A friend is dying. She’s older, my mother’s age. I’ve known Georganne, as I’ll call her, since my first book was published and she asked if I’d like to give a reading at the private library where she was a trustee. Her voice struck me on that first phone call with its bossy-but-breathy quality, no-nonsense and direct and maybe a little intimidating.

When I met her in person, her smile and large blue eyes disarmed me. Here was a woman, I thought, who demanded integrity and gave the same. If you’d been her child, you wouldn’t have wanted to get caught in a lie. And at the same time, who better to comfort and defend, to say what you needed to hear? Perhaps I thought in terms of a child because Georganne and my mother were friends. Or perhaps—now that Georganne is dying from lung cancer, stage four, which is the same thing that took my mother—I can’t help but think as a child.

A few months after the reading, Mom saw Georganne at one of their regular high-school-class-of-1948 luncheons and mentioned that I had to move. “Tell her to call me,” Georganne said. This was during the dot-com craze when San Francisco real estate spiraled out of control, and Georganne had been in the business years earlier. Plus, I was looking for a one-bedroom rental in a market several notches beneath the asking prices of any house or condo that Georganne would have represented. But I called Georganne, and she spent more than an hour going through her Rolodex for the numbers of people who, when I said I’d gotten their names from Georganne, took my call and gave me leads.

A year or so after my mother died, we spoke again. “I want to ask you something,” she said in her straight-to-the-point manner. She knew my dad was lonely, she began, and she had a friend, a lovely person, whom she wondered if my dad would enjoy meeting. Companionship, she said; someone to go to a movie or have dinner with. Would that make my dad uncomfortable?

I was disarmed again. Not only by her thoughtfulness and sensitivity to my father’s grief and standoffishness but by her calling me to ask directly. We didn’t know each other that well, but after that phone call, I felt we were friends in our own right, not just because of her connection to my Mom.

A few months ago, I picked up voice mail with Georganne’s usual message: “It’s Georganne—. Please call me.” Again, it sounded urgent. Was it something about the board at the library, where now (thanks to her invitation) I was a trustee, too? No. She was just wanted to tell me about a nice man she’d met, a single man, very interesting, who was an Episcopalian like me. “I thought you two might have a nice time together,” she said. “I know it’s hard meeting people.”

“I’m actually with someone now,” I told her—and she let me off the hook. “I’m so glad to hear that. That’s wonderful. See you soon.”

Ten days ago, I learned from a mutual friend that Georganne has lung cancer, stage four. I waited a week and called. Georganne’s husband answered, said she was with the hospice nurse, who was helping her with her medication. “I don’t want to bother her,” I said. “Would you please tell her I called and send my love?”

I hung up. Hospice. Stage four.

I pulled out one of my good notecards, the ones with my full name printed (I couldn’t afford engraved) up top. As my mother taught me, I drew a diagonal line through “Lindsey Crittenden,” indicating that I consider the recipient to be closer than the use of my full name implies. I wrote “Dear Georganne–” and I stopped.

That was almost a week ago. I’m practiced at sympathy notes, skilled at sending them off as soon as I hear bad news. In July, I wrote the hardest one yet to the parents of a nineteen-year-old boy who killed himself. I’ve already written and sent an email to Georganne’s daughter, my contemporary.

But to someone dying? What can I possibly say? To imagine myself in her situation feels both cheap and insensitive, hugely wrong. And yet perhaps it is mortality itself that freezes me up in the task of reaching out before the chasm opens. I stood at my aunt’s bed during her final hours, her bedroom sweet with the stink of dying, and told her, “Thank you for being such a wonderful aunt.” Her eyes, stark in her newly gaunt face, stared at me and I wondered if I’d said the wrong thing. Or was it just her stare, so direct and searing, that made me feel both heard and inadequate?

I don’t know Georganne that well. She has many close friends, is surrounded by family. She doesn’t need me for anything. And yet, she wanted me to know about her diagnosis. She showed me many small kindnesses. She thought of me. And now it’s my turn to let her know I’m thinking of her.

Life is full of excuses, isn’t it? If we’re lucky we don’t wait for death to burn them away. As soon as I finish this post, I’m writing the note.