I still mother them….

Right after Gabriella died, I had to clean out her house.

There was never a question who was going with me.

Regina.

We’ve known each other since grade school. We drifted apart for a little while and then found our way back to each other in high school. She was everything I wasn’t, and somehow I was everything she wasn’t. We’ve spent a lifetime balancing each other.

Our lives have always seemed to run parallel. Our sons were born on the exact same day. They became best friends. We raised our boys together, celebrated milestones together, and eventually experienced every parent’s worst nightmare together.

When I needed someone to walk into one of the hardest moments of my life, Regina was my person.

She knows me well enough to know when I need to talk and when silence says everything. She was my maid of honor, and I was hers. We can go a month, two months, sometimes longer without talking, and when we finally do, it’s as if we just saw each other yesterday.

She’s one of the few people left who remembers my whole story.

She remembers my mom. She remembers birthday parties at her house. She remembers me wearing a toga and dancing on top of her dishwasher in the kitchen. She remembers cruising Main Street in Newark in my mom’s Chevelle. She remembers all the ridiculous things we did that seemed so important when we were teenagers.

She remembers the Penny who existed long before addiction, grief, advocacy, and loss became part of my life.

She’s also one of the very few people I never have to wear a mask around. I don’t have to pretend I’m okay. I can tell her how angry I am that my children are gone. I can talk about the collateral damage these deaths have left behind. And in the very next breath, we can be laughing about something that happened in high school.

That’s what friendship is.

It’s not measured by how often you talk. It’s measured by how safe you feel when you’re together. It’s having someone who knows every version of you and loves you through every season anyway.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized how priceless it is to have someone who remembers where you came from. Someone who reminds you that before all of this heartache, there was joy. There was laughter. There was a little girl with big hair, wearing a toga, dancing on a dishwasher without a care in the world.

Not everyone gets to look at another person after decades of life and simply say, “That’s my person.”

I can.

Her name is Regina.

And that kind of friendship is one of the greatest gifts life has ever given me.