For over twenty years, my neighbors to the north of me have been part of my chosen family. Ten years younger than I am, they have assured me they’d stay in place till I was gone. We have keys to each other’s homes; they let me cut out the crossword puzzle six mornings a week which means they never read the end of some articles in that section of the local paper. He and I share watching backyard birds whom we feed all year. He and I love to garden and compare which of his newly planted bulbs come up while my similar ones often do not. She and I meet early mornings when she’s out being quiet as the day begins and I arrive with my little scissors to collect the puzzle.

About a month ago, they told me they are moving back to D.C. where they lived and worked before becoming my neighbors. They want to stop shoveling snow and keeping up a two-story house; they have found lodging at a lovely complex open to former officers in the armed service where he served when a young man. I accept that this is the right decision for them, even as I grieve losing important people with whom I have a long and rich history.

Recently as he and I shared lunch in my dining room, I saw the bidding site set up by a group that helps people get rid of household items. Hundreds of photographs were on the website and I even saw current bids. We laughed because things they know are valuable often had tiny bids, while things they considered trivial or even junky garnered double digit contests. We agreed there truly is no accounting for taste.

The bidding ended a couple of days ago and today was the day folks were to come collect their booty. So since about 9:00 this morning, a parade of cars, trucks, and vans have parked along our street as their owners brought out one or two items and drove away. I stopped looking out because I was too sad. Sad because this parade makes the move real to me; there’s no going back now. Also sad because their loved household objects are being divided and so their life here has lost its coherence. She just told me it feels like they will be sort of camping here, just as they are camping in their new space in D.C. as they drive out and test to see what kinds of new objects will fit in a small smaller living area.

I am working hard to be excited for them, especially for my bird/garden buddy, since he tells me how this feels like starting over. He seems younger when he talks to me about buying new things that are very different from their old things. So, as his good friend, I want to be excited for him. So I talk about my sadness with friends since I know he knows how I feel. At our recent lunch, he asked me if I’d like his most beautiful brass whirlagig that I’ve commented on to him often as it twirls its flashing parts in the wind as we lunch in their gazebo in their back yard when it’s warm. Of course I want the whirlagig.

One of the tangible things he has done all these years is coming over whenever my computer does something I don’t understand and cannot fix, or when my television won’t work the way it’s supposed to. Sometimes all he has to do is touch something on the keyboard and all is well. He assures me I can still FaceTime him and he’ll try and talk me through the problem, but I realize part of the pleasure of his help comes from his knocking on my front door and being in my space. I may get help but without the proximity that I so cherish.

By summer, these two fine people will be gone. I will have many sustaining memories of his and my exclaiming over the pileated woodpecker we both saw the only time one such magical bird graced our feeders. Or his willingness to come over at lunch time to give my beloved kitty, Patches, her tiny lunch when I’m out of town. Or our jumping when early acorns fell noisily onto the gazebo roof as we were having lunch in the sunshine. Or wondering if there would be another season of “Endeavor” or “Foyle’s War” or our other favorite Mysteries on PBS. Finally, we have agreed that we will keep having “lunch” but on Zoom, with him in D.C. and me in my dining room.

A lot of words have been spoken about the verdict of the three white men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery as he was jogging in their neighborhood in Georgia. The white female prosecutor has been praised by some and criticized by others for not making more argument about race. Pundits have pointed to the irony attached to the fact that one of the three accused men put his video of the pursuit and shooting on the Internet because he thought he and the other two had acted to preserve safety in “our neighborhood.”

I have not read much at all about the make-up of the jury. When I first heard that there were nine white women and three men, one of whom was black, I thought to myself “How has the defense let this happen–why didn’t they prevent nine women from being seated. My response comes from decades of “reading” my culture from a feminist lens (among others). All of those women either are mothers or could be mothers–so I figured. As they watched even a grainy video of a young man who was jogging one minute and dead on the pavement the next minute, I felt pretty sure they would flash to the possibility of losing a child who had or could have lived inside them. That reaction would push to a back burner whatever ideas they might have inherited about black people–so I figured. As closing arguments were made and the jury retired to deliberate, some of my friends felt sure the men would be found not guilty, given eleven white people at the table making life-changing decisions. I held to my original hunch and waited.

As life would have it, I tuned in to CSpan just as the jury was returning to render their Verdict, so I got to hear the calm judge say “Guilty” twenty-nine times! When a defense attorney asked for a voice vote, I listened very closely to hear how each of my nine white mothers would speak her “Yes, your Honor.” What I heard was the same clear resolve I had marveled at a few month earlier here in Minneapolis as twelve jurors responded with resolute “yeses” to having found Derek Chovin guilty of murdering George Floyd. There could be no doubt about how firmly each white woman found the three white men guilty of killing Mr. Arbery, who for them had become some mother’s son whose life was a precious, a classification that superseded all others.

