My mom's best friend, Peggy Swift, would have turned 88 today. She died in February in Hawaii, where she had moved several years ago to be near her two favorites in life: her children and the sun.

Peggy called my mom almost every morning in my young life and when I answered, she always asked how I was doing first before asking for my mom, and her voice is one of the forever voices in my memory.

When my mother-in-law visited here from California in the late 1980s, Peggy asked her out for dinner, though she didn't even know her, just because she was nice that way.  She lived on a beautiful farm then near Wandermere. My husband took this photo that night and I realize, looking at it today, that all the people in the photo are gone, except for me and my 90-year-old mother. Dick Swift, my dad, my mother-in-law, Peggy (far right, in the pink earrings.)

We grieve all the time, in quieter ways, the friends of our parents, as we get older and they die off, more and more of them each day, it seems.

Peggy wrote me a letter in the last month of her life, as she was slowly dying from pancreatic cancer. She said: “It is twilight here. Twilight in my life, too. The bell does not ring to tell me that I need to go to another line. But the bell rings with a loud whang when it comes with memories.”

Today, I miss Peggy and feel grateful for her incredible generous spirit, on that beautiful evening years ago when everyone in this photo, taken at twilight, was still alive.

(Tony Wadden photo)  

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