It feels a little demeaning, as if you’re placing all other friends on a lower scale. Dear friends are dear and there isn’t a best. I can say all of that with certitude and yet in the same breath tell anyone this: “Willa is my best friend.” She knows everything there is to know about me and she can detect any falseness on my part, like one of those airport security buzzers that screams when you forget to take off your belt. So this new Willa, the confused, disoriented, and weepy Willa, is a great loss. There are moments she seems present and others when she is as gone as if another has inhabited her bruised brain. When I stop by her cottage on my way to the studio, I can almost see the cogs in her head trying to churn out my very name, which had once been her first word. Mother was completely inconsolable when Willa’s first word was Eve. This morning, Willa called me Gwen. The past three weeks have stretched out interminably, unrolling with moments of healing and then backsliding.
