Ed often said that he and I were “best friends,” and I appreciated that – he also often said the cows were his best friends, and I think that was the real truth –  but I can’t say I was ever sure just what the term meant or means.

Ed had many very close friends, some of which he had known all of his life, and they loved him very much and knew him much longer and better than I did or could in a few short years. There were scores of them who came to honor him and say goodbye.

It’s hard for me to quantify terms like “best friend,” or define it.

I think women forge closer and deeper  relationships and share their lives more openly and fully than men do. Sitting at Ed’s funeral Sunday, I was surrounded by Ed’s family – his brother, his wife and children, his grand-children.

All of them were so much more directly affected by his sickness and death than I am. I never allow myself to forget that.

My life continues tomorrow almost exactly as it was yesterday, but their lives are radically altered for weeks, months, even years to come. There is a tear in their universe, a need for healing.

Their grief is profound and unique, mine is something different. It is important for me to keep that perspective.

It wasn’t that I didn’t feel pain or sorrow, or that’s Ed’s illness did not affect me, it’s just very different. It is not the same thing. What do friends feel when they lose someone they love? I have lost friends in a number of different ways – suicide, my own emotional difficulties, irreconcilable differences, growing apart, changing.

I suppose in some ways my friend Paul’s suicide struck me the hardest at first, it was so surprising and unexpected. Ed was diagnosed with cancer in April and died four months later. That was hard to see in a completely different way.

When Ed and I spoke of it, he said again and again that he had lived a long and  full and good life. He certainly did not want to die, but he always said he accepted death, it was not in his hands. He did not wish to be pitied.

My friendship with him was deep and real, we both trusted it completely. We each had given the other profound gifts.

My therapist told me after my crack up that when I recovered, I would lose every single friend that I had. For better or worse, I had changed, she said,  and they had not.  I had re-written the script that governed my relationships. This was prophetic. I did lose every friend that I had, and I didn’t have many.

It was a lonely feeling, but then I have always felt lonely, and felt it again today.

Friendship plants itself as a small and unobtrusive seed, wrote the author Anna Lyndsey, it grows thick roots that wrap around your heart. When a friend dies, the tree is torn up, the pain real and tangible. It is an act of violence.

Ed and I were close, I think the closest I got to any other man who I can recall.

We  only occasionally saw one another. My life could hardly have been more different from his life.

He could not comprehend the life of the writer, and I could not imagine the life of the farmer.

Yet we did love each other and change each other and touch one another. Somehow, our deepest selves were connected to one another.

When the carriage carrying Ed’s casket pulled off down the road, I wanted to chase after it and say “wait, wait, come back.” But of course, I didn’t. And he couldn’t. Who, I thought,  would come running to help me when a bear came into my pasture the next time?

I felt a bit lost today at Ed’s funeral, I cannot imagine what Carol feels tonight or what Ed’s children feel. But I can imagine what i am feeling and perhaps that is what sets it apart for me. Losing Ed, I felt an inner pain today, everyone around me was showing outer pain and, I’m sure, inner pain as well.

I have been naturally and appropriately depressed this week, irritable and impatient and disconnected as death stepped ever closer. When I saw Ed’s casket being hauled away on the two-horse wagon, it felt as if a part of me was taken away with him, but it is a part that I can and will live without. That is the thing about friendships.

I respect life, and I believe that the death of a person I love always calls me to a deeper knowledge of myself and of the powerful spiritual forces within me that I would sometimes call God. This idea is very different from the God being worshipped so beautifully at Ed’s funeral.

My God is not my master, he does not tell me what to do, or manage my life, or make decisions for me,  he permits me to hope and feel and love and create if I can do it myself. And he reminds me every day that I alone am responsible for my life. He offers much hope, but little comfort.

I won’t lie, all of these different feelings rose up in me as Ed was taken away to be buried, and so was a deepening sadness, my own kind of grief. For me, grief if fluid, it changes shape and color before it it can reveal itself, it burrows inward into the shadows.  I show no tears, I feel a great  numbness and exhaustion.

Ed’s death and absence does not end or even diminish this love inside of me, in fact it calls me to take another step into the mystery of my own inexhaustible need for love and connection. It is painful for sure, but even as many people agonized over what was happening to Ed, he didn’t, and most of the time,  I didn’t either.

This is life, it doesn’t need to explain itself to us or apologize for what can happen. No one is to blame.

Lots of people say they believe in God, but it is difficult for many of us to accept God’s work. When all is said and done, I thought, as Ed on his carriage disappeared down the road, our friendship going with it,  followed by a long trail of people, we have to face the reality of our own lives.

I thought also that it is love itself that is God and that offers me eternal life.

Thoreau wrote that the death of a friend provides us the task of a “double living,” we feel obliged to fulfill the promise of a friend’s life and also our own. I felt the truth of that today. Ed’s work is done, mine goes on.

I suppose the truth of it is that I don’t yet know what what to feel or what it is that I do  feel, these are unchartered waters for me.

Even as I grow older, I am not prepared for this, or wise or evolved enough to understand it.