It was with Meredith’s help that I’d learned how to be a friend. A bona fide, true-blue, long-term, steady friend. Through her, I learned to tolerate the vagaries of friendship, address the pain of competition with and envy of other women, and confront the lie of my own unworthiness. Without the work I’d done with Meredith, I would have looked out into the audience and seen threats, competition, and frenemies. But as I spoke Meredith’s words out loud, I saw loving allies. I felt suffused with tenderness, even for those women over whom my inner demons of envy, resentment, bitterness, and scarcity had taken me to very dark places.

Standing on that stage, I could feel it: I’d changed.

Not so long ago, Meredith and I both believed that we simply weren’t cut out for go-the-distance friendships with women. We joked that we were too damaged by our history of addiction, too twisted by our petty jealousies, and too wounded from growing up alongside golden sisters with luminous hair, radiant complexions, and all-around upright lives. But we decided—actually it was her idea and I went along with it—to focus on friendships. “Let’s do the work to get better at them,” she said, her cobalt-blue eyes boring directly into mine. We excavated our pasts and appraised where we’d done wrong by our friends and where we’d been led astray by toxic ideas that no longer served us. We did it in conversations over breakfast sandwiches, on coffee dates, on walks down the sidewalk after twelve-step meetings, and over the phone.

What happened was simple: we changed. About ten months before she died, Meredith called me early on a Saturday morning when I was out walking in my neighbourhood. That fall morning, the sun fell through the trees, dappling the leaves on the sidewalk under my feet. All that glorious light and colour. We have plenty of time, I thought. In those days, I swaddled myself in denial; I rarely thought of Meredith as my dying friend; she was just sleepier than everyone else I knew.

“I want to write about you,” I blurted right before we hung up.

“Make me sound smart,” she said. “Use big words.”

“Of course. And footnotes.”

The jovial tone soothed me. We were simply two friends on the phone before the quotidian demands of our lives overtook the day. I walked north along the Metra tracks between 59th and 60th Streets.

One hundred blocks away in Andersonville, she sat in her comfiest chair next to her cat and her husband’s dog.

“Oh, and do me a favour, will you?” she said brightly. I expected Can I pick my pseudonym? or Don’t mention my dentures.

“Sure. Anything.” Yes, I was still in denial about her illness, but lately, I couldn’t help but notice her whittled face and her jutting cheekbones, now sharp enough to slice an Easter ham. Somewhere inside me I knew she was slipping away. I would grant any goddamn wish she had.

“Please be sure it has a happy ending.”

I stood still on the sidewalk in a pile of yellow leaves, nodding and swallowing a cry. I didn’t like the word ending, and I didn’t understand the word happy in this context. How could I honour that promise if she ended up, you know, not making it? What kind of happy ending could I give her?

“Of course, a happy ending,” I chirped, and instantly hated the false, shrill tone of my voice—that wasn’t what we needed right now.

We needed the firm, solid notes of honesty. “Mere, I’m not exactly sure how to do that.”

“Oh, honey. You do. Tell the truth. Tell how we helped each other let go of being so brittle and scared and unable to connect with so many women because of our own hang-ups. Tell them how we learned friendship.

Together. Tell them how we changed by holding each other’s hand as we looked honestly at ourselves. Tell how one life can alter another.”

“I’d lost plenty of friends before, but never like this”: how the death of a best friend changes you