Asher finds a piece of the sea and he starts digging as if searching for the source of the water. His first hole in the soft, dry sand is deep and seems endless. His front legs move frenetically with the excitement and joy of discovery. He circles joyfully around his oceanic puddle, splashing and dancing towards and away. He is obviously delighted and I cannot help but smile at his uncensored joy. I look out to the horizon and the tightness in my chest makes way for breath and air. I breathe into the horizon and think about the day my dear friend died.

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Her breast cancer first appeared many years ago and then went underground for 12. It announced itself again over a year before her death in March, 2020. It returned to inflame every part of her. She didn’t tell me or anyone else for months. When my husband, Robert, and I vacationed with her and her husband in Mexico City, I had no idea that the cancer had returned to ignite and ravage every part of her.

It was magical, this time in Mexico. Robert, was not sure he would like what he imagined could be a dirty, poor city…not Paris or Rome. We both loved it, every inch. The anthropology museum and Frida Kahlo and the ballet and the synagogue which first opened its doors as the Nazis were squelching the life out of Europe. We stayed in a piece of architectural history in the Jardines del Pedregal neighborhood with our friends and their dog, Malu, and two others…Pita, a puppy, and a larger lab whose name I have forgotten.

On one warm evening Robert and I walked to the large and bountiful Mercado Santa Úrsula Coapa, returning with marinated chicken breasts to grill on the tiny barbeque. Everyone gathered in the small kitchen to toss a salad and sauté some potatoes. We ate outside at the wooden picnic table and I will never forget sharing this and other such unhurried meals…drinking wine and sharing the conversation of two couples who relish each other’s company. Were there moments in these idyllic evenings when she remembered that her cancer was also living in the Jardines del Pedregal? Do I wish I had known?

Instead, we meandered through the terrain of politics, kids and possible itineraries for daytime exploration. Sandra was on sabbatical from her teaching post in architecture at the California College of Arts and Crafts. She was working on a manuscript highlighting female architects of Latin origin. She was born in Peru and immigrated to California, to UC Berkeley and then onto Columbia in New York. She returned to the Bay Area to grow her career and raise a family. We were both on our second, much happier marriages, and our friendship of many years was germinated when her Sofia and my Nico became kindergarten buddies.

My Robert and her Glen have much in common. Introverts with good brains and kind hearts whose natural shyness hides their feelings. Our friends had been married just 5 years when she died as Covid was shutting down the world. The last time I saw her in person was when we gathered to watch the Academy Awards at her house, we applauded the honorees just as the curtains were lowering on the world at large. It was devastating enough to lose her, but friends and family could not even gather in person to mourn her passing and celebrate her life. This would have to wait. I miss her as much as I miss this couple time. The territory of a friendship.

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I was also walking with Asher in Pacifica at the moment of her death. At one point Asher and I stopped walking as I looked out to the sea, I prayed that her passing would be peaceful. Apparently she died at almost this exact moment. We had hoped to see her the day before and when we visited her husband talked with us from behind his mask. She didn’t want visitors and I couldn’t imagine how she felt. Knowing she was dying. I suppose I wanted a last hug and to say good-bye.

She is gone now, somewhere I cannot picture. Our friendship, however, is still alive for me. I hear her voice just as I can hear my father, too, and my mother. Perhaps it is the territory of love which inflames the heart, like the eternal flame which I can picture when we celebrate the oil that lasted for eight nights. We think it will go out, or subside, but it keeps going. These friendships.

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Just a couple of years later, it was Glen’s turn. Some cruel irony that after losing his wife to the ravages of breast cancer, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells which refused to produce the antibodies he naturally needed. A stem cell transplant was recommended to set things right.

He stayed with us during the outpatient procedure of removing the mutant cells. I imagine they were stored in test tubes carefully labeled. I never saw them but I picture them, perhaps a rainbow of colors, maybe glistening, but probably just the standard red. The stem cells went out, were cleaned and then returned, now ready to do battle with the evil cancerous ones.

Once the test tubes were full, he returned to the hospital for two weeks as an inpatient while a mega dose of chemotherapy ripped into his immune system. To leave him like a newborn with no immunity. No memory of a childhood case of the measles or a bout with strep throat. Years of flu shots and Covid vaccines were wiped from his body’s memory. Weak and tired and nauseous he remained in the hospital, each day stronger, more able to walk the halls and chat for a few minutes with the visitors who were encouraged.

One morning I brought him a plate of toast with cheese and a banana reminiscent of his childhood in Australia. He explained that when the fruit got brown his mother cut slices into a glass or cup or bowl of milk. And sprinkled this treat with sugar.“ We loved it…because it was sweet.” He was more animated than I had seen him in days. Crouching on his hospital bed in his private room on 11 Long. The quiet floor for blood and the rhythm of life delivered via Intravenous Therapy.

Robert’s cold was not allowed on the sterilized floor full of masks. It’s okay. I wanted to be there, perhaps as much because his wife, my dear friend, had lost her life to cancer. She was angry and depressed and though we all did what we could, it seemed she preferred to retreat as, of course, entitled. So now I am present for him, as much because of my affection for him and his family, but perhaps also in Sandra’s memory. Finally, I could help.

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As I watch Asher, my mind twirls among these cancer memories with the news of my son’s recent engagement. This truly is the thing to celebrate. I knew it was coming, as he and Dasha are on year six, but the reality is still slowly melting into my frontal lobe. After toast and cheese delivered to the hospital on Parnassus, my son and I chatted about the engagement party Robert and I will host later in April. About the food, and the guest list and whose party is it anyway?? We care so much about each other but sometimes I dive into the past and forget that he is 30 and sane and fully capable even when anxiety surfaces.

I am celebrating these two …. the son whom I will always love to the moon and back, and the lovely Dasha whose golden hair and crystal blue eyes must mean she surely is a star who discovered Nico in her travels through the extraterrestrial. Nico had lost his footing and was free falling for several years. Leaving home for college morphed into alcohol addiction and bouts of mania. Of course I stayed the course with him, offering emotional and financial support while maintaining my own boundaries as best I could. First there was darkness and now there is light. Nine years of sobriety, a college degree and the kind of maturity and self-awareness that only comes when one must freefall before settling back on earth.

I am not celebrating my friend’s cancer. But perhaps the hoped-for recovery. The miracles of medicine which could not save his wife, but will program many more years for him. So he can join us for a cappuccino when we visit him in Nevada City. Or as we hike along the Yuba River. Or for the mandatory foray into the fabulous kitchen store in Grass Valley where we bought the most perfect, hand-held pepper grinder. We will sit in his backyard hot tub after walking back and forth over the swinging bridge.

To care so deeply for my son and for my friend all at once. To know that I cannot control the health of my friend’s cells or my son’s emotional landscape. I can only control my attitude and the small slice of life that I call mine.

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Asher keeps digging. “Do you think he will get there?” asks a bemused stranger. The puddle of ocean and the warm, morning sand is his territory. The horizon opens for me and for a moment I feel hopeful.