“What do you think happens, Bawb?” Letty asked at coffee one day last year.

“I don’t know, but I know I’ll miss you.” She started to cry.

“Guy said he thinks it’s like closing the door behind me. I like that. I’m just going to close the door behind me.”

“You going to be wearing heels?” We laughed. “Not this time! I think I’ll wear my running shoes and get in one last workout on the way.” Honestly, we made light of everything. “I’ll close the door behind me and keep on running.” We sat quietly a long time. Then we talked about the reality of it all. “I’m sorry I don’t have the strength to walk. The treatments are exhausting.” I said nothing. There was nothing to say. “Oh! Did you figure out our mileage?” For thirty years or more we walked a few times a week about four miles each time, talking, sharing, helping each other through the thirty years or more.

‘Yes I did. We walked six thousand miles. I figured the four miles each time, twice a week, but I only figured thirty weeks a year since we missed some and vacations. And i figured twenty-five years since at the beginning is was more sporadic, but later on it was more miles, so it evens out.’

‘Six thousand miles!”

I didn’t care so much about not walking anymore. The point was to talk and we were doing that anyway.

“What do you want after you shut the door?” I asked.

“You know exactly what I want,” she said. I did, but now that it’s real I had to ask again. “What about you?” she asked.

“I’d like to be cremated and then rolled into joints and have a bunch of writers smoke me while reading all my work that was rejected.”

“You know if I outlived you I would have made that happen.” That made us quiet again. “Let’s go outside and take a picture.

It’s the last one of us.

***

I don’t even know where to start. I was waiting to teach one of my first classes ever at Tidewater Community College in Virginia Beach, and across the hall Letty sat in her office with the door open. We said hi, and after I left class that day we talked all afternoon.

That was 1989 and immediately followed by three plus decades of hour and a half walks three times a week talking about our kids, our hopes and disappointments, the other people in our lives, and endless deep conversations about what we (mostly she) had read that week in The Economist, The Atlantic, Le Monde, The Washington Post, and more. When she was pissed off she’d switch to French, then realize I was staring at her and she’d switch to Spanish. We helped each other through the most significant changes people can face.

Almost thirty-five years of coffee in the morning, afternoons at the Mexican place across from campus, cider at the local pub–way too often–and sharing. I gave her books I thought she’d like; she introduced me to French and Italian writers, we’d walk through the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk and talk about everything except art. We made fun of each other, like the time in the Hermitage Museum in Russia when I told her I’d meet her in the Impressionists so I could see some of Jean Francois Millet’s work. I didn’t pronounce it correctly though and she had no idea who I meant; “Apparently I’m not spitting enough,” I told her. She said, “But you had me all discumboobulated,” and I told her there is no such word in English. We spent our lives making fun of how each other talked, though she won hands down since she could carry on a conversation in a half-dozen languages. I made fun of her heels, she made fun of my flip flops. It was like that.

The week after my son was born she came to my office and sat and we talked for hours about life. We cancelled our classes and talked about kids and grandkids and posterity and ancestry. She told me how every summer when she was a little girl, her father would drive the family to the Mediterranean coast to a town there where they spent a month swimming in the Med. Her father would head back home to work during the week but return on weekends. It was her favorite place. She said maybe someday we could travel there. A few days after my father died, she called me up and asked if we could meet for coffee on the boardwalk. We did, and she talked about Camus, and about Saint-Exupery–one of her absolute favorites. She remembered a day in the mall when we were shopping and ran into my father who was there to walk, and how she would remember forever how thrilled he seemed to see us. She said she missed her dad.

We were each other’s open books, somehow more than friends despite the misconception of that suggestion. She told me once that I knew her better than anyone except Elisabeth and Guy. That night she texted me, “I wasn’t just saying that; I mean it; no one else knows me like you do.” I wrote back, “Really? You mean that’s all you’ve got? I know all of it? How sad you must be.”

We made each other laugh. We were friends in what must be the original intent of the word.

Thirty years of laughing about work, about changes in personal lives. Thirty plus years of lunches and coffee breaks, of drives to the beach. Once, a memorable trip to Russia for eight days where she refused my pleas to lose the high-heel shoes on six mile walks up Nevsky Prospect. “I was born in these and I’ll die in these,” she said.

There’s more, but I am having trouble explaining myself here. It’s like I have no idea how to do this.

Over the last year and a half since the diagnosis, we finished each conversation with “Talk to you in a few days.” On our last conversation recently, she said, “Talk to you in a few days. I love you Bawb.” It was the first time she signed off that way and the last time we talked. But for several years after I left the college, she would go for a walk three or four days a week and use that time to call me. Then when she told me of her prognosis, we spoke every few days; sometimes for ten minutes, often for a few hours. She talked about how Billy was taking such good care of her, she always asked about my mother and how she is doing, we talked about what I was working on. On one call she asked me to read some of my new work to her; she said, “In case it comes out after.” After that last call last month, a few days passed and she didn’t call or answer my texts, then a week, then more, so I knew she had turned that corner.

