I spent the weekend in New Jersey for my dear friend Brenda’s memorial. Luckily, I was able to also catch up with other friends, including Kyle of Vacuuming the Lawn and general Princeton community fame. (She took the pic of me above, among shockingly bright azaleas.)

I don’t think I was purposely avoiding finishing the short talk I had been asked to give at the memorial, but I’d never written anything like this before. And even though I’d had about 3 months to work on it, all I had was an outline. Most of which I ended up scratching.

The morning of the memorial, I felt clear that:

The point of the talk was not to say every single thing I wanted to say about this person. In fact, five minutes or less was probably a good time benchmark, so I had to be very focused.
The fact I’d known this person for less time than anyone else in the room shouldn’t matter. My best addition would be to highlight was was special about her from my unique POV.
One way to honor an entire life is to summarize her contribution to the world, through me.

I went with a structure based on “three lessons about friendship in the second half of life,” and it came out quick! I read it through once and made very few modifications, which is unusual for me. (How I write and how I talk can be so different.) In practice, it clocked in between 5-6 minutes depending on how quickly I could abate tears and get back on track.

I got to meet family and other friends Brenda had told me about over the years, and bonded with them over our mutual loss.