Sometimes in this jaded world, we forget to let the people who count know what we think of them We get caught up in doing more in order to be more, when just being in close contact with someone would really count more than a would-be pundit's words in a blog.  Perhaps this medium is too foriegn to me. I prefer the old, lost art of conversation. Bear with me. I'm learning. Here goes.

Somewhere in time, I learned that you can't take your love or your issues to the graveyard. Actually, you can, but the dead don't hear you.  At least that's the common belief.  Therefore,  I'm using this Blog space to count on my friends. Folks, it's just plain old love, so before I begin, I'll share the words that I'm also singing in my sleep. 

 Moe Bandy wrote these lyrics. When I'm awake, I sing them aloud:

"If life is like a candle bright, death must be the wind.
You can close your window tight and it still comes flowing in.
So I will climb the highest hill and watch the rising sun.
And I pray that I don’t feel the chill till I’m too old to die young.

CHORUS
Let me watch my children grow to see what they become.
Oh Lord don’t let that cold wind blow till I’m too old to die young.

Now I have had some dear sweet friends I thought would never die.
Now the only thing that’s left of them is the teardrops in my eyes.
If I could have one wish today and know it would be done.
Well I would say everyone could stay till they’re too old to die young. "

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This song is for my friends, the ones I've known a lifetime. Please hum along if you know the tune. There are some of you here on OpenSalon who have spent a lifetime in my consciousness, though I barely know you. I speak of Monte, MaryTKelly and Sandra Miller. Would that I could be so prolific and wonderfully bright and erudite and accomplished. This short reflection is for each of you as well.

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My Friends:

How old is old enough? How young is young enough? To die young?

Now, there is young in years, and there is young at heart. If this is the case, then we would all remain young at heart and perhaps would never die. I don't want to live forever, and yet I'm facing my mortality in tangible ways.

Two of my friends from childhood are facing serious prognoses. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but because I can't get this song out of my head tonight, I just want to talk about them.

 My friend Deborah Gradney was born a day before me, December 12th. Our mothers were in the same hospital wards in beds next to each other, so it is reasonable to think we knew each other in the womb. I met Deborah outside the womb at age 12 when we found ourselves at the same middle school, in the same home room, the only two Creole kids...

Chance? Just chance? I don't know. Our steps and paths would cross consistently until we were 18, when I went off to the University of Texas at Austin, and she to the University of Houston.

But certain circumstances make me wonder why we meet certain people in time and space and not others. I'm not a determinist, but what are the odds?

 Consider this. In 1972, Deborah invited me to a youth dance at her parish church, St Francis of Assisi. It was there that I met her cousin, Rene Jerome Espree, along with several others. Five and a half years later I married him. We are here together, 31 years gone by. That has been my blessing.

Deborah's outcome has been different. She was diagnosed with Lupus Erythematosis in 1972. She has a grown married daughter in Hong Kong, a long-standing divorce and she lives alone. I cannot begin to describe the surgeries and near fatalities in her history. I don't understand why her life is what it is. She accepts it all with grace. I can't imagine myself surviving in her shoes...

I've been given so much more -- and more from her than I ever deserved.

I am in awe of her courage. Stooped and bent, dependent on daily, skilled nursing care, and managing a body in constant danger of immediate demise, she lives her faith, and never considers her long exile from her youthful potential or asks why.

Because I hear so much whining from everyone -- in the media, the government, the schools, the salons, I am amazed that she carries on each day and never complains. Much of this time, she is alone with herself, making me believe that those of us inclined to complain are most likely in great shape.

Deborah has endured numerous surgeries, infections, and physical losses of all kinds. I cannot help thinking of what the poet Elizabeth Bishop said about loss: We can lose a relationship, a continent, a home, even our minds, as easily as we lose our car keys. But so few of us ever really know this much loss all at once.

Most of our lives are filled with activity and with hope. Most of us endure something, but what about the total loss of viability and options, short of death?

Deborah, at almost 54, against all odds, lives on. This must be what constitutes gifts of the spirit. Bear with me, I'm trying to understand the untenable, at least it's not tenable to me.

My other old friend, Sherry Horn, called me two weeks ago and said she had to see an oncologist/gynecologist. What she thought was a cyst on her ovary is a growth the size of a lemon. Her tests show her malignancy points based on blood tests are 22. Normal is a count between 1 & 6. She has surgery December 19th.

Married and divorced twice, Sherry lives alone with her two daughters, Nacha and Sable. Nacha, at 29, an educator, will marry this coming January. Sable is in nursing school. Sherry herself has been a career educator and a licensed counselor, not to mention a very proud black woman who has always impressed me as being fearless.  When she called, crushed and devastated, I felt helpless. All I could muster was "I love you and it's going to be all right." I meant it. One way or another, metastisized or not, it will be what it will be.