We saw this coming from the start, though. In October of 2022, she texted me: “I just want to say you are the best friend I ever had and I’ll never be able to tell you how much I care about you.”

An hour later I was out for a walk and thought about her message. She had never expressed herself like that. We specifically didn’t do that on purpose. So I texted back: “What’s wrong?” Part of me expected some laughing emoji and her words saying “Nothing! Just thinking about you!” but a bigger part of me expected a serious response. Unfortunately, I was right. She wrote: “I was rushed to the hospital from the gym; they thought it was a stroke. It wasn’t; they are taking out a brain tumor. I wanted you to hear it from me. I’ll call you when the alien is out of my head.”

The results were heartbreaking.

She called. She said, “I want to tell you something.” I was quiet. “Do you remember that time you walked by my French classroom and I wasn’t there yet, so you went in and said that Madam Stone would be along shortly. You then got to talking, and you taught them some Spanish and told them they were wasting their time taking French, unless they planned to hitchhike across Quebec, but they couldn’t go anywhere without being able to use Spanish. By the time I showed up and walked in, you were all talking in short Spanish sentences.”

I told her I remembered it well. She said she loved that day. She then recalled another time when she was late I brought her entire class across campus to the faculty parking lot and we stood where she normally parked and waited. When she pulled in she was laughing so hard she nearly drove over the curb.

This was how we passed time; three and a half decades of a friend like that is another level of fortunate. She used to say we were Jerry and Elaine, and the comparison completely fits. Not long after her diagnosis and some treatments, we had coffee at the beach and she said she has so many pictures of me but only a few of us and they were from Russia. So we took a picture. I love the shot. I’m just in front of her and she’s leaning against me from behind, looking short that day since she had on running shoes, not high heels. People say how nice the picture is and how affectionate she is in it, but she isn’t being affectionate; I’m holding her up.

But these are personal musings about someone I cared about who left us all too soon. There’s nothing in this writing that could possibly matter to anyone who doesn’t know the two of us, which is the vast majority of readers. I fear this remembrance can too easily be met with an “oh that’s so nice they had such a great relationship” response and not understand that there’s more than that here. It’s about being open, about dying without leaving anything unsaid. We all have lost someone or experienced something that can’t be communicated properly enough to capture the raw and festering emotion, and it frustrates us because we want people to truly get it, but we are shackled by language. The true essence of the love we have for someone we lose is very personal and something we must accept as ours alone and can’t be shared.

I’d give anything to hear her voice one more time, call me, saying, “Oh, hello Bawb” in her heavy accent, but that’s not going to happen. Ever, no matter how much time passes, it simply is part of my past now; memories remain, of course, but the reality of her voice, the way she always held my arm when she said goodbye, the way she smiled. The way after I told people I was leaving campus and my plan was to never return, and their response was one of “of course you will visit,” not knowing me, but Letty’s response was, “It’s about time, Bawb. Take me with you.”

Just over a month ago she told me she was not feeling well. “But I made it to 65!” she added. “Now I need to make it to your birthday! That is my goal!”

“Happy Birthday to me,” I laughed.

“That way you will not forget me!” She was quiet and I could hear her trying to talk normally. “You’re going to write about me, aren’t you?” She wasn’t hoping I would, but predicting I would.

“Yes.”

“Good. I trust you. Will you mention how much I love Billy? And how I wouldn’t have any life at all without Guy and Elisabeth? Oh, and how I’m so glad I lived long enough to see my Sophia, my granddaughter!? And mention the time we went over to Elisabeth’s office at Operation Smile and banged on the window to get her to come to lunch with us! And you have to mention that Jewish Mother reading and the books that night and how your student thought I was your wife, so I said, ‘yes I am’ and sold him five books and for weeks on campus rumors in my French classes kept going, all of them asking if you were going to come by the class again. I liked that.”

“Do you want to write it?”

“Oh sure, this way I can write myself back to life,” she joked, and we were both quiet. “Besides, there’s more to write about.”

“I know. but some things should remain just ours.”

“I’m very glad for that, you know. Etre en paix avec quelqu’un,” she said mostly to herself.

‘Letty, I’m from the United States. Speak Spanish.”

It’s about having a connection with someone. It’s not love, exactly; it’s a sense of peace.

A minute later: “Watch for the birds that come to feed at your porch mon amour et ami. I’ll be among them.”

That image saddened me. “Will you be chirping with an accent so I know which one is you?”

“Yes! I’ll be the Bawbwhite!” We laughed. We laughed, so I knew we should hang up. It was the last time we talked.

Letty reached her goal and died in the overnight hours of my birthday. Her ashes will be spread across the Mediterranean Sea.