On friendship and death and birthday parties

March 12th would have been Julie's 41st birthday.

I can scarcely believe that my beautiful, ethereal, sarcastic-as-hell partner-in-crime would be in her 40s had she not finally succumbed to the violence that chemotherapy wreaked on her body when she was a mere baby of two.

It seems impossible to me that last night was the 14th year in a row that I have been treated to a birthday dinner by her lovely and gracious parents. For nearly a decade and a half we have celebrated her birthday together and spent the evening talking about the joys and the pain of our respective past years.

We dined nearly a month late this year: our date was delayed as the result of another death, another loss, another type of grim milestone the likes of which life always, no matter how otherwise joyous, ultimately forces its survivors to mark and endure.

We had a wonderful time. We marvelled at how time has flown. We laughed about how they just knew the boy who accompanied us for dinner in 1996 was NOT the right boy for me and how they figured I would marry the one who tagged along in 1999: I did, last night was the 11th time that Rob has joined us.

For the first time in 14 years we went to a new restaurant. For the previous 13 years we had dined at Julie's favorite spot but in recent years the place has moved and seemed to decline to the point where her mother declared last night that she just felt Julie was admonishing us from above, "Come on you guys, live a little, mix it up a bit!"

And so we did. We raised a glass to Henny and to Julie and joked about how they had probably met in Heaven by now and how Julie, who surely owned the place, was showing her the ropes. We laughed in all seriousness about how alike they were and how much they would have loved each other had they met here on earth.

And as always I marveled at the grace and gentle humor with which these two people - these people I could not love more if they were related to me by blood - have managed to endure their loss. This year, that grace is especially poignant to me as Rob and Graham and I struggle to deal with our own loss.

Because the thing is, no matter how much we may all say that grief and loss cannot be quantified, surely you can agree that the death of a bright and vibrant young woman in her 20s is infinitely more tragic and galling than the loss of a woman who toasted her seventh decade in good health surrounded by her loving family.

And so I feel just a little renewed this morning. I feel that perhaps a little bit of Julie's parents' grace has rubbed off on me and that perhaps our enduring friendship on earth really has inspired the beginning of a beautiful one in Heaven.

Julie and me

We had big dreams, Julie and I.

She was going to be an Oscar-winning actress and I was going to be famous the world over for writing that would make people laugh with joy and weep with empathy.

Instead I today mark the 13th anniversary of her death by trying, in this humble space, to use my words to pay some kind of tribute to her and to our friendship.

Julie and I met nearly 20 years ago in my first year of university. I was in full party mode, enjoying a concert by a band I can’t remember, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and there stood a tiny, doll-like girl with a big, tipsy smile.

“I’m ever so short,” she said. (Really). “I can’t see the band. Help me out?”

She gestured to my shoulder and I burst out laughing at her audacity. When I regained my composure I stooped down and up she hopped. We were pretty much inseparable from that moment on.

I don’t know exactly how tall Julie was. Four feet, ten inches maybe? Four feet eleven? Surely not five feet. She never discussed it so I’m not sure how I came to understand that her growth had been stunted by treatments she endured to successfully fight leukemia as a toddler.

No matter. What Julie lacked in stature she made up for in attitude. She was startling beautiful and she knew it. She turned heads wherever she went. She would insult you in the most outrageous fashion and then charm you a second later with a conspiratorial wink and a flip of her hair.

We had a shtick, Julie and I. She was drool and I was goofy. I told corny jokes and she made cutting observations. We were partners in crime, kindred spirits, two peas in a pod. We got each other.

A few years after graduation Julie moved Los Angeles to pursue her acting career. I took a road trip to visit and fell in love with Arizona on my way through. I moved there not long after and we visited between Scottsdale and Los Angeles regularly.

What a heady time! She acted bit parts and I worked as a freelance writer. Drunk with youth and possibility, we attacked the world the only way we knew how – full tilt. We narrowly avoided a dust-up with a member of Faster Pussycat at Whiskey a Go-Go. We danced on the tables at a sushi restaurant in Venice. We traded jokes and insults behind the microphone at a house party we crashed in West Hollywood.

Superbowl weekend rolled around. Julie had vague plans to visit me in Arizona. I didn’t hear from her, but wasn’t overly concerned. Then her mother called in the early evening.

“I’m in Los Angeles dear,” she said. “With Julie. She’s dying. She’s asking to see you. You better come right away”

I have often tried, during the last 12 years, to recreate how I felt to hear those words. When the picture I carry of her in my head gets blurry or I can’t quite hear her voice, I force myself back into that dark moment, hoping, I guess, that fresh pain will somehow make her seem less distant.

And so I drove, tears streaming down my face, across the desert in the middle of the night. I remember the moonlight on the palm trees and the warm wind and the feeling that surely I must just be playing a part in some cheesy movie of the week – the kind Julie would eviscerate with one pithy blow.

But it wasn’t a movie of course. Julie had visited the doctor just a few weeks earlier about a nagging cough, which was, it turned out, symptomatic of imminent heart and lung failure. Her respiratory system had been compromised by the very treatments that had saved her life all those years ago.

I got to the hospital and went in to see her right away. I remember thinking how glamorous and beautiful she looked laying there, her hair artfully fanned out around her pillow: a tiny, perfect doll.

“Tell me a joke,” she said. And, because she asked me to, I blinked back my tears and did just that. Then I told her I loved her. She smiled like Cleopatra on the Nile. Of course I did.

One after another, the people who loved her filed in to say goodbye. Her parents went last and came out an hour or so later. She was gone, they said.

Julie was gone.

Afterwards I went to a Denny’s on Sunset Blvd and ate pancakes and drank Irish coffee and cried. It seemed fitting somehow and I lingered, knowing Julie would revel in the curious glances I drew with my smeared eyeliner, disheveled hair and tragic demeanor.

Some days I can’t believe that how much the world has changed since Julie was in it. How can it be that Pulp Fiction was the last movie that she saw? That she never got to make fun of Paris Hilton or weigh in on reality television. That September 11th was remarkable to her only because it’s my birthday?

I carried Julie’s lace handkerchief down the aisle with me on my wedding day. And on her birthday every year her parents treat me to dinner at her favorite restaurant. But I feel her loss most keenly at times when her memory sneaks up on me. Like on my 30th birthday when I couldn’t stop crying because it didn’t seem fair that I got to turn 30 and she didn’t.

There are so many, many things that Julie didn’t get to do and even as my life moves happily forward, I am haunted by each and every one of them.

Because we had big dreams, Julie and I.