For My Friend Cullen

I signed up to know Cullen pretty early in my life. And I am very lucky, because I have decades and decades of good Cullen memories.
 
We met each other when we were 9 years old, and I had just moved to Georgia. She loved to tell the story of how we were at a school function, and she noticed I was slowly eating an entire bowl of mints. We were friends ever since.
 
She taught me how to make rings out of acorns in her driveway, and how to swing on the giant swing in her backyard. We went to the first day of fourth grade together, the first day of junior high school, and the first day of high school. I helped her get ready for the prom.
 
I came with her to Dunwoody United Methodist Church, and I sang in the choir and went with her to youth group and even Appalachian Service Project. I am sure the church representatives here at her funeral today will be glad to know that she made an honorary Methodist out of me.
 
We went to college together and lived in the same dorm. We even shared a set of bunk beds in the condo we moved into sophomore year. She, as always, was the first to excel and to join multiple clubs and to take us along with her on the path of responsibility. But, she also drove us around singing ABBA late into the night in a minivan packed to the gills with us goofy (and possibly inebriated) college friends.
 
We graduated from UGA together. We got our first jobs around the same time. I once travelled to stay with in her in hotel room in Vancouver when she was on a business trip, and I watched daytime television and ordered room service in her suite while she worked. She obviously had a better job than I did.
 
I knew her when she met her husband Tom, and I knew her when they fell in love. She was at my wedding and I was at hers. I got to see her grooving on the dance floor to Dancing Queen in Las Vegas – her and her momma, Kitty, too.
 
We were actually pregnant around the same time with our first kids, and I eventually got to meet her two younger sons. In fact, we had the very special honor of knowing each other’s children when they were 9, the same age as when we met.
 
For years, we’d see each other across the paths of busy life, at brunches or birthday parties. Most often it was at Sunday lunches at Cullen’s mom’s house with Cullen and Cameron and Hannah and sometimes Carr his family and the cacophony of kids – the “circus” as the family lovingly calls it. I am convinced they bought Girl Scout cookies from me just so I would deliver in person, and they would have a new audience to tell stories to.
 
It was at those lunches that I got to see first-hand Tom’s loving ministrations when it started to get hard for her to move and walk and stand.
 
For the last year or so, I got to see Cullen once a month on Zoom calls with our friends Ryan and Jean, who have both known her nearly as long as I have. And even when she couldn’t talk any more on those calls, we all got to see her smile and see the twinkle in her eye.
 
Just last week, thanks to our friend Jean -- who has an uncanny knack for showing up and making sure we do, too -- I got to hang out and hold her hand while she was in hospice. And on her very last day on earth, I got tell her that I loved her, and that we intend be around for many, many more decades to help take care of the people she loved.
 
I am so lucky to be able to say I got to do all that, and to have so much stored up Cullen in my body and my mind.
 
Because as you all know, she will be sorely, sorely missed.
 
And her memory is a blessing.