She spent her last month in the ICU, locked in battle with that tenacious fucker, Cancer. I hear it wasn’t pretty. Cancer never fights fair. Perhaps it’s best that it ended Saturday.

Julie wasn’t a close friend, but we’d known each other since childhood. We still saw each other a few times a year, when the high school friends joined up to toast to the holidays or celebrate a homecoming.

Thalia and her oldest daughter were born just a few weeks apart. New Year’s 2005, we rocked our babies to sleep in their car seats, leaving them in a quiet room to the back of the loft. We compared notes about nursing and sleep schedules and exhaustion and baby socks that never stay on. But when we shut the door behind us, I remember thinking we were just two old friends at a party, drinking champagne and dancing badly to Blondie. Even if we had to keep listening for the cries of babies over the beat.

My strongest memory of her was from nearly 30 years earlier. My 8th birthday party. A country house with a very cold swimming pool.

While five of us all stood around arguing about who would go in first and whether it was too cold and were our towels big enough and I’ll go in if you go in, and should we hold hands–she simply jumped.

We should all do that more.

Goodbye Julie.