Kay decided she was going to die on Saturday, July 9. She didn’t have the death-with-dignity drugs or anything, she just felt that was when she would die. Pursuant to that she sent out her own death notice on Friday, July 8. On Tuesday when she was still alive, the calls started coming in.

“Who is it?”

“Lulu in Issaquah.”

“What does she want?”

“I told her you were alive and she wants to talk to you. She got your announcement.”

I watched Kay’s face as she realized the ramifications of having sent out 75 notices. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

“Oh, fuck!”

Kay died two months later, the second week in September. Although I promised her I would write about her life, the summer of her death was a journey and an education for many of us. She taught me how to die with grace.

When she first got the diagnosis of three to six months to live, she thought about her options, talked to friends and decided she would go into hospice. Her directness and calm made it easier for, well, me anyway. She and I talked freely about death. She promised me that if, when she got to other side, there was any way to tell me what it was like, she would. It was our little pact.

I once sent Kay a card that said, “we aren’t just friends, we’re a small gang.” Her then partner Jerry said he always felt a little nervous when the two of us were together; we were a dangerous pair.

I only wish we had had the time to spend a night at the Tulalip Casino. Not to gamble, but to see how many things we could pinch off the maid’s cart. Speaking of carts, another idea we had was to get on those motorized carts at the grocery store and chase each other around the store like we were riding bumper cars.

In case you are understandably confused, Kay and I are not children. Not chronologically. She was 84 and I was 68 when she died. We had known each other for about 15 years, our friendship secured with learning we shared a birthday and the subsequent Gemini energy that went with it. We each found something within the other person.

Not only a friend, Kay was just old enough to be the mother I didn’t have. I was comfortably myself with her, not something that comes easily for me. She accepted me, she was honest with me, she called me honey. My own mother never called me honey.

“If you had been my mother, the republicans would have forced you to give birth,” I said.

She smiled her mischievous smile.

Kay was a beautiful and sexy woman who was self-conscious about her looks. She was a bright, creative, capable woman who was self-conscious about never having gone to college.

She was mystified by the internet.

“What’s the cloud?” she asked me. “Do I get my own cloud or do I have to share?”

She managed to grow old without the headache of gaining computer skills. I told her that was a great accomplishment and she was a happier person for it.

July 9 was only the first time Kay was sure she would die. Like those eschatologists who continue to nail down the date of the rapture (she would hate that comparison), Kay would regularly decide it was now or tomorrow or soon. I think these pronouncements occurred as she seemed to feel life seeping from her.

One Sunday morning she called me.

“Can you come over?”

“Sure, when?”

“Now.”

I almost went over in my nightclothes, not sure how much time I had. I sat with her for much of the day, watching the rise and fall of her breathing and holding her hand. This was late-July. Over the next month and a half, I clocked in hours of holding her hand, watching her sleep, talking gently or making jokes, singing songs, feeding her ice pieces, eating popsicles with her.

She had stopped eating thinking that would hasten the process. When the hospice nurse said it didn’t work that way, we started giving her ice cream, pudding and Jello, things that would slip down her throat because she had difficulty swallowing.

She liked the Lindor milk chocolate truffles. “Dying is fun!” she declared, her mouth smeared with chocolate.

Lisa, Kay’s daughter, had moved in and was living in the house. Chris, a mutual friend, was often there. K.C. and Jamber were health aides that came in every morning. And Christina was the hospice nurse occasionally referred to as Dum-dum when Kay was annoyed with her. Kay perked up when we were there. She had always liked a party.

Once when we were all there, talking and laughing among ourselves, Kay piped up from the bed, “Hey, I’m the one who’s dying here!”

She had a big party for her last birthday, mid-June. She managed to be up and to walk around, talk and smile. The food was fabulous. Her son –who I called her Beloved Son and she called Randy—Randal flew up from New Orleans with Adrianna, his wife. It was after the party that she settled down to start dying and a full two weeks before she decided that July 9 was the day.

There was always a little flurry of activity when Kay decided she was dying the next day. She was in a fever until she got her will and directives in order. Once she had me haul out all her jewelry and divvy it up in little plastic bags with the names of her nieces and friends. She liked to look around the room and point out objects. She’d ask me to put a tag with someone’s name on them.

Other times we looked through her paintings. (I had taught her to paint and she painted joyfully for years.) She saved her best paintings for Randal who heads the art department of various movies and TV series. He will use her paintings as props in upcoming shows, a lasting legacy of his beautiful mother.

We all went through a period when we had to constantly arrange flowers for her. We had vase after arrangement after pot of them and we grouped them all together on the coffee table. Kay, who had to look at them all day long from her bed, made us move them an inch this way, an inch that way. Put those yellow mums together and the round hydrangeas in the middle by the pink delphiniums. Set the orchid a little to the side. The next day, annoyed with something that seemed off, she made us move them around again.

I liked seeing Chris when I visited but my favorite times were when it was Kay and me and I could watch her breath and tell her how beautiful she was and how gracefully she was doing this. I felt like she and I had a little world of our own, our little club of two, our small gang.  It felt priceless.

On one visit, Chris was in the family room with Kay.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s been asleep for a while.”

I leaned over the bed and stared at Kay. She opened her eyes.

“I bet you thought you’d died and gone to heaven when you saw me,” I said.

“I did think that,” she whispered with a smile.

I started to sit but she reached for me. I put my ear close to her.

“Can you stay?” she whispered

I felt as though my entire heart flowed right up into my throat and my eyes and I almost sobbed. I couldn’t remember what I needed to do that day but yes, of course, I would stay.

I learned something about my capacities for end-of-life-care. For two months I lived in fear of being asked to help with the process of cleaning Kay, the kind of cleaning that required I put on surgical gloves. I wanted to do whatever was needed and I suppose I could have learned how and gotten used to it but the surgical glove operations were not my skill set.

I was the one who sat with her and watched her breathe. One day Kay said, ‘When I die, you have to call hospice and they —”

“Kay,” I said. “We all know what to do when you die. But if you die today while I am here, I am just going to sit with you for a long time.”

Her face relaxed and she closed her eyes and nodded. I wasn’t there when she died. I wanted to be but I wasn’t. In the end I decided it was far better to have been there while she lived.

My beautiful friend, three weeks before her death