70 years strong: a friendship love story

My grandma, her first husband (my mom's dad), and Priscilla.

My grandma's best friend of 70 years died of Alzheimer's disease this past week. 70 years!! Very few people can say they have had someone in their life that long. Priscilla, my grandma's best friend, was like a sister to my grandma, being that my grandma was an only child. These two girls met in 8th grade and stayed by each others side through high school, marriage, war/deployment of their husbands, pregnancy, raising children, being grandmas, family sickness and tribulations, and the deaths of their husbands. They were each other's person through ALL of life's events. Although they were separated by 3,000 miles for most of their adult life, my grandma living in California and Nevada and Priscilla in Maine, they continued to hold onto their friendship by talking on the phone consistently.

Anyone who knows me, or has read this blog consistently,  knows that I find strength to be the most beautiful attribute a person can possess. I'm not just referring to physical strength, but strength gained through human relationships, experience, adversity, maturity, etc. My grandma is not only in great physical shape (if you were at my wedding, you can surely attest to this because she probably danced the night away with you), but she's also the strongest person I know. She has experienced a lot of loss in her life: the death of her young husband from Lou Gehrig's disease, the death of her son from brain cancer, the death of her daughter in law, the death of her second husband and now the death of her best friend, who was her constant through all of this loss. My grandma stayed by my mom's side during a turbulent first marriage to my dad and helped my mom grow into an even stronger woman. She acted as my mom's foundation and only true support unit while my mom learned to raise us on her own.  My grandma always made a choice to stay positive, to stay active and engage with those she loved through all of the challenges she faced. She had no choice but to stay strong in order to hold on to happiness; her choice to be strong, ultimately gave her the gift of joy.

Friends until the end

Having a best friend is having true love. I loved hearing all the stories my grandma would tell about how much trouble her and Priscilla would get into when they were younger. But more importantly, I love knowing that these two women held on to each other through out the entirety of life and made each other stronger. I know my grandma is very sad about the loss of her best friend, but Priscilla, despite having Alzheimer's, remembered my grandma's voice until the end. My grandma was imprinted into the heart and mind of her best friend until her dying day.

Hold your friends close, hold your family close. They will be the ones to love you and support you when the weight of the world is too heavy, even for the strongest of people. We can't go through life alone, so find your person, find your network that keeps you strong and don't ever let them go.