It Should Have Been Her Birthday Today

This post is a biography of my best friend Carole. Today would have been her birthday. She was born 49 days before me. Because of this, she always told me to respect her, she was my elder.
People at least once a week asked us if we were sisters. We always laughed and said, "We are closer than sisters."
She was tall, I was average. She was slender, I was softer. She drank beer, I couldn't stand it. She dyed everything white with tea so it would look old; doilies, curtains; drove me nuts.
She drove a little convertible with the license plate Ce'la vie' . That was her motto whatever will be will be.

She had one child and one marriage. She carried a broken heart from a love affair that was not meant to be. She was an advocate for the elderly. She loved impromptu activities!
She loved me. I loved her. We never had a fight in twenty years. We were just as close living three hours away from each other as we were living three blocks away from each other.
She always told me you have to have friends in low places because they will always have your back. She carried a gun. I hate guns.
She loved to dance. She had a hair trigger temper always triggered by an injustice.
She was a beautician, but after a few years she decided that she would rather do something different and became a social worker for a nursing home.
She gave me the best haircuts and perms ever! She would ask me to frost her hair and it was always an excuse to have a rum and coke and for her a beer.
She was the example of "pride goeth before the fall." She had insurance, but some inconceivable reason she thought that Medicare would deny her claims if she went to the doctor when she knew that she needed to go thinking that it would be a considered a pre-existing illness. I turned myself blue in the face trying to convince her to go, but she would not do it.
Neither of us had a clue that she had cancer. When she did finally go to the doctor it was too late for life saving procedures. It was the announcement to me, the Hospice nursing, and equipment in her home and within just a few months admittance to the same nursing home she had worked in for over twenty years.
Within a few short weeks she was gone.
It is not grief that she is gone because she suffered terribbly from the aggressive monster that was destroying her body, but rather a void in my life that will forever be with me.
Her picture is always available for me to see and the little statue that I have pictured says, "If we live to be 103 my best friend you will always be." The fun part of that little knick knack is that we gave each other the same one on a very special Christmas the year before the horror began.
Love hurts, but love gives us something that we can hold dear to our hearts until the day that we join the loved ones that are waiting for us.
Happy birthday, dear one.