Best, Best Friend....One of the joys of the work I do is meeting such wonderful people. They all have a lot to teach me, and learn from me, too. I am supposed to be there to offer nursing care, and I do, but there is always more to it. And sometimes, if I am really lucky, I get to share their sweet, sweet stories:
They were preschoolers when they first met. In a town nearby that is smaller, even, than Podunk.
There is a picture of them, chubby-cheeked little children, sitting in a Radio Flyer wagon. Sepia-toned, their clothing tells of the era of the photo: it was 1928. America was on the verge of economic disaster, but two little children, sitting in a wagon, only knew of the world around them.
He had sandy blond hair; hers was raven black. The innocence of the photograph is magnified by the years that have passed since it was taken. They were best-best friends.
They played together, went to grammar school together and, on Sundays, he walked with her to church. After high school, they both went off to college. When WWII broke out, they both enlisted in the service. He was a pilot in the Army Air Corps. She was a Navy nurse.
After the war, he came home and married a young woman from his home town. She married a man she met in the service during the war and they settled in the Bay Area of California. Several years later, she returned to her hometown, divorced, and with her five children.
He and his wife became close friends of hers again. Her five children and his seven children grew up knowing each other and spending time together. Once a year, they would all go to the Sacramento Delta and camp for a week.
Nearly a dozen years ago, his wife died. She was the first person he phoned. His wife had been her close friend for many years and they were like sisters. She went immediately to help him with the arrangements and comfort him as he grieved.
Two years later, at the age of eighty, they married. With the blessings of their children, and all of them in attendance, they tied the knot, more than 75 years after becoming best-best friends.
You would have to have seen her face, as she told it, to really appreciate the story. Her face was radiant, as she smiled and told me her story. Her eyes danced, looking first at his picture on the table, then back at me, and then at his picture again. I knew, even before she said it, that the years they were married were, as she said, “the best years of my life.”
He is gone now. They only had five years together as man and wife. But looking at her, and looking around her apartment, he is still there. Still making her smile, still filling her heart with joy.
And still her best-best friend.
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