Grace, Cameron and me, preparing our bras for the cause!

Sitting balanced on top of a worn out picnic basket, besides a black top that I never wear, that stubbornly insists it needs ironing anyway, rests a white handkerchief.

This time, two weeks ago, I was clutching it, mopping up stray tears. It was loaned in that timeless gentlemanly like fashion of passing to a woman who finds herself, despite her stoic Englishness, weeping, then laughing then weeping, in waves really and often both at the same time. You see this was "Grace Mina Navalta's memorial service, and Grace meant the world to me.

I think in retrospect this half year of piddling about writing and not and being so easily diverted with newspaper articles and research and anything really, but always being ready to call Grace and chat with Grace and laugh at Grace was because she needed me and I needed her.

She always had a funny story that she just had to tell me, and even at the end when the calls and visits were more philosophical meaning of life, family and what if and can I share this with you type conversations, where I'd listen and try to help negotiate the way through life when we're handed some very tough cards to deal with, I'd look forward to those calls.

I was not ready for the last call.

My last call to Grace was a voice message that said something like..."Hey, Grace I know my last call was bonkers, feel free to ignore it, hope you're feeling okay. I know this is all horrid but chin up and all that crap."

She would have laughed. But instead her sister called me back on Grace's phone half an hour later to tell me Grace was in hospital with her family around her, and to expect the worse soon. No, I was not expecting a call like that.

Is it a coincidence that the keyring, green with little gold flowers, that Grace insisted on me taking fell off my key chain that day?

When I went to visit her grave, a week later, I made a crack about inadvertently flashing Grace in my low riding jeans as Cameron and I tidied up her grave, propping up vases that had fallen over, weeding out the dead flowers adding fresh ones. Once I got home I realized I had a little flat object in my back pocket and there it was again, the same keyring along for the ride. Coincidence or not Grace would have found it funny and thinking about her made me smile.

The day she died all I could write was this:

It comes in waves
leaving me breathless
I can't believe you've gone.


It still catches me like that sometimes, like when I drive past the cinema and see the last film we saw together - Midnight in Paris - is still playing.
Then I remember us saying - We'll Always Have Paris , and laughing.

I think it will always be hard like that, but in-between when I think of Grace, I think of things I want to share. I think of all the stories we have and all the good times and mostly I think of her laugh and wish I could still hear it.

My friend Cameron wrote this column in " Pleasanton Patch if you want to know what the remainder of The Literary Lushes did that day. Yes, Grace was a writer and a fin