In my Anglo-Catholic tradition, today, November 28th, is the beginning of a season particularly dear to me–Advent. From today until December 25th, I work to quiet myself as I wait for the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, whom I believe was a special human who advocated for a new kind of world–one based in love and hospitality and forgiveness, one where all were seen as equally important to God, where whatever status symbols existed then, like skin color and zip codes today, did not shut one off from the promises spelled out so carefully by great Jewish prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah. At services on each of the four Sundays in Advent, I sing the same processional hymn, “Take Comfort, My People,” all about trusting that the tired old world can and will turn to the new light coming into a world too focused on dark forces that divide and conquer through force. At my present church, a huge and stunning basilica in Minneapolis, a giant wreath has been magically suspended from the ceiling at the very center of the church. This wreath has four large lanterns in which a single candle is positioned. Someone lights one of these each week, again magically as far as I can determine, and we begin the service by facing the center and affirming the coming light with its new message about how to live.

We are encouraged to resist the capitalistic appropriation of Christmas as we spend extra time just sitting quietly and thinking about what it might mean if more of us practiced the principles set down over and over by the carpenter from Nazareth, who kept saying he was the “prince of peace,” not a king wishing to control people for personal gains. I do this by reading the Psalms, written by one of the great poets of the western world. And I keep a little notebook handy so I can make notes of phrases or ideas in the individual psalms that appeal to or challenge me. This year, I have a new little notebook given to me by a special friend, so I feel especially grateful as I make my first marks on its pages. This practice, known as lecto divino goes back to the middle ages when monks kept similar jottings as they did their daily meditational readings. All this is to slow me down. And, as the world around me begins to focus on its notions of “Christmas” before we’ve engaged in “trick or treat,” I value what I know about the import of Advent more than ever.

And this year, the same day my faith world lights our first of four candles, my Jewish friends will light their first Chanakah candles tonight, so the crucial connection between these two sets of beliefs is even tighter than usual. I will soon put up my own creche, which is mostly animals/birds/sea creatures given to me by friends over decades. I have a little building at the back of which are tiny figures of Mary, Joseph, and the baby, but my creche celebrates how this unusual birth catches the spirits of non-human beings who delight in such a tiny figure’s having such an impact on the imaginations and lives of so many since he first cried and suckled his mother’s breast.

When I was a freshman at the University of Alabama in 1954, I met Dot Thomas when we both pledged the same sorority. Over the 67 years we’ve known each other, we have been in solid touch except for the worst part of my alcoholic drinking when I wasn’t a good friend to anyone, and six months after I came out to her as a lesbian and she needed a few months to absorb that news. When Dot had her first child, she asked me to be her godmother, a role I delayed playing until I sobered up but have thoroughly enjoyed fulfilling for about forty years now. When Dot fell in love with a lovely Dominican Republic man, I was the first person she told since she knew my committed relationship was seen as “wrong” by the dominant culture, just as was hers to a black man. I rejoiced for her and was delighted to meet him when he came to Huntsville, AL, to meet her family/friends there.

For many years now, Dot and I have begun our mornings exchanging short e-mails reporting how much sleep we’d just gotten, sharing fun or odious things ahead of us in a day, debating about how important the man-ness of Jesus is to each of our Christian faith lives, screaming about Republican politicians with ideas stuck in a hard past we both recognize for the racist morass it is. While I remembered her bout with kidney cancer some twenty years ago, I was still unprepared for it to recur a few years ago, this time in her trachea/lungs. Dot was so. pleased that the oncologist who had successfully handled the original cancer was still in practice, so she began undergoing chemotherapy with his caring oversight. As I watched from a distance as my dear friend’s energy to exercise and get her “steps” every day waned, I just prayed the drugs would stop the cells from growing. About two months ago, her doctor stopped treating the tracheal cancer because that treatment wasn’t working. So he returned to finding drugs developed to address advanced kidney cancer. These had horrible side effects that debilitated Dot, leaving her exhausted physically and emotionally. About a month ago, she stopped all treatment and enrolled in a hospice program, giving up her apartment in order to move in with her younger daughter since it was getting harder for Dot to feel safe alone, especially at night.

This morning, I learned that my beloved friend had finally been able to slip away quietly, ending the very hard ordeal that led to her death. Needless to say, Dot’s dying leaves a serious hole in my heart. Now no one alive has known me as long as she has, so there is the inevitable loss of shared stories from college days when we were both very “bad girls” right up to the present when she was known to tell her minister when his sermons were sanctimonious or just boring, or to help me control my rage at the latest absurdity in national politics. But this is not about what I’m losing. It’s about rejoicing that my friend is finally free of struggle and pain. I gather from her daughters that her passing was as quiet as her last few weeks had been otherwise. So I can only be glad for her. And in an e-mail to some of my close friends who have been supportive of me as I tried to walk this last leg with Dot, I rattled off the first descriptive adjectives I associate with Dot. They are the title here and I am so grateful to have had all these decades to experience each of them coming from her with such energy and ease–feisty and generous, wise and funny and loving. Safe passage, dearest friend, to wherever you’re going next.