What cancer looked like from here

I was cooking dinner and my phone went off. I said "It's Becky" out loud. When I was a kid, my best friend and neighbor, Becky, called every night at dinner to ask me to play. So, we had this long standing joke that anytime the phone rang at dinner, it was her.

I looked at my phone and it was ironically her sister. I immediately knew. All it said was "Can you call me hun?". See Becky was diagnosed with cancer and hadn't been doing well for a while. I didn't stop to think, I just called and went in to the laundry room.

She passed this morning. She was no longer in pain. She spoke to her angels last night and the stress was gone from her face. But... I wept. I wept audibly and aggressively against the counter in the laundry room. All I could get out was "Awww man" and hung up.

There was nothing left. No more FaceTime. No more phone dates. No more Becky calls in the middle of dinner.

My dinner was burning, my heart was hemorrhaging, my eyes were flooding. I wiped my tears and tried to finish cooking. I paced back and forth confused and eventually threw up in the bathroom.

I threw up every memory and every thing I didn't get to say. I threw up the jokes and nicknames and texts and bike rides and cigarettes and jesus candles and Steven Tyler posters and NKOTB craze. I threw up screaming and crying and speechless and relieved and sad and mad and everything I can't explain until I couldn't breathe and my lungs crippled in sadness. She was one of the few good parts of my childhood and she was gone.

It's like she was one of a few remaining fragile vases that held the good had just shattered. And all I could do was stare.

I sleeved off the tear, snot, drool, barf combo my face had just projected and returned to dinner. I felt the eyes of my children fearfully observe death through the eyes of their mother. My oldest who had been ready to kick down my door took over. My youngest opted out of Parmesan cheese so I didn't have to shred it.

I needed to talk to her. I thought she would just be sick forever and we would just have limited conversations. She was my sister, this was bullshit.

She had asked me often to have her baby for her and I thought someday sure, but not now...we have time.

She never wanted to talk about being sick, so I would call her sister for details. Or pretend... it was easier this way, to pretend.

But now she was gone and I thought that if I got an email out to her quickly, she would somehow get it still. Like "The Out of Office Reply is on, but they're still at work" or something.

I told her I missed her, but I still didn't tell her I loved her...cause we didn't say that, we just knew it. That would've been final, that would've been goodbye and I'm not ready for goodbye.

I'm not ready for Becky to not call during dinner.