I put on the ring she gave me, though it’s tight on my finger now. It still winks. I imagine it on her finger, when she was young. I imagine it in a shop window, catching her eye.