It’s been a whole week. Just a week since my mom passed away. Once the news came time sped up and slowed down and reversed and picked a bale of cotton, and it’s only been a week. From Thursday to Tuesday I spent almost every waking minute by the side of this girl:

Not the hot redhead with the hotter glasses and wicked thick eyeliner, the other one. The blond one avoiding the hot redhead with the hotter glasses. That’s my friend, Leigh. Let me tell you about Leigh.

To begin with, I met Leigh in 1992ish. We were in the debate club together. But we didn’t become friends until we discovered our mutual love of choreography and dancing. I’m not being ironic in the previous sentence. So we’d stay up late at her parents posh middle-class house and dance and talk about boys who didn’t like us and watch Grease and glory in our self-absorbed amazingness that we didn’t let anyone else in on. We swapped clothes and played Spit and talked fast and gave each other looks when other people said interesting things and assumed that no one else caught that we were giving each other looks. We skipped school to watch Charlie’s Angels, fried ourselves into blistered hot tranny messes while trying to get tanned, and ogled the lawn-mowing boy who later became Leigh’s husband. We created stupid nicknames for ourselves and decorated letters to each other with hyper-complicated swirly designs and rick-rack trim.

Needless to say, we didn’t have boyfriends during these years. Or many other close friends.

And while we haven’t lived in the same town since 1994, we’ve stayed very much in each other’s lives.

Leigh picked me up the day my mother died and drove me to Victoria. She sat in with the family during the planning and arranging and created the beautiful memory board thingys that held our favorite pictures of my mom. She, along with another wonderful high school friend, corralled the children during the viewing, so I didn’t have to worry about them. She stayed up until four in the a.m. and listened to the ENTIRE TALE of the Palace Sweeper, which in itself was an amazing feat.

So here’s what I have to say about this process, the process of grieving. It sucks. No getting around it. I told one friend that I was staying up late every night because I didn’t want to lie in bed for hours thinking about what I could have done or said differently. And then you go to sleep…that’s when things get weird. I’ve always had vivid, bizarre dreams…now they involve my mother who is not alive but was once alive and I get very confused when I’m asleep. It sucks. But having someone like Leigh along for the process is the closest you can get to making everything ok. It’s not ok, but it’s better than it would have been.

I needed levity. Leigh brings levity. And I needed to not have to talk about my mom right now. Leigh knows better than to make me talk about my mom right now. I needed music and bad Chinese food and guffaw-inducing recollections of our bad Victoria jobs in between the trips to the funeral parlor and my mom’s old apartment. It was a one-bad-thing-at-a-time kind of trip, and Leigh made the bad things easier.

She came up to me after the funeral and we mutually agreed she should just walk away. Bittersweet tears would have turned into raucous weeping and wailing if I had to hug this girl who had done so much for me. So she walked away and I greeted and thanked and kept the nice level of distraction that I needed for that moment.

Here is the part where I tell everyone reading this that you need such a friend. You need such a friend. Call your best friend tonight and re-affirm your friendship. I don’t know how that works, maybe you sign a recommittment card and take it to your local pastor, or maybe you just do some sort of blood brothers/sisters thing but without real blood, you know, because of the AIDS. But call. Now. Do it. Do it. My husband has borne and will bear the brunt of the bitterness of this loss. He gets the raucous weeping and wailing from me. But my best friend was the one who could make it all a little less painful. And that’s why I needed her.

So call your Leigh. But not my Leigh. You totally wouldn’t get her, anyway.