“Mom came to visit me in San Francisco after Dad died in 2016,” the author writes. “She wasn’t feeling well, which we assumed was part of her grieving process, but it turned out that her cancer had returned.”
We didn’t know Mom was going to die two days later.
“Girls, get in here so I can get my hands on you,” she said, summoning my college pals into bed with her. She had managed one of her signature Susan Gormley lines, even with the oxygen tube that never stayed in place across her face. She constantly fidgeted with it and kept asking the nurse if she could “take the damn thing out,” as if the oxygen tube was the problem, rather than the cancer.
The girls were Nancy, Brooks and Tippett, and although we were women, according to our 40-something calendar years, we still felt like the girls who met at DePauw University, when our greatest responsibility was figuring out which dive bar to go to on Thursday night. I remained single and childless, but I had contributed to the list of undeniably adult things like graduate degrees, weddings, children and big jobs that seemed to keep happening to the four of us. Grown-up things.