Saturday

       "Each friend represents a world in us" came to mind Saturday as I looked around the congregation of a Methodist Church in a small east-Texas town.

       So many of my worlds were there for the sad occasion of remembering a daughter we'd known and loved during her growing up years, then as an adult through stories and pictures shared by her mother, one of us.

        I could remember the day when every one of those friend-worlds began. Those days are sealed so tightly in my memory that over our now-aging faces I can still see exactly what we looked like when we were twenty and thirty-something. So many times we've been there for each other over the forty and fifty years we've been friends--after deaths in each other's families, divorces, health scares, surgeries, and moves.  At baby showers and weddings and birthday parties.

        In some cases, I could even remember singing the hymns together that were sung in that church on Saturday--back when we were just starting out our decades of being adults and parents.

       After my divorce, three of them took me to the beach for a "Divorce Retreat." When we go through big changes, whether good ones or terrible ones, the friends of a lifetime show up when they can in whatever ways they can.

       I've often heard that just before people die, their lives flash before their eyes. I don't know that yet from personal experience, but what I do know is that my life flashed before my eyes on Saturday, just like the scenes of my friend's daughter's life flashed on the wall:  baby, then bride, then child on the beach.

       Memories are like that.  Fractured and in no particular order.  When you visit each other in grief, you know the stories and families of each other, and you're all back to your most core selves, ageless sisters.