When the parents of one of

my closest college friends asked me to write down some things that I remembered

about their daughter, I was honored to be asked, but found myself suddenly

without words. How do you describe a friendship that spanned 12 years

to parents who desperately want to know their daughter a little better?

Anna died of ovarian cancer

at the age of 30, one of life's inexplicable tragedies. There was no need

for me to write about things they already knew. What they wanted were

insights in to the unknowns about their daughter, and I, as the keeper

of her secrets (as she was the keeper of mine), had to find that fine

line to tread between sharing and oversharing.

In our early college days,

Anna was a paradox in every manner possible. She was fiercely independent,

but quietly insecure. She was a free spirit that seemed to always be looking

for her tether. Anna was the kind of person who could sing out loud with

her eyes closed to the songs on the radio in a crowd of people. She had

an artistic defiance about her that enabled her to take aesthetic pot

shots at social conventions.

She had a beautiful chapel

wedding, very simple and elegant, and at the end when she walked back

up the aisle with her husband, instead of the traditional recessional,

she piped in the "Coda" from Eric Clapton's "Layla."

That was vintage Anna. She loved animals, music, and friends. She had

a joie de vivre that was palpable.

And yet underneath her laughing

surface waters flowed an Irvingesque "undertoad." She told me

back when the movie "Beaches" came out that she always thought

that she would die young. She wore a veil of impending doom, even back

in the beginning, that left me to wonder after she did die young if she

was clairvoyant or a self-fulfilling prophet. At any rate, I came away

from her death leery of thinking bad thoughts.

She was steeply reared in the

southern bible belt Christian tradition, but inwardly rebelled against

the profoundly deep faith of her mother. When her mother fought, and eventually

beat, breast cancer (she is now a 14-year survivor), she held fast to

her faith. Anna shook her fist at God for turning his back on a woman

whose whole life had been devoted to serving Him. It infuriated her that

her mother had such faith that God would heal her, because she couldn't

believe it herself.

I like to believe that, as

she lay dying, Anna reconciled herself to God. That her parents were with

her in that house showering prayer over her, I believe, opened a pin light

of grace and radiance that was big enough to show her the way home.

She had a depth of perception

that put her on a different plane that most, and it was in that place

that I knew her best, even though I now know that as young adults we were

only half-baked. It isn't until later in life that our ideas and beliefs

come to full fruit. When you lose someone who is just beginning to bloom,

you lose what you've known, but also what you would have known.

I miss that I didn't get to

know Anna after maturity and experience finely sculpted her "selfness."

I miss that we won't ever take trips together, or talk about books we're

reading, or watch grown children marry. I miss not seeing her old and

wrinkled, salty and wise. I regret the things we could have done back

then, but didn't, and the things that I can do now that she will never

know about. I miss that, after our roads diverged, we never got to see

the day that our paths came full circle together again at some time much

later when paths taken and not taken are just specks in the span of one's

life.

After college, I settled in

to young married suburbia. I was a stay-at-home-mom who traded in my degree

for diapers. My life was simple and stable, and filled with milk-mouthed

grins and giggly, wiggly toddler bodies.

She was snorkeling off the

Gulf coast, listening to jazz music in trendy pubs, going