The front porch: Friend’s death erases a way to fondly recall childhood

My childhood friend Kay (Murphy) Mortlock died earlier this month.

That damned lung disease Wegener’s granulomatosis finally prevailed. She’d lived with it for so long and had tiptoed to the edge of mortality several times already.

Even so, when she called me during the holidays last year and told me time was short, I kind of put the information in the I-don’t-really-believe-it file in my head.

When her husband Gordon told me in February he thought he was about to lose her, I wanted to go to California for a visit, but I’d just had surgery and couldn’t travel.

She rallied. Kay and I talked several times since then, the last time earlier this summer.

She was hanging in there. I thought she always would.

Kay was my first friend. I met her when I was 2 years old; she was 3.

She was the youngest in a big Irish Catholic family; I was and remained an only child.

We did all kinds of things together as we grew into our teen years back East – riding bikes up and down Jasmine Avenue, roller-skating, playing jump rope, hopscotch, hide-and-seek, and stoop ball, climbing trees, playing dress-up.

All of it. And we shared little girl secrets.

It wasn’t necessarily a magical time. Childhood, even at its best, has its problems, and I’m not oversentimentalizing those times.

But those days of childhood were ours; they formed us, and they were important to us.

I moved away when I was 14, which changed the kind of connections Kay and I had over the years that followed.

News of boyfriends, jobs, marriages, births, troubles and, in time, serious health matters – these came by phone and lacked that wonderful in-the-same-room intimacy we shared as girls.

Visits were infrequent.

A few years ago, I accompanied a group of college students to a conference in San Francisco and arranged to spend a day with Kay in Benicia. She already was on 24-hour oxygen and being hit hard by this awful disease.

Still, we visited the yarn shop she loved, and I came along for the dinner she and her church group organized for low-income residents in her community.

We reminisced and visited and shared the same stories about life on Jasmine Avenue we’ve told each other over and over and over – including the one about that big old gouge she got in her calf when she impaled her leg trying to climb over the picket fence in my backyard. (Yes, we really had a picket fence.)

Or how we never used the doorbell. I remember standing in her driveway and just yelling, “Heyyyyy Kayyyy” – and out she’d come.

We’d always laugh, or at least smile that remembering smile, at the telling of the stories.

Kay and I had reached the age where we’d buried our parents and had started dealing with the aches and illnesses that come with, as one of my sons would say, “advancing glamour.” Of course, she faced a tough one with Wegener’s, but we really hadn’t yet said farewell to a close peer, let alone a lifelong friend.

In thinking about her these past few weeks, I mourn the loss of Kay the wife and mother, devoted sister and aunt, community member and friend.

But I find I am also grieving the loss of something very personal for me, and it has surprised me.

I find myself mourning the childhood that only feels real when it can be recalled in conversation with another person, someone who was there.

As long as there was Kay, there was the Jasmine Avenue of long ago.

There was a remembered and shared childhood. Easter bonnets. New patent leather shoes. Sleepovers. Ice cream cones at the neighborhood candy store.

When I close my eyes, I can picture her remembering smile at those images.

But there will be no more telling of the stories.

Instead, there is a hole in my heart where two little girls were forever catching fireflies in mayonnaise jars on hot summer evenings.

All of my childhood has Kay Murphy running through it.

And now it’s gone.