Love, death, and best friends have something in common: they all sneak up on you. Best friends never begin as such. You begin as two individuals walking along separate paths. But miraculously, you find each other in the empty spaces between what you have and what you need. And then you talk and you play and you gossip and most importantly, you laugh. You laugh until your stomach hurts and neither of you can breathe. And one day, you look at her and realize that you have found not only a friend but another part of your soul. Love is the same way, built silently out of inside jokes and nicknames until you realize that you love this person so deeply it feels like your love might spill out of you and flood the town. Death is an omnipresent, merciless force. Death crouches in the darkness and waits until the right moment. Until you’ve gotten so used to the taste of love on your tongue you’ve forgotten death was even there. And then it reminds you, and all of a sudden your best friend is sobbing and telling you she has cancer. That can’t be right, because this is your best friend, the other part of your soul, the girl you traded secrets with, the girl you donned matching scraped knees with, the girl whose hair you’ve braided, whose dreams you’ve listened to, whose laughter you’ve shared. And now death is a constant presence in your life. Now you know it could swoop in at any moment and claim her. When death arrives, you’ll have known it was coming. You’ll feel guilty for not being in the hospital when it happened. You’ll feel guilty about everything you could have said and didn’t. You’ll wonder if she was afraid, because you were. You were so incredibly afraid. That night, when the phone rings and jolts you awake, you will know what has happened. You will be paralyzed with fear because now you have to walk through a world without her. Without your best friend. The magnitude of this crushes you. You won’t move for days. Finally, her mother comes to your house and delivers you a letter. “She wanted you to have this,” she says, tears in her eyes. “She wrote it for you.” And you read it. Inside, your favorite person, who is now your favorite memory, has written that love survives death. It never really leaves. Love echoes off the letters written between lovers in museums. It radiates from pictures of old friends hanging on walls, even when time and geography stand in between those moments and the present. Love sits on flowers on top of gravestones, bees pick up the love and carry it to fields where little girls make daisy chains and laugh. Love hums along with daughters as they sing and make the recipes their late mothers left behind. We were here. We laughed and we loved. We lived. Death can never take that away.