How long have I known her? Since we were six years old. My mother was her first-grade teacher, whom she says, inspired her to become a great reader. My Momma thought Sherry's family was wonderful and wanted us to become friends. We did. My fondest memories are of Sherry acting out the characters in every story she read.

She was so skinny and so black-skinned, some folks believed color and culture, ultimately, would have been a barrier to our friendship, but our lives have proved this assumption false. So much for stereotypes about us and either of our families. Both our mothers were selective about the company we kept. They liked and respected each other.

What's eerie about this? Well, in 1996 we would walk a difficult road together. She buried her Mother in April. I buried my Momma that October. Through the years our paths have parted and entwined together, spiraling apart, yet circling back again. Our children know each other as family.

This past weekend. She came by to see if I was okay. Sherry is formidable and is convinced she can battle this potential life-threatening cancer and win. Am I okay? As long as I focus on the big picture. She's right. If anyone can.

But if life is in the mundane details, I have to consider the possibility of loss. It has been my nature that I begin to mourn long before the mourning is due. My process.

Now I do not wish to tempt fate. Both my friends are young at heart. Much younger than me. If that's the criteria for this wind called death, then he has to pass them by, at least for another 40 years. I just can't get this damn song out of my head. That means it's supposed to be there right now.

So here I am lighting candles and singing in the dark, asking God to spare all my folks. God has affirmed me before.

You see, my dearest companion, my husband, had a meeting with death in 2007, and I prayed, and his doctors successfully completed a seven-hour procedure that required burning away the errant circuitry in his right atrium, which made his resting heartbeat more than 150 beats per minute.

Without that intervention, he might have lived only in my teardrops, except for the power of memory, recollections of a boy I fell in love with before his beard grew in.

Just a few years ago, such a procedure was unheard of. The old remedy was to just stop the heart and restart it, and then hope the problem corrected itself. I want to emphasize, if I have not already, that this is not all about me. I want to honor these, my living treasures.

You see, it is easier for me to face my own death than to imagine the loss of these old friends. I'm an old friend kind of girl. New friends are hard to make. It has been that way for me since adulthood. This alone has forced me chronicle these passages, the age-ing of people whose faces I knew when we were very young.

Scary stuff and yet I know that just having them in my life is a privilege, not a universal experience in a world where so much, even friendship, is ephemeral.

Another two best old friends are Alice (from middle school) and Erlene(from college). We visit a few times a year and its always like time has stopped. Alice is my Saturday morning breakfast pal. We venture into Houston's Fourth Ward to eat at Merida's a few times a year. She also visits with her son Joshua whenever I cook their favorite foods -- a gumbo, an etouffee, a court-boullion. Long ago, our families would meet at her Mom's house each year on Christmas Eve for homemade tamales.

Erlene, my friend since college, is now enduring the loss of a healthy husband. Jim is getting over a bout of pancreatitis and has back problems. We mostly talk on the phone since she lives out of state now. But we remember birthdays. I'm sure these gals have their trials, but as far as I know, they are in great health. They both love their professions. Alice, a mathematician and educator; Erlene, an above-the-glass-ceiling chemical engineer.

My new, oldest friend is Beth. We too have traveled long roads that parted in high school, and commenced again in recent years. We crossed the distance of those times at a long lunch in 2007, and began a friendship based on our common ground, past and present. Beth is a wife, a mother, and a professional therapist.

My oldest old male friend is Michael. Originally from Abilene, he's in Austin, Texas. Still. Also a loyal husband and a noble friend, he is one of the few pals I made in college. He's a historian and an urban planner. Like me, he keeps things forever. We have held on to each other. We are great companions who possess a penchant for highly esoteric subjects.

As for me, I have some disabilities. I am loyal to a fault, hopeful to the end. One dear friend, a next door neighbor, has been out of touch for five or six years now. My song is for her as well.

Oh Lord don't let that cold wind blow, on any of my friends...

At least not till the time has come, and all their stories told...

Now I'd like to add more of my own lines to Moe Bandy's sentient lyricism.

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"If death is just a conscious sleep, then let them know we care.

That even if our life does end, our love is always there.

And sing this song some years from now, when life is closing in.

Then you will know these words by heart, and share your soul with friends..."

Our birth is but a gentle sleep, where we forget the end.

So let me die with memories, til life begins again."

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I end here with an invitation. Would my new friends stand up and be counted?

"You can sing your songs to me, when darkness closes in.

And I will stand and proudly be, your true and faithful friend."

Still,

Just Millie...singing, praying, musing...here in the darkness.