There was a week in October that was blurry as it happened and has grown progressively more faint. I feel blessed to have been there for it, but I don’t ever want to do it again.

It was just happenstance that I saw a post on Facebook. I don’t spend a lot of time there anymore. But I saw it and I was immediately in the car, on the road, at the hospital. Security made me wait even though I had the room number. I waited a long time and then I just started walking. It seemed unlikely that the guard, who was eating something that might have been a burrito bowl, would come after me.

I found the longest possible way to get to the room. Angie’s mom was the only one there with her. It was after 9 on a Thursday night. “Cousin Kristen. How did you get here? Nobody has your number. We wanted to call you…”

***

Angie was sick for nearly a year before she told me. She told me when I called to break the news that Carrie had passed. She hadn’t told me before because she’d seen how I, and the people around me, had processed Kevin’s death. What a shitty, shitty maze to navigate.

I made her promise to tell me everything, to let me know or to have someone else let me know when she was in the hospital so I could bring her magazines and popsicles and do whatever else I could do. She told me once but told me not to come. From then on, I would find out after the fact that she’d been in the hospital for a week, for ten days, for whatever. Always in the vaguest terms.

We were able to drive north for a few hours in the summer two years ago to see old friends play music in a church parking lot. When they asked about her cancer, she said simply, resignedly, “It’s going to shorten my life.” I did not ask for more detail. She would tell me what she wanted me to know. She would tell me what she thought I could handle.

While I was driving too fast all over the Bay Area in the rental Mustang after her brother’s wedding a month later, she had to leave to come home for a chemo treatment. I wish she could have stayed. I wish she could have gone to Santa Cruz with me, to go back to a restaurant we went to decades ago to watch the sunset over the ocean.

***

So, the post on Facebook took me by surprise. I was not prepared. I was not anywhere near ready to say goodbye.

In the days that followed, people filed into the room and out of the room. Sometimes a few at a time, speaking in whispers. Other times, boisterous laughter that I was sure was going to get some of us asked to leave. Aunts, uncles, cousins, loved ones. Drifting through tears to find coffee, or the salad bar in the basement cafeteria. Returning to find more cousins telling stories of when they were little, making cookies with Angie at Christmas.

As I said above, most of it is a blur now. What I remember are the ebbs and flows of people and laughter and silence. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore and passed the box of tissue to someone else. I spent time with adults who were kids the last time I saw them. I hugged strangers I’d only previously known through photos on Angie’s Facebook page. Her dad and I talked about the crystals her stepmom had given her to carry, hoping they would bring her healing or comfort or something.

I knew she carried them, and I know she did so not just for what they might bring her, but for the comfort they might bring the person who gave them to her. “Nothing to lose by putting them in my pocket,” she’d told me. I wonder what happened to them.

Late at night, when it was just the smaller circle of family, we talked about music and the cabin at Rockaway. I heard stories I hadn’t heard before, and repeats of some I never want to forget.

When I left on that last night, I told I’d see her the next day. Her brother Joe called me two hours later to tell me she’d gone.

She left no instructions for what we should do next. We decided early in the week that cremation was probably best and the pastor at our church set the wheels in motion for a memorial service on Veteran’s Day.

When I say that week in October was a blur, the two weeks that followed are every bit as incomplete for me. At some point, Joe asked me to write an obituary. I already had most of it in my head.

Her memorial was an incredible remembrance of her. I’ve been to memorials before where the person officiating does not know the decedent, but Angie had been a huge part of this church long after I’d stopped going and the pastors know her well. Her brother spoke on behalf of the family and I’ve never been prouder of him.

I tried to sit in the back, as had been our custom, but the pastor made Annette and I move up front with the family. Only not quite with the family because there was SO MUCH family, so we were off to the side in our own row. I’m sure Angie was laughing at how awkward this was. I’m a good Lutheran. I sit in the back so I can bring my coffee with me and not cause too much disruption. I have no doubt that Angie raised Annette to be the same. But there we were in the front of the sanctuary anyway.

We went up for communion, which was also awkward with so many people who were either out of practice or just unfamiliar with the custom. With front row seats, the traffic pattern watching was top notch. IYKYK

Afterward, we gathered in the fellowship hall, family, coworkers, friends old and new. I desperately hope she understood even a fraction of the impact her life made on all of us.

It’s been a year now. A year and a few hours. None of us will ever be the same.

I drove out to the coast today, taking the same roads we took so many times. I stopped at a casino she liked, drove through the town where her family has their beach cabin. I talked to her along the way and laughed about the time we saw a guy in a serape walking a pack mule along 101 just south of Garibaldi. “Did you see that?” she’d asked so many years ago. “Oh, good,” I answered. “I thought I was seeing things.”

I will miss her forever. My friend, my chosen sister.