02/06/2026
I found an old card today.
It said, “Let’s stay friends a long time, okay?”
She was 16 — my best friend — when she drowned in a pool.
Revived… but never the same.
A severe brain injury. A life that required care from that moment on.
Finding that card broke me open.
At 16, we think tragedy is something that happens to other people.
But that loss shaped me in ways I still don’t fully understand.
It changed the trajectory of my life — quietly, permanently.
It forced me to find new friends.
One of them became my lifelong ride-or-die.
And I wonder sometimes…
Would that friendship exist if Debbie hadn’t drowned?
That friendship has now held the loss of her daughter, the loss of my parents,
and also weddings, birthdays, babies, ordinary Tuesdays, and the long arc of becoming.
This is the part I’m still sitting with:
how grief can be a doorway — not one we would ever choose —
but one that somehow opens us into lives we never could have imagined.
I don’t believe tragedy is given to teach us.
But I do believe God meets us in the aftermath,
quietly weaving connection, endurance, and love from what was shattered.
Thirty-seven years later, a simple card can still punch you in the gut
and remind you how close the past still is.
Some moments don’t fade.
They are held.
So today I hold Debbie, and a friendship I have held for a lifetime-just not in the way our young hearts thought it would be.
