My track record as a friend is almost universally abysmal, but I can at least proudly point to the fact that I still have the first one I ever made.

It happened so long ago that I don’t remember meeting her. But I do remember that not long after, we were very close, enough so that when she proposed a future marriage, I readily agreed. I was five and she was three, so there were unseemly consequences to that arrangement that we didn’t know about at the time. When we learned of them, we married other people instead. But I do still talk to her, and she still talks to me, which never fails to amaze and delight.

Around that same time she decided she’d been named poorly by her parents, and I agreed about that too. The official one was far too formal to suit her. She floated the idea of reclassifying herself as a Kitty. It was pretty perfect, because even then she carried herself with a feline grace and charm, and the quiet strength of the pretty lady who ran the Long Branch Saloon on Gunsmoke.

But again we gradually learned adult things; in this case, that Kitty was a stripper name (and even Miss Kitty might have been employed in a related field). So instead, my dear friend modified the original from her birth certificate to be more warm and femme, less formal and aloof, and stuck with that for the rest of time.

She was always, and still is, prettier and more charismatic, more worldly and more successful, more full of life, kinder and yet fiercer than her older brother.

This edition of the spill wouldn’t have been here, in this form and as soon as it was, but for her tactful but insistent love.

We both passed 50 clicks a while ago, and I never in a million years dreamed that she’d be the one to get sick before I did. There is no justice in this world.

This morning the phone rang in the other room while I was sleeping, and rang again right after. When I stumbled out, there were two missed messages in a row, both from brothers. I got woke fast and didn’t even stop to make coffee in my rush to find out what was up.

She’d been characteristically keeping the bad news mostly to herself, until some trivial social incident between another sister and some acquaintance made it untenable. Finally she let that sister break it to the rest of us–and that’s what the calls were about.

She’s been through a lot of fear and pain pretty much on her own in the recent past, and she doesn’t want anybody’s fucking pity or sympathetic clucking about it either. I know this, in spite of not having talked to her yet, because I know the shape of her lovely soul about as well as I know my own.

Honey, you are loved, and my eyes are full of the best kind of real tears for you right now, and they’re starting to fall like spring rain as I tell you of it. God damn it all.

Here’s what I want to say to you.

The end will come for us all one day, and the road ahead of us is shorter than the road behind.

We’ve all got twenty minutes or twenty years left to spend what’s left of this one gift we’ve been given, of conscious time–this miracle of being able to feel and move and think and whisper to each other. There isn’t any heaven, there isn’t any hell. Those were just two more lies they told us long ago. There’s just the uncertain number of clicks left on the clock before the gift expires, and how we choose to spend them.

You spend them however you want. Fuck money. Fuck what people think. Fuck expectations and probabilities. The quality of the time matters much more than the amount of it.

I want you to listen to Angelina and Olivia and Christina and all the other strong beautiful women who have walked this road before you. But the one that spoke clearest to me on that page was Carly Simon.

“I’ve always thought of myself as being a warrior. When you actually have a battle, it’s better than when you don’t know who to fight.”

You’re a role model to me, as a warrior and a human being, and it’s always been so.

The battle begins. Game on, motherfuckers.

I got your flank, Princess, and I’ve got it with precise rage and mixed tears, and most of all with the love I’ve had for all you are since time beyond memory.