A Magical Life Cut Short, but Lived on Her Own Fierce Terms

It seems like yesterday. It seems like a hundred years ago.

After my friend Linda Elizondo died of cancer last week, her sister-in-law sent me an old photograph which, she thought, captured Lindy's joie de vivre.

"A magical life cut short," Lindy's sister-in-law wrote, "but lived on her own fierce terms."

I had taken the picture 35 years ago. I don't remember taking it. Not a very natural pose. (Is it any wonder I didn't last long in photojournalism?) What is Lindy doing? What's with the unopened bottle of wine leaning against her leg? The answers are lost to history. Except for the color of her blouse. That I remember: Fuchsia, her favorite color.

Looking back, I can't say my adolescence was either excruciating or delirious. It was both. But now that I've made it to the other side of middle age, my abundant anxieties at the time seem laughable.

Calm down! I'd like to tell my past self. Also: Cherish these days with Lindy. Soon you will go your separate ways, and you will never again have such a close woman friend.

For about a year Lindy and I were, as one observer noted, inseparable. "Very rarely would we see one without the other."

We three -- myself, Lindy and Lindy's boyfriend Charlton -- shared a rundown rental house near the University of Texas campus in Austin. Lindy majored in art, Charlton studied film, and I was in over my head no matter which courses I took. I was a lost girl, but Lindy took my hand.

A trip to the grocery store was an adventure. On the walk there we'd talk about anything and everything, because she was interested in any topic you'd bring up. One time she told me dictionaries didn't work for her. "I get stuck," she said. "I never get to the word I'm looking up because I stop on 'kangaroo' or something."

Lindy once confided in me her most embarrassing moment. She was standing in line to register for a class, and this guy was in line behind her. They struck up a conversation, the way strangers in line sometimes do. Only they weren't strangers. They'd gone out together, but the date was such a disaster they were both pretending they didn't remember. "My name is Lindy Elizondo," she'd said. "What's yours?"

I laughed all night. I'm laughing still. I can't believe she did that, and I can't believe she told me. But that's the kind of girl she was. She was not proud. If you teased Lindy about something, she'd just agree with you. Once a friend asked Lindy if, when she was alone, she ever talked to herself. "No," Lindy replied. "I'm not on speaking terms with myself."

Lindy never sold her drawings and paintings. She insisted on giving them away. "Some things are ruined if you sell them. Like art. And sex." She was a woman of principle, even at the tender age of 19.

Lindy eventually married her boyfriend, and they moved out. Later they divorced, and for years Lindy kind of drifted. I'd lost touch, but every now and then I'd hear of her.

Then, in 2001, I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I tracked Lindy down. To thank her. And say goodbye, I guess. We caught up. She'd married a second time, and divorced a second time, and given birth to a son.

Fate is a funny thing. I didn't die, and seven years later Lindy called up with her own cancer story. Then, in the summer of 2009, she proposed we take a 30-day rail trip together, so she could show her 12-year-old son the Grand Canyon.

For 30 days we would be together for the first time since college. It was a crazy idea. But I said yes, and off we went.

I knew we would not be picking up where we left off. Too many years had passed. Too much had happened. What did we have in common now, besides cancer? Not a lot, as it turned out. We argued politics nearly every day. But we still had fun together. We knew how.

After the trip, Lindy got sicker, as I suspected she would from the symptoms she had. Towards the end of her life was another surgery, and seven weeks in the hospital. By the time I saw her again, she was truly a different woman -- gray-haired and frail. She made it home again, but just for a few days. An infection sent her back to the hospital. She died quietly, after a sponge bath.

Grief is supposed to run in a straight line, in five stages. Except that it doesn't always work that way. Grief can be circular. You revisit grief as your life progresses. New triggers bring back regrets and longings you thought you'd shelved for good.

After Lindy died, here I was on the phone with Charlton, Lindy's ex. He's happily married now, and the father of two, and I am way past the age of needing a BFF. Still, Charlton and I found ourselves sighing in unison. How could the most vibrant person we've ever known be gone?

If only I could have reached my hand out to Lindy, and taken hers the way she took mine all those years ago: You're OK, you're with me. But that's not the way cancer works.

Lindy grew up in San Antonio. She studied art, but then went to work in a bank. She raised a child. And, for a year in my life, she made the sun rise in the morning. I couldn't begin to tell you how. That secret she took with her.

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