She's gone. I found out the other night. Friends from out of town came sweeping late into a dinner party Thursday and told me. They thought I knew. First I was in shock. Then I cried. Then we drank a toast to her memory.

My friend, Marilyn Joyce Moysa, died June 8 in Edmonton, Alberta. She finally sucuumbed to ovarian cancer. She fought it for 11 years after the doctors gave her 8 months to live. Before that, she vanquished breast cancer. I began to think that she would live forever. 

My friend Marilyn had been ill for a very long time.  I remember when I first found out. It was the cause of a tiff between us. A mutual friend told me of her breast cancer. I told someone else and it got back to her. She chastized me, rightly so. We cried in each other's arms. 

She worked for the competing newspaper to mine as a labour reporter. In Canada she is famous for a Supreme Court challenge. She refused to reveal her sources during an ugly meat-packing strike, brutal even by strike standards. She was a conventional woman, not given to grand gestures, but she had the courage of her convictions. She made up her mind that to testify was unethical and against her journalistic principles, and she stuck to her guns. She won. 

Her mother died of ovarian cancer the year after I met her. Marilyn grieved, and bought a fast, red Mazda with part of her inheritance. After she had two mastectomies, her younger brother, her favourite, dropped dead of a heart attack on a racquetball court.  She grieved again.

We talked a lot about love, especially after she fell hard and fast for a gorgeous Englishman during a summer at Cambridge University. I couldn't fathom how she could have been so besotted so quickly until it happened to me. The relationship didn't last, but when I visited her in England, I began to understand her need for acceptance as a "normal" woman, although she was anything but normal in the best sense of the word.

Marilyn had a good sense of humour and a hearty laugh. One of my favourite pictures of her was with the "gang" in my back yard. I am looking at it now. She is wearing a straw cowboy hat and looks tanned and healthy and happy. My heart is breaking. She fought so hard to live. 

I often think about those days when journalism was my life and joy, and I had a large circle of friends in the media, especially women. Marilyn was a key part of that circle. We all  got together often and partied hard, but we were close in the ways that count. The friend who told me of her death introduced me to Marilyn. It is hard to believe that the picture was taken 25 years ago. I have the unimaginable luxury of growing old. 

Marilyn needed a sense of humour around me. She got me, but still.  I am never more tactless than when I am trying to be diplomatic. One night the gang was gathered at her apartment overlooking the city and much wine had been drunk. We were having a discussion in the living room about all the fake-boobed bimbos on MTV and I said something like, "They think all they need are boobs to be real women." There was a terrible silence. One of the women gasped and glared at me. 

Marilyn did not. She said, "The fact that you can say that Val without any hesitation at all proves to me that you think of me the way I really am." That was Marilyn in a nutshell. Honest, heart-smart, and precious. She kept her sense of humour even as she lay in palliative care, entertaining the medical staff and a steady stream of visitors. She quipped to our mutual friend that she'd never had so many friends in her life as when she was dying. 

Of all my friends, Marilyn was the one who insisted that I stay at her house the night before I left Edmonton for good. She did not want me sitting alone amidst the boxes and detritus of a lost job and a move to a new city. She prepared a lovely meal. Marilyn was Ukranian and there was always plenty of everything in her fridge. We ate, and drank wine, and she gave me a pair of earrings that I am wearing right now. They are silver with green stones, a little bit longer than what I would have chosen, but yet exactly right. 

Marilyn knew. That is why tonight I am not going to wallow in the guilt that I hadn't seen or talked to her in years, or that I missed her funeral. I am not going to think about her dapper father who survived her, or her remaining brother and his wife, who thought it was a chore to occasionally take her to medical appointments.

No. I am going to raise a toast to her indomitable spirit and remember the good times. There were an awful lot of good times.