One Year Later

One Year Later

Today marks exactly one year since a dear friend passed away.

People say cancer took her, but long before cancer came, she had already fought many battles. The battle called life.

It’s strange how, when someone leaves, the memories that return are never the ones you expect.

I think of her little house. Years ago, she pawned her jewellery so they could put down the deposit. She was the one who pushed her husband so they could finally have a home.

I think of the time her husband had an affair. Ironically, he fell into depression when the girlfriend left him. I often wonder how deeply that must have hurt her. Yet she stayed.

Later, she met another man, only to discover he was a player.

Life wasn’t always kind to her.

Yet she never stopped living.

She loved to dance. Every year she would travel to India, pursue her passion, and, with that mischievous smile of hers, hope for a little holiday fling. She embraced life with all its imperfections, and I loved her for that.

At forty, she suffered a heart attack. From then on, she managed her health with medication. At fifty, she was diagnosed with cancer.

She fought that battle with everything she had—chemotherapy, radiation, medications, and endless hospital visits. Eventually she was given a clean bill of health.

For a while.

One day she told me, very matter-of-factly, “If it comes back again, I’m sorry. I’m done fighting.”

She was crystal clear.

When the cancer returned, she stayed true to her promise. She didn’t want to fight anymore.

Above everything else, she was one of my truest friends.

She was honest. No frills. No pretence. Just completely herself.

After she passed away, I remember her children saying, “Mom only had two close friends, and one of them is you.”
I have never forgotten those words.

She answered every one of my phone calls, especially when I was going through the legal issues surrounding my business. She didn’t always have solutions, but she listened. Somehow, that was enough to pull me through one of the hardest periods of my life.

When I told her I had left my husband, she didn’t offer sympathy.
She laughed and said, “Quickly find yourself a boyfriend and have a fling. You deserve to be happy.”

That was so typically her.

Whenever we met, it was always a ruckus. We gossiped, laughed until our stomachs hurt, and picked up exactly where we had left off. It was no different from when we were thirteen years old.
She kept our school yearbooks and the autograph books we wrote in on our last day of school.

As the years passed, life caught up with both of us. There were long periods when we hardly spoke, but neither of us ever questioned the friendship. We never got angry. We simply understood each other.

That is what good friends do.

When I started my running journey, she called me one day and said, “Make sure your shorts are super short.”

I laughed.

She had liked every one of my Facebook posts for years.

Then one day, she stopped.

Somehow, I knew.

In her final days, she didn’t want any visitors.

I understood.

So the last image I have of her is not one of sickness or suffering, but of the vibrant woman she had always been.

A few weeks after she passed, she came to me in a dream.

She was all cheery, smiling, dressed in a flowy dress.

We walked through the corridors of our old school, hand in hand, just as we had done so many years ago.