April 2016

Kat would come home from work and tell me about taking a walk with Lisa Reyes at lunchtime.  She would tell me what a terrific person Lisa was and about her husband and children. Then she would tell me she was going to meet Lisa on Saturday to watch Lisa’s 12 year old daughter play soccer.  She would ask me if that was okay.  Of course it was and it would have been okay if Kat told me and not asked me.  She always talked about her friends and rarely about herself.  I didn’t always pick up that she loved her friends and they probably loved her.  It wasn’t hard for Kat to love people.  That is where she instinctively wanted to go.  She didn’t try to be friends with everyone, only people she deemed as special.  And what were her standards for special?  That they were like you; good people, kind people, accepting people, friendly people, often funny people.  Not a hard club to be in but not easy for Kat to find you.  When she did find you,  and you found her, I would always hear about it.  She was so effusive when she talked about her friends.  I miss that;   the excitement that she would bring when talking about someone she had just met and, maybe shared time with.

When Kat met Judy, a dear friend of our dear friend Yvonne, she talked about her for days with such joy.  Kat could go on and on and often did.  Yes, sometimes I would ask her to stop because Kat would branch out to tell me the details of the life of not her new friend, but her friends cousin or some other distant person that I had absolutely no interest knowing about.  When I didn’t want to know about that distant person Kat would get angry and tell me “well then don’t tell me anything about your friend Mike, I always listen to you.”  And she always did listen and she always had more patience than I did.  When she was with you, she was with you 100%.  I miss that, too.

I miss my cheerleader, I miss my biggest and, maybe, only fan.  Kat would be urging me on in my writing.  I miss not being able to cheer her on and encourage her in anything she wanted to do or try.  We both loved each other’s accomplishments and successes more than we loved our own.   I miss not seeing the relationships she had with you, the people she loved, and the people she would have loved.