Friends for 16 Years. Lovers for One Night.

“Do you think we would have fought if we’d been a couple?” my best friend Jeff asked me the day before he died.

Two days earlier, we had left the hospital with information about palliative care and hospice. That morning, he had nudged me awake before 4 a.m., saying, “I think it’s going to be today.”

We spent the next two hours sitting in bed surrounded by paperwork, dealing with the business of dying. When the sun rose, we ventured into the kitchen to make coffee and feed the doves on Jeff’s fire escape. “My doves,” he called them.

I smiled, wiping down the counter. “I don’t think we would have fought.”

“We would have fought a lot,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered.”

Throughout our 16-year friendship, Jeff and I had, indeed, fought a lot. I delighted in reminding him that he admitted he didn’t even like me the first time we met.

“That’s not it,” he said. “It’s not that I didn’t like you.”

“But that’s what you said!”

“Fine, have it your way,” he said, laughing. “I didn’t like you. But that’s not what I meant.”