Gone was the friend with the quick smile and long brown hair with the golden highlights. What would be left in her place was unrecognizable to me –the skeleton that remained on the couch screaming for her eyelids to return to her was all that was left and from that day forward as each day passed what seemed horrific one day was still better than what was to come.

I had spent the last year and a half driving her to doctor’s appointments, struggling with her walker and her wheelchair then her increasingly anger personality as the chemo and the pain wore away at her naturally pleasant disposition.

I could ignore most of them—the politest question answered with a furious insult or the litany of complaints about my driving, her husband, money, the doctors the behavior of the guests on Jerry Springer ( what are they going to say to their grandchildren or daughters when they get old enough to see what their mothers had done)

What could I say—I had to remain silent but the images of the things her and I had done together making me shudder and laugh and blush all at the same time.

True enough none of them had been broadcasted on national television but we had watched and made fun of hours of grainy horribly directed pornography the drunken evenings of me and men and Beth filming everything with the prehistoric video camera.

Damn this cancer—before it turned her into a sobbing skeleton in had taken her personality first. This angry prude sitting next to me in the car was a stranger.

I wanted to show this stranger the tapes that she had made and some of the photos I had taken of her and remind her of the laughing pumping youthful bodies that we had once had.

Granted my body was fading slowly—if I worked out stayed out of the sun, lost weight stayed off the booze and koke I could look okay—but Beth 7 years my junior had been stripped of her youth and radiance. Before her body died she had been transformed into a crippled crone her spirit turned to darkness but there was to be a reawakening in her soul just a few days before her death .

I was glad that she didn’t do anything noble or grand with her attitude. She was anger and hostile at this fucking thing and she wasn’t going to be dignified about it.

I thought about that as I was vomiting up pinot grigio and brandy on the day she died. We were undignified sisters till the end. People were talking about how drunk I got on the day of her death two weeks later at her funeral.

At first I was embarrassed but as I knelled in front of the closed gasket that shielded all of her stunned friends from what this fucking disease had done to her, I shrugged and smirked a little. Beth would have laughed, none of this steel magnolia shit for us two—these scorpio sisters were drunk and puking and wailing and falling down the steps together till the end.

The day Beth died before I made the Brandy Pinot Grigio barf fest on the sofa that Beth screamed for her eyelids to come back on I was working and when I got the called that whe had died at ten thirty three am from respiratory failure I try to get the noble images of Beth out of my mind. They were excruciatingly painful, almost blinding, like stepping out into the sun after being in a movie theater or smashing your shin on a foot stool.

Healthy Beth had glossy chestnut hair that flowed down to the middle of her back and she was always smiling and laughing, particularily when we were riding horses around her property. Several hundred acres surrounded her home and she had build a barn and purchased a couple of horses so we could ride the trains that criss crossed the land that laid between 611 and kellers church road in Bedminster township bucks county.

We would ride the trail—her on sonny her app and me on Dirk her dark bay both bought from the killers pen at auction. Beth had bought saddle bags and two big western saddles –filled the saddle bags with cans of coors light and off we would go.

She would toss beer cans to me as we rode across the earth soft with autumn rain—the sun glistening and sparkling on the world of golden red and orange leaves that surrounded us. This was the world right than the perfect world Heaven before the curse of cancer cast us out—golden and scarlet shimmering over the soft brown earth the sound and the smell of horses their warmth and life filling up our bodies with motion—just the whisper of the blue sky visible when a gentle breeze briefly blew apart the leaves.

The smell of horses and leather, a sip of foamy but cold beer the warmth of the day and the warmth of the horses life force blanketing us in a little oasis of Heaven. This was the safest most beautiful place on the planet.

Beth’s eyes were as blue as the sky and because I could not see the sky her eyes became the sky.

And while I thought those days I spent watching my friend die in front of me slowly were the worst days of my life, I knew that they were not, I knew that some of the first days I had spent at the kennel when I first started working there were truly the worst days of my life. May 29 1999 leading all the way up to the Millennium New Years Eve.

I remember thinking while I sat there alone in the apartment above the kennel that I wasn’t the only person on the planet to be spending the night alone.

Surely there were people in the hospital, prisons, living on the streets and even other caretakers for remote kennels spending the night sipping warm champagne and listening to the far off fireworks punctuate the lonely howls that the cold December wind lifted from inside the kennel and carried up to dance with the blue and purple booms of fireworks.

Occassionally the dogs in the kennel broke out into a wild chorus of barking and howling and I remember thinking that it sounded like they were having a party of their own.

But I didn’t go down and check on them—the fireworks and shot gun blasts were upsetting them. Or they were having a killer party, dog treats, party hats chasing cats in balloons—I would just be an interloper with no real howl or bark to contribute to the pack at the midnight hour. I just sighed some drunken sighs and burped because I had only had hot dogs for dinner and they were not mxing well with the champagne, I ate some antacid and climbed into bed as the howling and fireworks and all the parties and dog parties in the world went on without me—knowing now that that was not the worst night of my life but thinking so confidently that it was.

It was one of the nights that I went through that would change the way I lived my life for several years but it was not the worst.

Next to the worst would be the night before I reported to court ordered rehab and the women’s rehab facility only five days after that new years night of champagne and hot dogs.

All the degenates and shop lifters and alcoholics that were in the rehab with her laughed at me and the disheveled, morose group I had checked in with and laughed,”The first DUIs reporting for rehab in the year 2000-“ Some snorted, some guffowed almost all of them were missing a tooth and had poorly bleached hair. And so it was that five days after the night of howling and fireworks a friend had dropped her off at 6 am in the morning in the snow of January and I thought about what I done in the heat of August that had landed me of this dismal doorstep.