I keep seeing her stare at me from the picture on my china cabinet. Her smile is vivid in the picture as much as it was in real life. And I wish, how I wish, that she were sitting next to me at my dining room table and laughing with me as we had so many times over the years. She was my best friend, and she died almost three years ago. The missing part hasn’t lessened in the least.

Recently was the anniversary of the last time we went out together. So I am blue, and sad, and laughing through tears as I remember that crazy night. And I want to tell every woman something they should already know; don’t think you have forever because you don’t. Don’t take one moment for granted because you don’t know when it all will end.

Patty and I raised children together, went through divorces together and also learned to date all over in a different era we were both unfamiliar with. We liked to say we were “relationship delayed” as if somehow, twenty years of each of us not dating, we were stuck in teenage girl years as the rules we dated by. We did the typical things all women do, we over analyzed every word a man said. Every action was scrutinized by the “what did he mean by that?” We chatted all hours of the night over the little things that make up a life and the things that make up a relationship. And we grew up together in our last few years we were together as we suffered tragedies and blessings.

Patty was my one and only night out on New Year’s Eve as an adult. On the way to the party, she spoke of her late love of her life that had passed away two months before. She spoke of her last New Year’s Eve with him, “We danced to Al Green, Let’s Stay Together, and we knew it would most likely be our last, but we knew too, that we loved each other more than anything in the world and it would be okay, and that it was worth it. Even losing him, to have had that in my life, it was worth it.”

I am glad that I really listened to Patty all those years. I am glad I really heard the things she said about life and love and relationships. I am glad I was never too busy and neither was she. I am glad there is no regret in my heart that I was not there enough or that I missed any moments. I was there, and I savored each moment. I appreciated her. I felt lucky to know her. We made a difference in each other’s lives.

All of the stories she told me, all of her hurts and joys, I now tell her daughters and my own daughters. I feel blessed to be able to pass it on—to be able to help her daughters know her even better than they already did. I don’t need to help them feel lucky—they already do. But I do try to give the advice their mother gave me.

She went out into the world first on her own and helped guide me through my own private journey. She let me make my own mistakes and never said, “I told you so.” But instead, “It’ll be okay.” She was my voice in the dark, the one I could call day or night. I was hers too. And now I am a voice in the dark in hers and my girls’ lives. I hope I can live up to her legacy and be the comfort she was to me.

I celebrated Patty’s oldest daughters twenty first birthday a few days ago. Patty should have been there with us physically, I kept thinking. I shared with her, her first legal drink. We toasted her mother. We laughed a bit and cried a bit. We missed the other girls not being there with us. But I realized too, that she is always with us. She hasn’t left us after all this time. Her laughter lingers in each of us, her words still are as important today as they were years ago. The place where she used to be isn’t empty of her; it is filled with the love she left behind as she stepped into the next part of her journey. And I do believe, “It will be okay.” as she always told me.

Monika M. Basile