When I was in my late teens, seven of my father’s male friends died within a year and a half.  Not husbands of my mother’s women friends.  These were men my father knew independent of Mom.  I don’t remember him outwardly showing emotion though I’m sure he was, at the very least, sad.  Being a doctor, he may have prepared himself differently in order to survive the aftermath of friends dying.  In any case, he rarely expressed himself beyond being military stern or showing joy.  How he was in the private sanctum he shared with my mother, I cannot attest to.  For what I believe they both thought was parental protection, they seemed to mask any depression or loss they may have felt in their daily lives.

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I was somewhat surprised when Dad insisted that I attend two of his four older sisters’ funerals, both in Philadelphia.  With his sister Mary, he maintained a good and lifelong relationship.  She was the one and only paternal aunt I knew well enough to form a thoughtful opinion.  I adored her.  When she died, it felt natural to pay my respects and keep my father company, traveling south with him to attend her funeral.  His sister Eva I had only met a couple of times.  From what I witnessed, other than Aunt Mary, he didn’t see or talk to his other three sisters very often.  His oldest sister Sarah I saw one time when I was three years old. She visited our house in New Jersey.  Aunt Sarah gave me a stuffed animal, a panda bear, that I kept close until I left my childhood home.  Until quite recently, I hadn’t remembered Panda had come from her.

I never met his sister, Lily, who had acquired a good deal of money and lived her adult life in Washington, D.C. My mother told me she was considered to be a bit of a rebel, which included her having an affair with an African American man in the late 1950s.  At that time, it would have been shocking.

When Aunt Eva passed away, my father insisted that I accompany him to the funeral, perhaps because my mother was away at the time and wasn’t able to join him.  Eva and Mary lived in the same apartment building in Wyncote, PA (where Sister Sledge, who sang the hit “We Are Family,” comes from). My aunts lived across the hall from each other, and ironically, both succumbed to Parkinson’s disease.  I don’t know or believe that was the diagnosed reason for either of their deaths.

Dad would have rarely, if at all, seen or communicated with his sisters had my mother not pushed him to do so.  Mom was very close to her two sisters.  During my lifetime, they intentionally lived within a couple miles of each other and appeared to be best friends.

Not counting my maternal grandmother’s death the summer I was 12, I had experienced death and witnessing others suffering from debilitating illnesses at a fairly young age.  My best friend in high school had a rare and adverse reaction to the Swine Flu vaccine. Basically, he had the equivalent of a stroke (Guillain-Barre Syndrome) at age 18.  He didn’t die, but his life was forever altered and subsequently, the killing of his youth took me to a place of understanding something I don’t think young people should have to face.  That may be a luxury only offered to children who live during a time without a draft or war.

A few months earlier, a high school friend was killed in a car accident at the end of our junior year.  I attended her funeral and wept audibly.  And then in my 20s there was the AIDS epidemic.  I was not only spared acquiring what, at the time, was a death sentence, but very few friends of mine succumbed to the disease.  However, my boyfriend got it at age 30 (I was 27) and died the day after his 33rd birthday.  He not only didn’t know anything about AIDS he also didn’t know the only people we had even heard about contracting the virus were much older than he and I.  And later, in the mid 1990s, a number of my friends died from either cancer or illnesses attributed to HIV.

So, death was not exactly a rare thing to me.

This year has been an era of loss.  Not blood family—both of my parents died years ago.  But others who have added safety to my daily life by being a part of it.  I accept death is inevitable.  And being a senior citizen, it will become more common as the years pass.

Though I was a mess the day my mother died (as my brother, Dan will attest to), I didn’t cry when my father’s life ended.  Nor did I shed tears when my aunts and others of my parents’ generation who were important to me left this Earth.  Like Mom, I don’t cry easily at the predictable moments.

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Within the past 12 months, one of my co-workers died from a cancer invasion, then the last surviving member of my parents’ generation died at 98, and recently, one of my close friends passed away. She had been hospitalized with pneumonia and wasn’t able to fight it off.  For whatever reason, this death hit me with an unexpected and strong reaction, emotionally knocking me over with the force of a cyclone.  Perhaps it registered more deeply because I didn’t see her as regularly as others, since she lived about four hours away, outside of Baltimore.  We tended to email multiple times a week and sent each other books that we thought the other might enjoy.

I met her as a client two decades ago when I was working at an art gallery.  Staying professional, I have only established some long-term relationships with a select number of collectors.  I remained emotionally removed from the vast majority of buying clients.  But with a few, I developed deep relationships outside of the gallery world.  Phyllis was one of these people.

For those who know me, I am not an adventurer.  Rembrandt would have called me an armchair traveler.  Phyllis was one of the few friends I went out of my way to visit. I rarely invite people into my private world. But for me, Phyllis was part of a guarded and somewhat sacred area of my heart.  We understood each other.

Her last gift to me was written. Here is part of her final email message to me, sent from her hospital bed: “You’re a great good friend and I love you.”

I love you too.  So much.