During the fun lecture (fun for me, I mean, to see people nodding, smiling and enjoying the stories of sisterhood, friendship and the importance of fulfilling connections both within and outside of our coupledom), I noticed a woman crying. She was visibly touched, it was clear, by the story I had just read: "Remembering Cathe," story #6 in What Happy Women Do. I love the story for many reasons, partly because it's brilliantly written by the woman who shared it; partly because it reminds us to have great friendships and salute them, always; partly because we all can relate to mystery, laughter and loss.
I share it again below to remind all of us happy-couple-readers to make sure we round out our couple-ness with great friendships. Research shows our social networks (not of the digital kind, the actual human kind) do significantly influence our marriages and partnerships.
Remembering Cathe
A little more than five years ago, a dear friend from college, Catherine, died after an on-again, off-again battle (she called it "inconvenient") with breast cancer for years. She was 49. Her little boy was 11. It broke our hearts.
Cathe had a way of collecting friends like some people collect coins. She polished all of us and scooped us together in a pile. Low and behold, we became friends, good friends who gather several times a year to flirt with Italian waiters, eat too much, and drink a bunch of wine. Sometimes we top it off with a forbidden cigarette, just because Cathe liked being a bit of a rebel.
After she died we had a tree planted in her honor on the campus of her alma mater, the College of St. Catherine. Each spring it boasts pink blooms, and a bench now graces the site, too. On July 31, the anniversary of her death, I sat there again, drinking in a kind of silence almost antithetical to Cathe's nature: She was Irish and never shut up, except sometimes in church, and even then she usually found something to whisper and giggle about.
As I sat there thinking about Cathe, I hoped there is, indeed, the afterlife to which we Christians cling. I have some good gossip I need to tell her and I need to feel again the special kind of exhaustion that endless laughter brings. I need her to tell me a story. I miss her "cackle."
Suddenly, my reverie was interrupted. Someone walking to his car after a campus summer music conference had burst into a perfect-pitch rendition of "Amazing Grace." Thanks, Cathe.
