NIKKI WAS A MONTH shy of two when we met and she’s twelve now, so the math is easy to do. It was the first day of nursery school and Stacy and I were there with Nikki, and Heidi and Adam were there with Walker. Stacy and Heidi were both hugely pregnant, and as hugely pregnant women often tend to do in crowded places, they found each other. A few months later Heidi had Georgia and Stacy had Stevie, and after that what we had was a whole lot of fun together.
No one was more fun than Heidi was. Especially on skis. Heidi was as beautiful a skier as I have ever seen. And she was delightfully patient with me, even though I could barely keep up with her. My favorite memory of Heidi on skis was the time she implored me to ski faster by suggesting I chase her down the mountain as though I were James Bond and she a beautiful villain. I went after her as best I could, and any time I got close I could hear she was humming the James Bond theme as loudly as she could. It was so much fun.
I told that story at her memorial service.
If you, like I, believe there must be some justice in the universe, then you would have struggled as much as I did with what happened to Heidi. One day she was a wonderfully healthy, happy, sexy, outdoorsy, soccer-coaching mom and wife, the next day she had a pain in her back. By the time they figured out it was cancer that began in her breast and spread to her bones there was almost nothing they could do. When it spread to her brain, it was over. She died September 30th, 2009.
At the service held to celebrate her memory, before I told the James Bond story, I was sitting two rows behind Walker and Georgia and Adam and I was the angriest I can ever remember being. I had never witnessed anything that felt like more of an injustice. And then I sat and listened to the reading of what sounded like letters but I later found out were internet posts written by women whose names I did not know. They were some of the most emotional passages I had ever heard; they spoke of Heidi as though she had been their sister. But Heidi didn’t have a sister. By the end of the night, I wasn’t as angry anymore.
We were in the kitchen, Stacy and I, a few days later when I remembered those words and I asked who had written them. That was when Stacy told me that Heidi, during her illness, had developed these incredibly intense relationships with a group of women from a cancer support website, women she called her “breast friends.” She died without ever actually meeting any of them, but they loved her and cried for her and wrote of her, again, like she was their sister. Which, in a way, I suppose she was.
So that is where this book came from, and that is who it is for. It is for Adam and Walker and Georgia, and Bobby and Natalie and Bob Sr. and Carole, and all the rest of Heidi’s family. And it is for all the other husbands and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers living with holes in their lives that will never be filled. And, most of all, it is for Heidi. If there is any justice in the universe, we will ski with her again someday.