I’m not sure why you stopped talking to me. It happened slowly, methodically, like rust. There was no big fall-out, no noteworthy event. Suddenly, you and I were no longer speaking. The divide formed.

Women are weird. They’re passivity runs deep. But you and I are different. We’re the outspoken women who yell when angry and sob when sad. We cry out. We express. What happened? Our voices got pale and garbled suddenly. The lines fell down.

Maybe it started when you received the diagnosis. I knew it. You knew it. Even as teenagers, you knew you’d get breast cancer. Your mother had it and you just felt it in your bones. Your bones were my bones, so I felt it too. It was no surprise.

The size was a surprise, though. A baseball, they said. A fucking baseball. I moved from San Francisco to New York, in part to be closer to you. But somehow, my own survival became an issue and I wasn’t as bedside as I wanted to be. Perhaps that’s when it began, the divide.

When they removed your breasts, you showed me your flattened, sutured chest in your kitchen. There was nothing you could show me that would shock me. You are my best friend. Your scars are mine.

“No, they’re not, Beth. They’re mine. You still have breasts.”

I tried to understand the difference that was forming but somehow I never grasped it the way you wanted me to. Perhaps I was unable. Perhaps I am just too self-centered.

“When am I ever going to have sex again, Beth? Who’s going to want to have sex with me now?”

You always loved sex, almost to a fault. You put the horniest sailor to shame.

“I want to have sex,” you’d say many times in the past, apropos of nothing. “I want to have sex now.”

“Kris, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe there will be someone at the party tonight.”

“There better be because I want to have sex.”

“I heard you the first time, Kris.”

Breastless, you felt sexless. And I didn’t know how to give that back to you. Your sex drive was your lifeline.

“I’ll get out of New York and come visit you for Christmas,” I told you, during our last phone conversation. (No one tells you it will be the last time you'll speak on the phone. No announcements are made. But it would be our final phone call. You would accept no more of my calls after that.)

A year passed. Calls placed. Letters. Pictures. Anything. Friends tried to intervene.

“She’s getting worse, Beth. You need to come see her.”

“She doesn’t want to see me. She hasn’t responded to me in a year. I did something very wrong.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

The secondhand stories grow worse. You can't walk that well. Your bones begin to snap. Your face changes, shifts, hollows. You are 42 and dying of breast cancer. This massive clock in a pitch-dark sky keeps ticking in my ears.

You always served as the big sister – a role you didn’t always relish. I was the emotional mess and you were the semi-reluctant anchor. Maybe this time you wanted to be the emotional mess and it was too late for us to change roles. Is that why you're mad at me, Krissie?

Maybe my problems were too dismaying. You yelled  several years ago, as I relayed to you a recent event where I put myself in jeopardy with drugs, men, sex, wine and recklessness. “What the hell is your problem? What would possess you to put yourself in that situation?”

Unable to answer, I just felt shame. Shame that you, my closest friend, saw the train wreck that was my life and could no longer tolerate it.

I’m racing down a highway in South Jersey, trying to get to you. You have hours to live, they tell me. Hours! I race and race but cannot erase. What did I do? What did I do?

When I get to your house, your mother is waiting on the steps, fragile, shaken, deeply worn.

“Please, Beth…just be careful! Don’t upset her. I know you two…please, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

I think of the other times in my life when a gatekeeper intervenes – someone to warn me before I walk through a doorway and face death. How the gatekeepers sound the same. When my mother was dying, it was my brother-in-law. “You need to know, Beth…she looks differently since the last time. It’s…”

“Get out of my way.”

When I enter the shrine, your air-conditioned bedroom, with the curtains drawn and music playing, your eyes light up.

You’re not mad at me! You’re not mad at me! Those eyes are happy to see me.

I crumple next to you, exhausted, in your hands, totally in your hands. You try to splash cold water on my face because you see how red I am, from racing, crying, humiliation. Leave it to you to worry about me and my comfort at that moment  Leave it to you to be so much of a better person than me.

Then you say something that stuns me:

“I don’t know how to say I’m sorry,” you utter, in this unrecognizable, garbled voice.

“You? You don’t know how to say you’re sorry to me? I’m sorry. I’m the bad friend. I’m the selfish one. I didn’t show up enough and….”

“No. That wasn’t it. That's not why…”

“Then why?”

You try so hard to find the words but it's exhausting, stretching and reaching for words, words, words, and you are so tired. You look me pleadingly, as if to say, "Read my mind, Beth. I can't work any harder." Rest, please. Stop. Stop!

“Does it matter, Kris...does it?”

“No. No, it doesn’t. At all.” That comes out very clearly. In your old voice.

And we let it go. At that very moment. Our silence breaks. All is forgiven. The birds fly out the window.

I sit down and sing songs quietly to you the rest of the afternoon as you sleep restlessly, fighting some imaginary blanket being pulled over your body. I sing all the songs we love to sing, over wine, over food, over cigarettes, over stories, over love, over loss, over life. Our anthems, our songs from our humble, beautiful and difficult Jersey lives.

I could tell you enjoyed it. A slight smile sometimes. I sing our songs like little lullabies and put you to sleep.


One of our songs: